Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Questions by Cody "Micajah" Bye
Answers by Jeffrey Steefel (Executive Producer for Lord of the Rings Online) and Adam Mersky (PR Director for Turbine)

The holiday season is upon us in full force and nearly every massively multiplayer online game has embraced the burgeoning spirits. The Lord of the Rings Online stands proudly among the games with slated holiday events, but the coming of the holiday season also means 2008 is just around the corner! The Ten Ton Hammer staff tracked down Executive Producer Jeffrey Steefel and Public Relations Director Adam Mersky to check up with the game's future course and ask the devs a few questions about some of the changes that are being made to one of the more prominent live zones. Although we didn’t get to ask any Book 12 questions (Turbine simply isn’t ready to talk about that just yet), the developers were happy to discuss the holiday season, expanding to different countries, and the major area "redo" that's been dubbed the Great Angmar Revamp. Pull up a chair and read away!

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Ten Ton Hammer: Are you guys simmering down at all for the Christmas season?

Jeffrey Steefel: We may be simmering down on the things we talk about until the beginning of next year, but other than that we're working at full steam because when we get back from the holidays we're going to be in the final throes of getting the next book released.

Celebrate the holidays with your kinship in LOTRO!

Ten Ton Hammer: So are you taking any sort of break?

Jeffrey: Some of us are. Obviously we're a live service and the service components - whether its customer service, the community group, or the operations teams - they're taking shifted time off. Some people are probably going to be taking their time off at the beginning of next year so that the right people are going to be there to service the game if needed.

But in terms of development, we certainly make sure there's at least enough time to make sure people can take a few days off during the holidays and even a little bit more if our schedules provide that.

Ten Ton Hammer: The Great Angmar Revamp seems like a pretty thorough "redo" of a zone for something that's been live for awhile now. How did you come to decide that it needed such a thorough renovation?

Jeffrey: This is an indication of our larger strategy in general. On the one hand, we need to make sure that we know where the game's going and where we want to take it. At the same time, we've gotten really good at understanding what is and is not working exactly the way we want it to in the game. We put a fair amount of cycles into pouring through what's going on in the forums to doing a variety of surveys to look at the various trends in the information and coupling that with data showing what people are actually doing in the game.

These things tend to line up in the areas where people are universally having problems and then taking a break from the game for awhile. With that information in hand, we can then say that something isn't working exactly the way we want it to work in the game. This feeds directly into our development plan. That's not to say that just posting about something in the forums will automatically cause an item to be adjusted in the next patch, although there are some people who think that!

Ten Ton Hammer: That's definitely true! *laughs*

Jeffrey: However, we do spend a majority of our development time on items that simply make the game experience better. We launched an MMO - the biggest game you could possibly launch - six and a half months ago and for us to presume that everything we did at launch was perfect and didn't need refinement would be foolish. Angmar servers as one of those examples, and there was some discussion about it as part of a larger overall discussion about the nature of the content we've put into the game; how much of it is soloable, accessible, or groupable; and how well we've pointed out what it takes to complete this type of content. Overall this is something that we're definitely focusing on and I think players will notice the changes we've made. You saw a little bit of it in Book 11, and you'll probably see even more of it in Book 12.

There were some general zone improvements made in Book 11, but the most noticable changes will come in Book 12.

There are a large number of players that spend the majority of their time soloing, and so it's a challenge. The advanced players want to get together in groups and have challenges that they feel has no possible chance of being completed without a group, and a lot of people, including the advanced players, also want to be able to jump into a session by themselves where they can be challenged and rewarded without grouping.

Since Angmar was one of the highest areas when we launched, it was hard to know where we wanted to set the balance between really, really challenging and accessible; really, really rewarding and making the players work for it. And at the same time, the area - in general - wasn't as well put together as we wanted it to be and we wanted it to be more perfect than anything else we made. You can ready more about it in the dev diary, but when you get better at what you're doing, you find better ways to lead players through the content and Angmar was one of those areas where both the players and designers thought were confusing and it wasn't really fun.

Back in the early days of MMOGs, figuring out the game and learning where you needed to go was part of the gameplay. Now that's not really the case. People want to play the game and not be lost. Players want to go into an experience and have a general knowledge of what they're going to encounter and where they need to go.

Finally, everyone knows that there's only so much you can do to a game before it launches. There's a ton of perfecting you can do to zones before a game launches, but there's only so much that can be done. But...it's Angmar! Players were playing through those later stages and they were fighting....boars?!

Ten Ton Hammer: Evil boars!!!

Jeffrey: It's not quite that bad, but Angmar should be the place where you encounter the most nasty things possible. In many parts you do - fighting trolls and other nasties - but it was uneven. So we wanted to go in and make it even. We're looking at a lot of the epic content because players want to explore that content but they may not want to put together a giant group to power through those areas. Those are some examples of a long list of things that we're working on for next year, some of which will show up in Book 12 and some will show up in Books 13, 14, and so on. And it focuses on play styles, content, and giving people more choices.

Zone revamps should not occur very often, at least not to the scale of the Angmar improvements.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you expect that this revamp sort of thing will be happening very often? Or is it like something that happens once every two books? Are you looking at all the other zones as well?

Jeffrey: This will only happen when we have a good reason to do it, so the answer to this would be no. It's not going to be like we're changing things and slipping this in underneath people every time when introduce a new book. The experience would have to be significantly better if we were going to change anything, especially after the area has launched to the general public. Many people have significant commitments to what's already been introduced to the game, so it would be ill advised for us to change things all the time.

I think there are some places in what we launched that we've changed simply because they were done poorly or certain aspects of the game where our decision turned out to be incorrect. Once people started running around the game it was obvious that there were areas we needed to change, and it states in the dev diary that we've just gotten better at making this game. On top of that, we are becoming better and better at learning what the players actually want.  Six months from now that could change. *laughs* It probably will.

But going forward, I don't think there are going to be many areas that we're going to change as thoroughly as what we're doing to Angmar. But, we always want to be willing to change things that aren't perfect; if something's REALLY in the way of allowing the player's the experience we'd like them to have, then we're going to fix it.