Lord of the Rings Online MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

Early Tuesday morning [and by early we mean the butt crack o’ dawn early!—Ed.], the developers at Turbine Entertainment launched their first official expansion pack for one of their titles since “Regions” which was released for the now defunct Asheron’s Call 2. Although the rush to buy, download and install Lord of the Rings: Mines of Moria didn't have the same sort of publicity hype that the World of Warcraft developers enjoyed, there were still plenty of willing participants ready to jump into the game the moment the servers went live.

Although Turbine has released two full games in the last two years, Mines of Moria will be the team's first expansion since AC2.

As one of the first press outlets to talk with Jeffrey Steefel (Executive Producer) and Adam Mersky (Director of Public Relations) after the launch of their expansion pack, Ten Ton Hammer relived some war stories while also receiving some very pertinent information about the future of LOTRO and Turbine.

“It’s been a great launch,” Steefel said. “I was here during some of the launches – I think AC2 Regions was the last one – but we’ve learned a lot since then. It may not make things easier, but it does help us to understand what we’re in for and what it’s going to take to make these expansions. We love having that rabid audience out there that is eagerly awaiting the next product that lands on the shelves.”

“On top of that, we actually figured out that we pretty much launched a full expansion – in terms of content – even before Moria with our Book updates,” Steefel continued. “So theoretically, this is our second expansion. That said, our intention is to launch a new expansion every year or close to that…because we’re nuts.”

 “[Mines of Moria] went live bright and early on Tuesday morning, just a little bit after midnight, and there were plenty of people waiting in line to come on board. Now we’re just working through whatever issues there may be and that’s why we have what we call “mission control” where there’s a bunch of people in a room monitoring things until this launch is squeaky clean,” Steefel said. “The rest of the team – ninety percent of our staff – is already working on the next expansion and the next Book update.”

Even with the people waiting anxiously to get into Mines of Moria, the expansion probably wasn’t helped out by the overall timing of the release. In perhaps one of the strangest occurrences that we’ve ever seen in MMOG history, full scale expansions to four major titles – not to mention a fifth major content update to another MMOG – were all released in the span of two weeks. Gamers were forced into making a decision with their pocket books; should they get expansion A, B, C or D? Or simply get the free upgrade to game E? I asked Steefel if there was any conscious thought put into releasing the LOTRO expansion in this “expansion season” or if it was mere coincidence.

“It just worked out that way,” Steefel replied. “A couple things drive when we release our products: what we think the needs of our players are and when they need something substantial besides book updates, and when we think we’re going to have a time frame for when we’re going to be ready with that content. We really decide our own timeline based on that, and although there were some thoughts floating around on when the other developers were going to release expansions, but nobody really knew. I think we – as companies – need to focus on what we need to do and not get in each others way intentionally.”

“But at the end of the day, it’s great that there’s an expansion season. The fact that there are enough MMOs out there that there’s actually this type of “expansion season” – that’s got to be great for the market in general, and therefore great for us,” he continued. “It’s interesting that playstyles are very different now. Two or three years ago, you were an MMO “X” player. Period. That was the MMO you played, and it didn’t matter what anyone else was doing, and you were going to play it until your dying day. Now players migrate to and from these games. It’s going to be kids in a candy shape for players over the next couple months.”

And for those hardcore gamers, it may really only take them a few months (or maybe even a few weeks!) to experience all of the new content these four games have to offer. As we reported here at Ten Ton Hammer, a number of the top raiding guilds in World of Warcraft were able to blast through all of the content in Wrath of the Lich King and actually defeat the end raid in just three days. Three days! When we asked Steefel about this situation, he was completely honest with his assessment of the players.

It took WoW players three days to "beat" Wrath of the Lich King. Will Mines of Moria last that long?

“We’ve learned – I think all of us in the MMO industry have – that making a prediction about how long its going to take hardcore players to get through the linear path in the game is impossible because they always surprise us,” he said. “In fact, if I come out and say that it’s going to take X number of hours, there will be people bleeding from the eyes to try to beat me by 20 minutes.”

