Middle-Earth Online Dev Diary
-
Category: News ArchiveHits: 929
It wouldn't have been terribly difficult to tell a vanilla tale that existed safely to the side of the events of The Fellowship of the Ring, but we felt that having been given the opportunity to explore an entirely new piece of the greatest fantasy world ever created, we also had a responsibility to deliver a story that would make people feel as if they were discovering Tolkien's world anew. The more ambitious we became, the more responsible we had to be. We didn't get it right the first time; it took much iteration to construct a bold and interesting plot that took great advantage of the license.
Even after we had the plot nailed down though, there was more trouble waiting. This is the trouble that we didn't realize would be there: the logistics of implementing the plot into a game world. We knew there would be problems trying to tell a basically linear story in a shared-space world, but until we sat down and started listing them out and trying to solve them, the scope of our challenge was not evident. When we got right down to it, what we realized was that there is a darned good reason MMPs don't generally have plots (stories, sure, lots of it and often very good; but plots? Not often...).
