The Lord of the Rings Online Interview
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There was a lot of criticism about the way Blizzard handled raising the level cap in WoW. What did you learn from that and how you are applying that to LotrO?
Steefel: It's one of the biggest challenges that a developer faces as you're expanding the game. You know you want to enhance the advancement curve, which means you need to create things that are more powerful, but you don't want to create a situation where you negate or nullify everything a player has been doing they've been doing up until that point.
Things are going to change - it's inescapable, in order to move forward. The big difference is we're going to engage the players through the whole process. In a lot of the free updates we made tweaks to classes, and there certainly were people who were upset at some of the changes, but overall our experience was that people were happy with the way that process was handled.
One of the challenges with the IP must be that you're tied to a narrative that takes a while to get going. Was there any worry that the opening areas wouldn't contain enough conflict for people used to World of Warcraft?
Steefel: It definitely was a concern. The benefit though was that instead of getting on the rollercoaster of 'fight fight fight!' it made us focus on the stuff that really mattered to Lord of the Rings. Being in the world is a really big part of the game and the story.
That said, we knew we were launching an RPG. In fact, there was a pretty big transition in developing this game. When we were a developer looking for a publisher, the game was a little bit more sandbox.
There wasn't a meta-game and wasn't that kind of advancement. It was about being in a social place known as Middle-Earth and farming and stuff like that. Which some players are still mad at us for not doing. All twenty-seven of them.
