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

The past couple weeks have seen a lot of proposed changes to the Lord of the Rings Online, announced through a series of new Dev Diaries. Tim "Raskalnikov" Lang, the game dev you may remember from such Dev Diaries as Update 2: Minstrel Developer Diary, brings us another look at upcoming changes, this time to the character panel.

Ahh, the good ‘ole Character panel; I think it’s safe to say that over the years it’s turned into a bit of a rat’s nest. The changes started off innocently enough: “Players will love this Cosmetic Inventory system. Where do we put it?” “Hooray, housing is in! Where should we put the housing information?” “Now that we’ve converted a lot of our stats to points, where should we display all of the new stats?” Inevitably, the answer would always be, “Let’s just put it in the Character Panel.” While this did make the Character panel a one-stop shop, it also made it more convoluted and thus more difficult to navigate for newer players.

The goal, then, was to tidy up the look of the character panel, while also introducing a handful of new features. Well, not "new," exactly, but existing features made bigger, bolder and/or better. Including adding 3 new cosmetic outfit slots, apparently unlockable through the LotRO Store. 

Our guide takes us on a tour of the process behind this redesign, showing the different stages of development - from crude, confusing hack-jobs to the more elegant and refined "final" version:

Images courtesy of www.lotro.com

Bigger portraits in the character panel give you a better view of what your toon looks like. Interestingly, the devs decided to go with the ol' standard head/waist/feet zoom buttons instead of a slider bar as shown in earlier concept mock-ups, and have kept the tiny "eye" icons to toggle visibility of equipped gear instead of using something more obvious. Large buttons linked to the appropriate store pages allow for the easy purchase of cosmetic items and character enhancements. Evidently, individual tabs are given up in favor of a mini toolbar at the bottom of the panel with graphical icons. The Stats panel has been greatly simplified and moved to the right-hand side, with a checkbox at the top to show advanced stats in addition to basic/simple ones.

Read more about these changes at Update 2: Character Panel Changes Developer Diary.