Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar Interview

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Eurogamer: Microsoft is already talking about a next-gen 360, so maybe we'll see it on that?

Jeffrey Steefel: Which is... stunning. This one'll have a larger hard-drive, a power-supply that doesn't melt... I've been blown away by the Xbox actually, the service they've built around it is really impressive. I'm on my second one and it's having a few problems, but that's the price you pay for wanting to be first to market by a year and a half. It paid off in the beginning, the question is, will it long-term? Anyway, it's good for us all that there's two high-end players in the market.

Eurogamer: Monster play feels like a free-for-all at the moment. Is it designed that way, or just because of the large numbers in battles?

Jeffrey Steefel: Depends on who's fighting. If you've spent lots of time in WOW and elsewhere, these things tend to be chaos; and there are people that really enjoy that. On the other hand, I've seen groups of Freeps and Creeps really organise themselves about how they approach some of the strategy that was already in the Ettenmoors on launch - taking keeps, getting access to certain resources. What we launched was a good start but didn't make for enough of that strategy, so that's the path we've been going down.

In Book 12 we added the Delving of Fror, which is fun to play and hard to say, but it takes things to the next level and says, why do I want to control certain parts of the Ettenmoors? Having control of these areas up here gives access to Delving of Fror, which is basically a whole bunch of really high-end and cool raid content that gives me lots of loot I can't get anywhere else in the game. It's also a really high-end PVP area, so if I lose control up above then the other party can come in and kick my butt from behind. That's an indication of where we're going to take things, and we'll go even further for Moria and beyond.

Eurogamer: Sounds very similar to Planetside's expansion Aftershock, which was the beginning of the end for the game.

Jeffrey Steefel: Well, first, everyone has access to this, as it's not an expansion pack. You can solo some of the content down in Fror, and the fact that there's only five things to take control of in the Ettenmoors means there's a fluidity of access down there, with a constant watching your back. On our test server - I don't want to call it beta as our Book testing is only about ten weeks long - we opened up Fror and we had hundreds down there without any problems. You're right, that's the challenge, as PVP isn't everywhere, and if you're participating in PVP, access to broadest group of people and making sure content is available to as many as possible is important.

Eurogamer: Are you planning to expand PVP as the war expands, across more of the land?

Jeffrey Steefel: I want to be careful not to be too definitive in this answer, but that's definitely, philosophically and from a high-level design perspective, what we talk about all the time - which is, you get across the Misty Mountains and that's where you're really getting to the martial part of Middle Earth, from Helm's Deep to Minas Tirith to the Ents marching on Isengard, war is always there. More will crop up once across the Misties.

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