“So we really don’t know,” Steefel answered. “We’ve put an awful lot of content into Moria, and we really think its going to take a significant amount of time. It’s really all about how that player chooses to consume that content. If a player just wants to pound through the content, it’ll go much faster than someone who wants to explore all of the epic content in the new area.”

“On top of that, one of the things we’re most excited about is the legendary item system. The whole point of this system was to create this endless source of high level content for players to explore,” he concluded. “I’m not sure how you run out of paths when you’re building these legendary items and customizing the stats. It’s really a self perpetuating gameplay that we hope will keep gamers occupied for a long, long time.”

But Steefel is slightly hedging his bets, because he made it clear that the LOTRO development team isn’t sitting on their laurels or going on expansive vacations now that they’ve got an expansion on store shelves.

“We’ve already started on Book 7, which is the first Book update to Volume II,” Steefel stated. “Things will continue to ebb and flow, but we’re definitely going to support the game like we have in the past.“

Speaking more directly to the Mines of Moria expansion, I had to ask Jeffrey about the combat renovation that the game experienced with the release of Mines of Moria. Although it wasn’t ANYWHERE near as shocking or devastating as the Combat Upgrade and the NGE that hit Star Wars Galaxies, any change to systems in an MMOG is liable to get gamers ruffled. With that in mind, I asked Steefel if we’d ever see another adjustment to this sort of system in LOTRO.
 
“I’ve learned over the years to never say never,” Jeffrey said. “I can’t make any promises, but I think that we did a lot of things at launch that we got very right in terms of it being something that could mature, extend and grow over time. However, with combat it really felt like we didn’t really give ourselves enough head room, and we needed to convert it to a point system so we wouldn’t run out of head room and be able to extend combat to the far future.”

“I don’t think we’ll need to do another fundamental update to the systems in this way again, but you never know,” he finished. “We try to stay open and flexible, depending upon what we see. You never know how playstyles are going to change, but the focus is going to be on fine tuning the advancement paths and filling out player roles in the game.”

As the last question for this part of our interview with Jeffrey, we asked the executive producer exactly where Lord of the Rings Online is going to try to push the bar next. Over the last few months, LOTRO has been striving to stay ahead of the competition in every aspect – gameplay, achievements, and even graphics with their DX10 upgrades – and it’s apparent that the developers want to continue to lead the pack in innovations. But where did Steefel believe they were going to explore next?

“What we try to do is get ahead of ourselves,” Steefel said. “We figure that since we’re always even or ahead in some areas that as long as we stay ahead of ourselves, with what we’re doing we’ll be doing very well.“

Turbine is always trying to push the envelope in the MMO marketplace. What will there next big step be? Find out on Monday!

“As an example,” he explained. “we already knew that we could make unbelievable, immersive landscapes and I think we’ve demonstrated that we can do that better than anyone on the planet. So we decided to we wanted to see if we could do that in a dungeon, and Moria was a perfect place to try to attempt that. Could we create that sense of space and expansiveness and epic scale while being underground in a dungeon?”

“That sort of thing isn’t normally done for a number of reasons, including a vast number of technical issues. I wouldn’t be surprised to see people try to emulate that in the future,” Steefel added. “We definitely set the bar with our achievement system, and it’s been highly adopted by other companies. We’ve seen some very familiar sort of things occurring in other games…” *laughs*

“Now we’re doing legendary items, and we think that’s a huge step for item advancement in the game world,” he continued. “It creates a very unique elder game system. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see something similar showing up in other games. We’re always going to be looking at how we can take systems and push them to the next level.”

“I also think we’re pushing the genre in the area of how often you release content in a subscription business. We’re starting to see the whole industry start to do our style of content releases, which is difficult,” Steefel finished. “We’ve got all sorts of things to talk about next year that will push the bar, but Adam will slap me if I talk about them now.”

If you’re interested in finding out exactly what Steefel is talking about (although no slaps from Adam were issued as far as I could tell), you‘ll need to stick around for the second part of our interview, which you’ll be able to see next week!