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Tidings of Evendim - An Interview with Jeff Anderson

There's been a lot of buzz about the Shores of Evendim, Turbine's upcoming content update for Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. Shores of Evendim will be the 9th Book (the series of story-related quests that the player characters embark on) in the game and focuses on the quest to reforge Aragorn's ancestral blade, Narsil. Between balancing the first 24-man raid in the game, bringing a host of skill additions to the Champion class, and designing loads of new quests and monsters, the guys and gals at Turbine have been quite the busy little bees. Jeff Anderson, President and CEO of Turbine, was kind enough to take a short break from all the hard work to talk to us about what the future holds, both for Evendim and for the overall direction of the game.

On the Shores of Lake Evendim

Some ruins in the distance. Perhaps Annúminas?

Jeff had a lot of new and exciting details to share and spoke at length about what to expect from their first content update. The Shores of Evendim is intended to continue the epic storyline which currently stops at Book Eight. Aragorn needs help reforging the ancient sword, Narsil, and requires assistance in finding and securing relics of the Second Age that will alow the elven smiths to complete the remaking of the blade. Many of the quests center around Lake Evendim in Eriador, about 100 miles north of the Shire, and the ruined city of Annúminas on its banks, as well as the surrounding area. When asked about the size and scale of the zone itself, Jeff said that "the region is something like 5-6 million square meters in size with over 100 new quests. The level range is about 35-45 and is intended to fill out the back end of the game a bit." Players will be able to enter the new zone either by traveling north from the Shire or across from the North Downs.

The southern part of the zone is very similar in look and feel to the Shire itself, but as you travel north the land rapidly becomes savage and wild. Crypt robbers and tomb raiders are scattered throughout the marble ruins of Annúminas, and powerful new foes roam the woodlands and river banks of Evendim. One of the new enemies you'll likely run into is called a Boggart. Jeff described this creature as a sort of goblin that comes in packs of 4-5 at a time. Despite fighting as a small swarm of enemies, he made it clear that these are not swarm-level critters - quite the challenge for an unsuspecting adventurer!

Another new enemy he mentioned are the Gauradans. These are savage, muscular, red-skinned humanoids who dress in wolf skins and keep wolves as pets. They'll be found in areas with high level wolves and travel with small tamed packs of them.When discussing some of the new boss encounter dynamics that Turbine is using in Shores of Evendim, Jeff mentioned one fight in particular with a Gauradan shaman that's sure to be fun and interesting: "In this encounter, you have to fight your way down a river enbankment past all these wolves. Once you finally get to the boss he has a lot of healing powers. He'll heal himself and his pet wolves throughout the fight and also raise the undead spirits of the wolves you kill to aid him during the battle. As you continue in the fight you'll have to deal with more and more spirit pets."

There's more than that to this content update, though. Jeff promised that nine different unique monster types with lots of variations would be finding their way into Middle Earth, and there's also the previously announced raid boss (although completely optional in case some players have no interest in raiding) and Champion class tweaks which will give the Champion a much larger and more useful role in fellowships. There's sure to be something for everyone in the Shores of Evendim. PvP enthusiasts weren't left out in the rain either. The Spider Weaver monster character can look forward to getting a new attack: a deadly ranged acid spit. Remember that this is just the first of many content updates, as well. To quote Jeff, "We're not done with the landscape, we're not done with the quests, we're not done with the monsters, and we're certainly not done with the crafting or the combat classes. These are all things we're going to continue to expand and build out."

The Future of Middle Earth

After that, we switched gears a bit and chatted with Jeff about the overall direction of the game. One of the first questions I posed to him was something I've seen asked a few different times in the forums and one that's been bothering me for a while: "What do you do in a story-driven MMO when the story ends? We know that Frodo throws the ring into Mount Doom eventually, so where does that leave the players?" Of course, Jeff coyly dodged it, pointing out that they have plenty of material to build on for years to come just from the trilogy itself. It seems this is one question we won't have an answer to for quite some time.

Next, in the wake of the recent gold farming bannings, we wanted to talk a bit about Jeff's views on the MMO secondary market. "I understand where [the secondary market] comes from, from a player standpoint," he said."If I have more money than time and want to kind of 'cheat ahead' and get to an easier place in the gamplay experience. The downside is that it kind of tends to be corrosive to the player economy if left unfettered, adding a significant amount of inflation to the game and making everyone else's gameplay experience much harder." Turbine has been making significant strides towards combatting gold farming in their game, and is committed to limiting its influence as much as possible.

One thing we can look forward to is more of Turbine's regular content updates. They're currently planning to do a quarterly release schedule of free updates, with new content and class tweaks in each one. This is aside from the routine patching which will occur on a regular basis as necessary. Jeff stated, "As a company, we've become experts at delivering monthly, bi-monthly, and quarterly content. We'll try to expand the epic story with bigger landmasses and bigger gameplay experiences." He also confirmed that there's to be no level cap increase in book 9 or 10 and that we can expect a rather large player housing update in book 11 (which will likely be an actual retail expansion pack, due to the large number of new textures and other assets required). Finally, for all you Lore-master fans that think the class needs a little love: your update should be coming either in the next update or the following one, but soon either way.

It's easy to see that Jeff and his team at Turbine are really passionate and committed to creating a fantastic experience for their players. He stressed that quality and fun are two of the most important things to them, and so far they've done a fantastic job of providing both. They play their game too, and they really try to do their best to serve the needs of their playerbase. As Jeff pointed out at one point during the interview, "Most people would have charged for what we're building [in Shores of Evendim]. We just see this as part of our commitment to making this an amazing place to be."

- Cameron "Aelryn" Sorden