When you've got as much material to deal with as the Turbine boys have with the Tolkien legendarium (we're using the poncey word for his mythos out of pure pretention), then you'd think there would be no need to create whole new realms for players to explore. Yet the new books of Lord of the Rings Online - updates to you and I - are mostly exploring areas on the edge of the books, stuff that was barely written about. The upcoming Book 13 is a pertinent example, seemingly extrapolating from a single paragraph in one of the books an entire culture, environment and array of foes. We spoke to Jeffrey Steefel, executive producer on LOTRO, about what they're planning for Book 13 and what new mechanics they're introducing to the game.
Eurogamer: Are we getting any more out of this interview than Book 13?
Jeffrey Steefel: Our communications director Adam Mersky is sat next to me and he slaps me upside the head everytime I say stuff I'm not supposed to. We're not talking about Mines of Moria and Book 14 at the moment.
Eurogamer: Where does the idea of Forochel come from? The actual language we've seen describing it so far features lots of Finnish names, and the screenshots seem to show Eskimos.
Jeffrey Steefel: It's actually mentioned in the books, just in one paragaph that describes it as a barren icy waste where an imporant shipwreck happens. As normal, we took what was talked about there and extrapolated from it. Tolkien also talks very briefly about the Lossoth, the indigenous types who help the shipwrecked. We took that as new faction for reputation, created their infrastructure, and decided they were like eskimos of the northern wastes here. On top of that, we looked at their language and thought, "What would Tolkien do?" He was a linguist who used lots of Nordic and Finnish influences when he created Elvish, and he was very knowledgeable about most languages; he looked at about 3-4 regions beyond 14-15th century English, and they were mainly from the nordic region, which is where words like Orc came from. Had he written more about the Lossoth, we felt he'd be Finnish-inspired, so that's why all the naming and stuff is like that.
Every update is a mammoth undertaking.
Eurogamer: The actual story the Lossoth come from is about a king called Arvedui, who flees north and is drowned in a shipwreck; however, his story features an ancient ring that's given to the Lossoth; does this tie in with epic questline, which (spoiler alert!) is chasing down parts of a lost ring at the moment?
Jeffrey Steefel: We're trying to avoid spoiling the story, but Arvedui's plot is involved in chasing down the ring Narchuil that Amarthiel is looking for, and the epic story in 13 is heavily involved in where that goes next. Players will find out if the ring that King Arvedui was carrying is linked in. I have to stop now as the content guys are right outside my door here, so if I spoil too much they pile on and hang me from the rafters and it's really nasty.
Eurogamer: The Children of Hurin is the 13th book of the official books - and this is Book 13. We're assuming there's no link, as you guys haven't licensed that stuff yet. Are we right?
We're betting the guys in white aren't friendly.
Jeffrey Steefel: Absolutely, there's not really a correlation between our book numbers and the books themselves, it was more of a motif. For example, we'll be finishing off this volume when we get to Moria and then we'll have a new set of books that are part of volume 2. In terms of Children of Hurin, it's not part of our license right now.
Eurogamer: Would you want it to be? We might not be literary critics, but we're really opinionated and it's really not very good.
Jeffrey Steefel: Ah... it depends on the purpose it serves. Our license is very specific; Tolkien Estates doesn't even have the right to license us the Silmarillion or Children of Hurin.
Eurogamer: Would you want it to be? We might not be literary critics, but we're really opinionated and it's really not very good.
Jeffrey Steefel: Ah... it depends on the purpose it serves. Our license is very specific; Tolkien Estates doesn't even have the right to license us the Silmarillion or Children of Hurin.
Eurogamer: We know that you're not introducing any new races until, perhaps, the Moria expansion; but you're introducing a new Defiler race for monster players now. Why's it so urgent?
Jeffrey Steefel: He's the first brand new class/monster. He rounds out the monster party, as what was arguably missing was a healer class. He's kinda your shaman and he has lots of cool, nasty things to do in the monster party. One of my developers wrote the dev diary and He's all [Steefel puts on a Comic Book Guy voice] "The defiler is able to take the pus from other creatures to make his own creatures more strong and angry." Reading it through I was pretty nauseated, so I guess he did a good job.
Eurogamer: The most important new mechanic you're introducing in Forochel is the temperature system, reflecting how freezing the area is. How does that work?
Jeffrey Steefel: Yeah, the temperature is constantly damaging your morale so it could kill an inattentive player. Like real life, if you go into the Arctic ocean, and spend more than 20 seconds in there, you're going to be defeated. If you're just really cold, you can find a campfire, or warm hut, or certain foods, and that staves off the death.
Eurogamer: Will this be extended to other areas later; like desert heat, marshland miasmas, or even the intense heat of the Crack of Doom?
Wander into that sea, and you'll be dead in seconds.
Jeffrey Steefel: It's what my designers call "another mouth to feed". We've opened this door now, it's interesting to have the environment itself become part of gameplay, and it's something we'll always be thinking about when moving into new areas. Whether we do it in every area comes down to time, resources and priority. It's very important for Forochel for example. Similarly, Mordor's going to be lots of things, as dread will come into play in a big way.
Eurogamer: You're introducing a series of new skills called hobbies in the game, the first of which will be fishing. Will there be high-end fishing in this arctic weather, like wading out into the ocean for extreme fishing?
Jeffrey Steefel: Legendary fishing, yeah! There's tiered access to fishing and this fits into the fat-path/skinny-path of our systems. We want to make sure that anybody who wants to craft can get through most of the tiers without having to craft for their life, but then there's mastery for those who really want to make crafting a big part of their experience. There's basic fishing you can do anywhere in Middle Earth that has water; you just need a fishing pole and the most basic bit of training. But then you can worry about the bait or pole you have, and there's certain very rare places in the world that have cool fishing spawn points and that's where you get the rare fish. And of course, every now and then you'll get something which might be a rusty dagger... though no tyres.
If it gets too cold, you'll have to gut him and crawl inside.
Eurogamer: ...or old boots? To a lot of players this will sound very similar to the WOW system. No offence intended, but lot of the little things you're adding in feel like checking off a list; WOW's got that, now we've got that. Is that unfair?
Jeffrey Steefel: Not entirely. Fishing came to be as a matter of... players really want fishing since they've done it EverQuest when the fish was like 4 pixels, so we know there's a base level of fishing they want, and it's bound to be similar to WOW. However, we can take it different directions by not making any requirements on you; you don't have to be in one spot, at a particular level, with this level of proficiency to actually fish. For us it's, how can we remove the barriers to make this a genuinely accessible, fun hobby. It's also the first implementation of a whole series of hobbies that are coming.
Eurogamer: What else are you looking at? Whittling ships in bottles?
Jeffrey Steefel: We've quipped about this before; one of the crazy ideas was "painter", so you can capture scenes throughout Middle Earth. You can go crazy. I have designers here who, if I let them, they'd be like [Steefel again deploys the Comic Book Guy voice]: "Okay, you get different types of paint, and you go around and collect different types of metal, and the way you'd mix them up would make different types of ink and they'd last differently and if you make this kind of element, they won't fade in the sunlight and..." and they won't stop. What players really want is to capture certain scenes so it becomes more like photography, though it's not literally like photography obviously, it's Middle Earth, so it's a way of quickly capturing a scene you're playing that you can turn into an object to be put in your house.
