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

Mirkwood and Beyond

Ten Ton Hammer: Just to clear up some confusion, could you briefly explain the Adventure’s Pack and Siege of Mirkwood purchase options?

Jeffrey Steefel: Basically what we’re doing is we’re offering some promotional opportunities to the players before we launch. So if you are an existing subscriber and you want to upgrade to a multi-month plan you’re going to get Mirkwood for free. If you are an existing subscriber already on a multi-month plan or if you are a lifetime subscriber and you buy the adventure pack you’ll get Mirkwood for free.

The adventure pack is a set of two pretty big account wide functionalities that we’re making available to players. One is two extra character slots which is huge. We added two character slots obviously when we added two new classes, but now you have the opportunity to level up two more alts. And then the second thing is shared storage which is very cool. At the account level you can share things with all of your characters, the exceptions there being for bound objects, only the character that created the item storage and only the character that puts the item into shared storage can take it back out.

Ten Ton Hammer: So players can almost use that as overflow storage for bound items if they run out of space for an individual character.

Jeffrey Steefel: Yeah, but we don’t want them to use it sort of as the ultimate mule obviously.

Ten Ton Hammer: You may have already seen it, but there’s actually a fairly amusing player created flow chart on the forums currently that outlines the Mirkwood / Adventure pack purchase options and sort of pokes fun at some of the complexity involved…

Jeffrey Steefel: Yeah, marketing has been trying really hard over the last couple of weeks, somewhat successfully, to clarify things. Definitely the communication was a little… unclear at first which made something that’s already a little bit complex even harder to understand. The intent was basically to give people all kinds of different opportunities for how to get the new content.

Ten Ton Hammer: With the interruptable auto-attack that will soon enter the game, have you made any concessions to players who are afraid that the “feel” of combat will change?

Jeffrey Steefel: A lot of what we’ve done is just change how the animations play. The numbers that are happening underneath are exactly the same. We haven’t really changed combat, we’ve changed what you see. It’s amazing though, because the relationship between what you see and what you’re doing on the keyboard - we’re talking about milliseconds here - makes a big difference in how it feels.

There’s options in the options panel that go along with this change where you can actually go into options and adjust how the animation is playing. You can make it feel pretty much like it did before - it puts in the players’ hands the balance between snappiness and fluidity.

Ten Ton Hammer: Maybe you can clear this up for everyone - is Siege of Mirkwood an epilogue to Volume 2, or a prologue to Volume 3?

Jeffrey Steefel: Hopefully if we’re writing our story right it’s a little bit of both, but we are very much intending for it to be the epilogue to Volume 2. We’ll start Volume 3 with Book 1 next year. That’s pretty much a 180 change from what we’ve been doing to date, and there’s a lot of reasons for that change. The biggest one was that we felt like we were doing a TV series where the pilot was the finale. It made more sense to pull things together or certainly end it with an epic story in the expansion and then start fresh with the next volume. So Volume 3, Book 1 - which will be early next year - will be the kickoff for the story of Volume 3.

Ten Ton Hammer: So Volume 3, Book 1 will be a free update?

Jeffrey Steefel: Our intention is to do free Book updates next year just like we did this year. I can’t promise anything, but that’s absolutely the plan.

Ten Ton Hammer: Some sites refer to Siege of Mirkwood as a "mini-expansion" - and it certainly seems like a retail expansion without the retail availability. How do you size this one up?

Jeffrey Steefel: The thing you need to look at is it all comes down to time and scope. By the time we were in alpha for Mirkwood it had only been about eight or nine months since we launched Moria. So we have a choice; we can either keep players waiting a lot longer and launch a much larger in scope expansion, or we could do it more frequently and have it be slightly smaller in scope but still have it be much larger than a normal book update. That’s also why you see a significantly reduced price point for Mirkwood, and we feel it’s appropriate to the size and scope of the content that we’re providing. We didn’t really want to keep players waiting and it is better to get them a little bit less content, but do that more frequently and be able to charge less for it.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you think that approach is something you’ll look at doing more of for future content additions to LotRO?

Jeffrey Steefel: The industry in general is going through a lot of transition, so I think all of us are trying to figure out if the way that we deliver content to players and what we charge for it is exactly right, or is that something that needs to have different choices in the future. We’re playing around with all kinds of things. The adventure pack is one experiment, and the digital only upgrade for an expansion at a lower price point is another. There are a lot of different things to try, the thing being making it as convenient and accessible to players to get new content.

Ten Ton Hammer: Turbine has definitely been pushing things in some interesting directions, for example the approach you took with the relaunch of DDO as a free to play title with a subscription option.

