LOTRO: Developers on designing the MMORPG

Getting an MMO to tell a story isn’t easy. There are tons of MMOs out there that are supposed to provide their players rich fantasy worlds where they get to live out adventures and experience the “epic” first hand.

This is the reason why Turbine, the guys developing Lord of the Rings Online, have their work cut out for them. Lord of the Rings is arguably one of the greatest fantasy story and in fact, many fantasy conventions spawned from it.

If Turbine gets LOTR online wrong, it would be like saying that Gandalf is a rip-off of Obi-wan Kenobi.

In a rather lengthy interview over at Gamespy, several game-design and game-play related details were revealed. The details revolve around the innovations and game design decisions Turbine made regarding the game.

Get the juicy bits of the interview after the jump.

Getting an MMO to tell a story isn’t easy. There are tons of MMOs out there that are supposed to provide their players rich fantasy worlds where they get to live out adventures and experience the “epic” first hand.

This is the reason why Turbine, the guys developing Lord of the Rings Online, have their work cut out for them. Lord of the Rings is the great fantasy story and in fact, many fantasy conventions spawned from this story.

If Turbine gets LOTR online wrong, it would be like saying that Gandalf is a rip-off of Obi-wan Kenobi.

In a rather lengthy interview over at Gamespy, several game-design and game-play related details were revealed. The details revolve around the innovations and game design decisions Turbine made regarding the game. Here are the juicy bits we think you guys would like to hear about:

The developers are aware of the fact that Tolkien‘s world is huge – that’s why they had to go through a period of introspection to really figure out what was important or not, what should they keep for now, and what would be nice ideas that should be better introduced later.

In one swoop, the developers realized that they can solve the problem that most MMOs based on intellectual property face. You know, like how in Star Wars games having the players run into Luke Skywalker will cause the publisher (and probably a few lawyers) to breathe down your neck faster than you can say Jawa.

Anyway, according to the developers, players won’t run into Frodo simply because you know where he is most of the time. Frodo’s big quest is going on and you’re not part of it –  at least not directly. If you take the story as is, and then you dump it into an MMO world, you’d wonder why Frodo and the gang had such a relatively low amount of random encounters.

Well, apparently the developers figured that in their MMO, you’re the reason why that is. They suggest that you could be a part of the Dunedain team that cleared the path for the furry-footed halflings. The developers also point out that there are a lot of temporal gaps in the story itself that they could fill in with their MMO.

Another issue that was raised was the problem of the “Groundhog Day” effect that players experience in MMOs. Time in the game world doesn’t really pass, you can kill that dragon 20 times and hang it’s head on 20 different guild halls. Well, the developers claim that with judicious use of instances, they’ve almost solved this problem. For example, a ranger the players meet in the tutorial, will slowly fall to darkness and become a wraith until the players at level 10 eventually have to kill him — and they’ll never see him again once they do.

As for the bestiary, the developers say that the monsters in Tolkien’s world were so evil that they had the power to alter reality (or peoples perception of it) at will. In the MMO, whenever you encounter evil of significant malevolence, the game-play experience of the players will change too. Their HUD will freak out, their mini-map will stop functioning, game sound cues will change. Nice huh?

And lastly, the developers stress that while they know that character roles (tank, healer, mage, skill/stealth) are a must to make MMOs work, they don’t want the players to be “imprisoned” by the class system that has become an RPG convention due to Gary Gygax’s D&D. They give out Gandalf as an example. How do you give out a “Wizard” class when Tolkien says that there’s only been five wizards on Middle-earth? They claim that they’ve worked on a system where the characters get to define themselves based on their actions. A good example of this would be Aragorn, who is a few parts tank, few parts ranger, some part healer and an all around bad-ass.

Based on the details that have been given out, LOTR online is shaping up to be a game fit for Tolkien’s world. We’ll just have to wait for the games release to be sure that Turbine doesn’t drop the ball… er, Ring.

Via Gamespy