The Lord of the Rings Online: Siege of Mirkwood Q&A, Part Two
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GZ: Talking from an interface standpoint, how would you map the controls to certain functions? Have you figured that out or is it an ongoing process?
JS: Well yes and yes. We think we know how to do it, we've hammered it out and tried a lot of experiments and it's an ongoing process. But I think it comes down to the process, you don't approach it as:
"I've built MMOs before and I know how they need to function and I like to build one on a console, so how do I map those functions to certain buttons." You basically say "The first thing I need to do is simplify the experience."
The PC experience of an MMO is far too complicated for a console. It's a completely different experience, there's too many decisions and choices to be made. MMOs intentionally slow in pace to allow your time to make choices and push all the buttons. Console games are fun because they are responsive and immediate, therefore there isn't enough time to make those decisions. You don't want to have one hundred skills in an MMO on a console, you don't want to have a story interaction that's based on a lot of text or walking around and talking to people. You also have the issue of fundamental things like social interaction and chat, how will people reach out to each other and communicate? How do you make a game that doesn't require a huge amount of communication back and forth? Which people depend on for text chat for on the PC. The U.I work and mapping is hard, but that's the easy part. What's hard is figuring out how to build a game that suits the platform, so then some of the decisions on how the controller works become more obvious.