Jeffrey Steefel: The response to that has actually been astounding. It’s gone beyond our wildest expectations so far. And that was even another kind of experiment where there are a lot of people out there who enjoy playing certain games without having to pay a subscription but end up participating just as much. These are all certain tools and it’s just a matter of which product is the right place to apply it.

Ten Ton Hammer: Even the content delivery for DDO Unlimited was handled exceptionally well. At most it took about 10 or 15 minutes to get into the game after first clicking on the download button which is a huge and awesome thing for an MMOG. Do you foresee attempting to incorporate that same approach with LotRO at some point?

Jeffrey Steefel: That’s actually built on top of technology that we had been working on for LotRO first. The thing with LotRO is that it’s such a huge game. If you look at what it used to take to get into the game two years ago you basically had only one choice which was to download the whole client. If you download the free trial version of LotRO through the Turbine Downloader that we have now it actually does the same thing as the DDO client. It’s just that the chunks are a lot larger since LotRO is a much bigger game. We’ve also got peer to peer built into it so there are a lot of things that make the experience much more efficient.

But yea, absolutely; that’s one of the tenants at a corporate level that we’re driving on here is how do we get people into the content much more quickly. It’s tough because these are big games. That’s the other side of the experiment for Mirkwood – instead of retail distribution everyone has to download it, but it’s not small. On the other hand when we did Moria we saw a large proportion of the people who bought Moria did so digitally simply because they wanted to have it right way. So again, it’s not about replacing one model with another, it’s about just having more choices.

But to the earlier discussion, we’re learning how to get better at communicating all of those multiple choices. It’s a lot simpler to basically say here’s the deal; you buy a box, you bring it home and then you pay us a monthly fee. Once you have all of these other little things like the adventure pack it becomes a lot harder to communicate, so we’re still trying to get better with how we do that.

Ten Ton Hammer: Turbine has definitely been pushing a lot of those things into some interesting new directions that go above and beyond what we’re seeing in other parts of the industry.

Jeffrey Steefel: What’s interesting is that it’s starting to become something that lots of other people are looking at, so we’re in a leadership position there which is great. In other media it’s already happened. The way I watch movies or listen to music is completely different than it was 4 years ago. Actually let me rephrase that – I was probably doing those things 4 years ago because I’m a digitalist nerd, but now “normal” people are doing it on a regular basis.

I think we’ll see some of these things change by necessity. I don’t think people will be able to compete in the old way anymore, and to a certain degree we’re already seeing that now. That’s why it’s harder for these games to succeed now because the market is way different than it used to be.

Ten Ton Hammer: Absolutely. Even some of the smaller independent studios are having a rough time trying to get shelf space through the normal retail channels.

Jeffrey Steefel: Retail is tough in general. It’s been a crowded space for a long time and this is even harder because you’re competing against games on the shelf that are a much smaller commitment from somebody when they’re buying it.

But I think competition, like always, will drive the industry to be more and more friendly. I think that’s one of the biggest transitions in MMOs over the past 5 years. People look at them like other types of content and technology now; it’s just supposed to work. Back in the day when Turbine was launching Acheron’s Call and Sony was launching EQ it was like it just needs to be really fun. It might be really hard and it might break sometimes and it might take you three days to actually get it working on your machine, but that’s part of the fun right? That’s not accepted at all now.

And it’s going to be the same thing; people paying for these games in only one way is going to become archaic over time. Only being able to play if you can play 40 hours a week is going to be an option for some people but not required in the future. But these games are like aircraft carriers; you can’t turn them on a dime. You have to be very careful, because we’ve seen games that try to change what the game is and not succeed.

Ten Ton Hammer: That really hits the nail on the head with what Turbine has done with DDO Unlimited. You haven’t radically altered the core game, only the means of distribution and how people are able to get into it much more quickly then when it first launched.

Jeffrey Steefel: What’s also exciting is that it’s brought a whole bunch of people back who may have given up on the game, and are now realizing how much better the game is and realizing that if you take it out of the subscription environment it’s really great and fun. It was kind of a mismatch there between the kind of game DDO is and having to pay a subscription. Although ironically a lot of people are still paying a subscription. In fact we have more subscribers now than we did in the past.

Part of that is just that it’s hard to make that kind of commitment when you can’t see a whole lot of what the game is about. Plus I think there’s just a lot of people out there who would rather be a la carte. Plenty of people will still pay for HBO or pay a monthly subscription to Rhapsody because it’s just too complicated or not fun to sift through long lists to find what you want. Whereas a lot of other people will think it’s fantastic to be able to get something that’s exactly what they want. As long as the goal is always to extend capabilities and not to replace one with another, then we’re probably going to be on the right track.