by Savanja on Mar 28, 2009
Designing instances takes a talent that not many of us have, but when Lord of the Rings Online developer Orion gets to work, he clearly knows what he is doing! Ever wonder what it takes to create a 3-man instance? Orion shares the ins and outs in this dev diary.
The most interesting part of designing the Tham Mírdain instances was that they were intended to violate the standard 6-man instances found throughout the rest of the game world. It was a request directly from the Design Director to do these two instances a bit differently than the others for the Moria Expansion and it was something that, honestly, I did not want to do. I prefer the larger group mechanics as there are more curve balls that you can throw at players. I wanted to make another Barad Gúlaran, focusing on unique fight mechanics that really made the fight more of a puzzle, but the design gauntlet was thrown and I was to pioneer our new 3-man instances.