The Lord of the Rings Online Free-to-Play Interview
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Gamervision: Beyond the games being different in terms of the scale, what difficulties did you run into making LotRO free-to-play as opposed to DDO?
Kate Paiz: Well we wanted to make sure we translated the systems appropriately. Finding the right way to enhance core systems, finding out which systems we needed to lock down or weight in some way. Because DDO and LotRO run on the shared Turbine Engine there are unsurprisingly a lot of similarities in the two systems. We also have a change to the inventory system free players will get three bags with the opportunity to buy free storage, and this is partially to defray the database cost. We wanted to make sure we weren't costing too much on the back end to support them.
For the most part we wanted to keep it very open. Crafting, housing, and the cosmetic players are all available for free players. There will be new cosmetic items and new housing decorations for players to buy if they're interesting in that, but, again, it's completely optional. We had to decide how to balance it, decide what's really fun; we played with some of the crafting access. Those are the kind of balance issues we'll be testing in beta, tuning and tweaking based on feedback and being responsive to that, as we always are.
Gamervision: Is there anything else that's locked out? I know in DDO sorry to keep going back to that, by the way, it's just the best example some of the races were locked out at first. Will there be any races or classes restricted for free players?
Kate Paiz: The Warden and Runekeeper, which come with the Mines of Moria expansion, will be available for purchase in the story individually. They do not become free classes, as they weren't before, but they do become a little easier to buy. You can buy them right in character generation, just click on the button and rolling.
