PCPP: Please give us a brief introduction into your game.

JEFFERY STEEFEL: Lord of the Rings Online is, obviously, the first online representation of Tolkien's world ever. We're all big fans of Lord of the Rings. We've seen it the movies, read about it in books and dreamt about it for years, and this allows us to now go there and explore that world, interact with that world, and more importantly, be a meaningful part of that world. Be an inhabitant, and also part of the on-going story that is one of the greatest stories of all time.
The story of the ring, and the story of Saruon, and the story of Middle Earth. So you go into this world and participate with that world.
At the same time it's a next-gen MMO, taking a lot of the things that we've all learnt in the industry from the audiences that we've had about what players want in an interactive MMO and we've, in a lot of cases, taken those, honed those and solidified those and made them as effective as we possibly can. In other cases we've looked and things that we've though that we could take a little further. Basically, it's a next gen, mature, massively multiplayer game set in THE fantasy world of all time.


PCPP: So what will make LoTRO stand out beyond the beyond setting?

JS: There are a lot of things that we focus one. First of all it's the nature of advancement in the game. Basically, as you accomplish longer-term goals and objectives during your experience in the game and this gives you all sorts of benefits that layer on top of your advancement.
Very early in the game you start getting titles. So I'm the saviour of Archet, or I'm the rescuer of Bree. The very first thing you do when you come in the game is you have a title that is based on your lineage, right? Where you are from. Or Wolfbane, or whatever ... Orc Slayer. Then you start getting these things called Traits. Traits are like equippable characteristics that you can put onto your character.
Legendary traits are higher-level deeds that actually unlock traits that unlock new skills for you. That's on the gameplay side.
A lot of these traits are called virtues. Virtue of Wisdom, Virtue of Hope. All of these kind of characteristics that make up your hero. Look up the story of the world of Middle Earth. It's all about becoming a hero and protecting Middle Earth, so while you're collecting these things to help your gameplay, you're also creating this sense of who your character is. Very strong in certain virtues by virtue of what you have done in the world ... so it's got a sort of story component too. We're always driven gameplay first, but at the same time we always want all of those gameplay aspects to grow out of the lore. Grow out of the world.


PCPP: Okay, so you have Middle Earth, how do you leverage it?

JS: A lot of ways. First of all there's the world itself. [Ask] anybody who's been playing beta -- and we've got some great feedback on this -- it just feels like a real place. I think one of the things that distinguishes Middle Earth from other fanstasy worlds that have been created is that he created a [i]real[/i] world. He really approached it like a reverse historian. How can I create an entire place with history, with culture, with races that have lineage, with languages ... the pieces that you expect are there.
The sum total is that it feels like a real place that I can inhabit. Some fantasy worlds, and again, it's a different approach, are fantastical. Here's something that probably couldn't exist, right? But it's just completely cool because it's different to anything I know. He created something that's just so real it has a sense of familiarity.
We made sure that while we were building out the world we were paying huge attention to that and that comes down to everything from the detail at how the landscapes are built, to the towns themselves and making sure every town has a history, a personality, a reason to exist. Beyond that it has a name and has some buildings that you can go to.


PCPP: How would we see that represented in the game?
JS: Maybe this town happens to be near a river so there's a mill so there's a lot of lumber stuff there so you'll find out that some of your crafting, when you go to looking for lumber nodes, they tend to be around there or there's a dwarven mine and the town near there seems very focused on selling ore and all of that kind of stuff so you get a real sense that this is a real place. It also comes into the fidelity of the game world. There's an emphasis on things like just how the skies look and how they change. You look at the night sky and my guys have built constellations. It looks incredible. The tracking of our day cycle really feels like weather is happening and things are changing. And then that creates the base-line feeling that this is a real place, a place that I could just walk into and I want to spend a lot of time in.
Then there's making sure that it feels like the place. That I am seeing all of the things that I expect to see. I'm going to the Shire, I can walk into Bag End, I can hang out at the Prancing Pony, I can talk to Barliman Butterbur or I can go to Tom Bombadil's house, I can go into the old forest. I'm going to end up at Rivendale talking to the Fellowship and hanging out with them, I'm going to go into the Misty Mountains and ... everything that you remember reading about you're living it and tasting it and participating in it.
The third layer on top of it is the story itself, because it's also one of the greatest stories of all time.
And that story is one where the Free people of middle earth are in constant battle with Sauron. And, specifically, in the three books, in this particular set of battles, the ring of power is a representation of all evil, having to be destroyed by the free people of Middle Earth. Frodo and fellowship become a symbolic representation of that overall struggle and we place you in the middle of that struggle. What we don't do is put you in the bodies of the fellowship and have you relive their experience; what we do is say is that you are in Middle Earth during the era all of these things, in a place that is marred by war, and the things that you are doing are an integral part of what the fellowship is doing. Sometimes you're interacting directly with the fellowship, sometimes you are doing things that are more related to the struggle against Angmar.


PCPP: How does the game's narrative fit into all of this?

JS: We have written our own story that intertwines with that, that gives us context for the gameplay. So the things you are doing in the world is for a reason. So, some guy tells me to go get something, or kill something or save a town or whatever, it's not just some random guy asking me to do some random thing. It's a ranger asking me to go help this town because there are Orcs there and the more Orcs we kill, the safer the passage will be for the Fellowship or whatever it happens to be.


PCPP: There are obviously some issues with following the lore of Middle Earth. As I remember it, the whole world is pretty vast and largely unpopulated. How do you deal with that aspect of Tolkien world?

JS: That goes on the list of: "how do we draw the right balance between factual accuracy and authenticity?" You're right, it's a big, lush, open world and we have to create that feeling, right? You have to feel like it's that kind of place. There are lots of places in the game where you come up over the crest of hill and look down on a huge valley with mountains in the background and you're in the Misty Mountains and there are mountains as far as the eye can see. So the tone and feeling of it is exactly as expansive as in the book. We make sure that it doesn't feel like a theme park where you go from stop to stop to stop, but if you go into the appendix of the books you can tell exactly how may days and weeks and hours and months or whatever, they were just trotting along ... and that's not really fun gameplay. So it's a combination of shrinking space (in some cases, but only where it is uninteresting) and secondly it's providing you with fast travel, which we do in the game.