The Lord of the Rings Online Interview
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Eurogamer: What sort of things didn't work? Can you give us an example?
Alan Maki: Sure!
Jeffrey Steefel: Hahaha.
Alan Maki: One of the first combat games we had was based around a card game. As your character advanced he acquired more and more cards and he placed these into your deck. As you progressed through combat you would be given random cards from your deck to build trumps and other ways to finish off your attacks and skills. That didn't test so well internally at first, so we looked at it as a table-top version and we looked at it in the actual game and realised very quickly that it was far too random and ended up not being very fun.
Jeffrey Steefel: One of the other big changes was there started to be a lot more focus on the game itself. That sounds obvious, but it really was a big part of the transition that LOTRO became less about a sandbox Middle-Earth and more about an MMORPG with a significant game that propelled you forward through a compelling world. A lot of the early work was redesigning the game. But we also spent a lot of time focusing on how combat should work, because you spend so much of your time doing it in-game.
It was interesting as we were going through some of the same thought processes that Blizzard was about the MMO genre having the potential of becoming something larger than a small, narrowly-focused market.
Eurogamer: Would you have captured the same size audience as Blizzard had you launched before WOW?
Jeffrey Steefel: Oh, you know, we'll never know. Don't think it hasn't crossed our minds once or twice! And we drive ourselves even more crazy by saying what if we launched before WOW and while the [Lord of the Rings] movies were coming out. Alan and I could have driven to work in our Porsches!
