Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar Interview

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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.