"We can't wait to do Moria, which you can see as the ultimate fantasy dungeon of all time."Australia, May 16, 2007 - The Lord of the Rings Online is off to a roaring start, garnering very positive reviews and a rapidly expanding player base. No wonder really, as Middle-earth is the archetypal fantasy world, and to be able to explore its plains, valleys and mountains, and to interact with its inhabitants, whether they're a named character or a homely hobbit, is many a gamer's dream come true. Best of all, however, developer Turbine has really nailed it - the visuals, the feel and the mechanics. Looks like WoW finally has some competition. To find out about how smoothly the good ship LOTRO is sailing, as well as what the team has planned for the future, we spoke with the Executive Producer on the game - and industry veteran, Jeffrey Steefel.IGN: Now that the game is out, how has the response been and is the team happy with the way the game turned out?Jeffrey Steefel: It's been great, I mean, so far. Y'know, it's early to tell, because we've had four and half years working on it and then we stop to see what's really going on, but it's been great so far. We've gotten the kind of response to the game that we wanted, we've gotten the kind of audience into the game that we were hoping for. The numbers look good so far - again, it's early to tell, but so far very very positive, and for the most part I think we're seeing people play our game the way that we had hoped they would. And of course we're learning some new things which we're already working on trying to make better for after launch.
IGN: Can you tell us roughly how many players you have online at the moment?Jeffrey Steefel: Well, we actually don't release our numbers right now, but we have lots and lots of people playing worldwide - in North America, Europe, Australia, really all over the world. And soon to be joined by Asia. So we don't disclose numbers at this time, but we've got a large group of people playing.IGN: Can you talk about how many players each server can host concurrently? Some users are complaining about lag on the servers since the game went retail - have you seen any load issues on your end? Jeffrey Steefel: We haven't, and there's always all kinds of different reasons for lag, and one of the things we've learnt is that what players call lag can mean any of a hundred different things, and of course we're trying to find out from our players what they're seeing and why they're seeing it, and there's all different sorts of causes. We haven't come close to our load capacity, and we know this because during alpha and beta we did lots of stress testing to push the servers well beyond their capacity, and we are well below that right now and the game is functioning the way we expect it to. What some people see as lag may be client hitchiness that happens because they're running at a graphics setting which is maybe too high for the equipment that they have. There's been some issues with Vista too, and you know, it can just depend on so many different things.IGN: Speaking of the load bearing tests you did, where do the servers max out? Can you tell us?Jeffrey Steefel: (laughs) Well again, we don't disclose numbers, but we can hold many thousands of people on our servers, and it's competitive with what other companies are doing in this area. What we set out to do was to say - we want our world size to be equivalent to what the industry standard is right now, but we want to be able to operate our game, which is a much higher fidelity, at those levels of load, and it seems to be doing that right now.IGN: Geographically, how big is the world in LOTRO that's currently available, say, in comparison to World of Warcraft's?Jeffrey Steefel: The world that we have is about 50 million square metres, and it's difficult pound for pound to compare the two games. We think that in terms of the amount of gameplay that's generated, and the amount of density in content in the things you're doing and the land that you can traverse and the time it's actually going to take to play through all the content, it's very equivalent to World of Warcraft at launch, perhaps even a little bit more. And so far, we haven't really had anyone get all the way through the game yet, but so far, as we look at the rates of advancement and content consumption and how much time people are spending in the game, it's turning out approximately the way we expected, which is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of gameplay, just with the launch product.
IGN: In terms of content, you've announced the first free expansion, which is hitting towards the end of this month, any chance you can give us some details that haven't been released yet? Jeffrey Steefel: I'm not sure what's been released in your part of the world, but it's the Shores of Evendim and it's a whole new region. One of the things that Turbine has always done, starting in Asheron's Call and something that we're going to push very hard on in Lord of the Rings is frequent and real meaningful updates, so our first update to the game is going to be an entire new region, so where we shipped with eight regions, we're now shipping a ninth region which is itself almost ten million square metres or something like that. We're adding, ostensibly, another 15-20% of area to the game just in this one update. We're also adding well over a hundred new quests, we're adding nine or ten new monsters, we're adding new functionality, we've taken our music system to the next level so there's all kinds of new things you're going to be able to do, including sustain notes and import music to play on your character instrument. And we've made, obviously, lots of changes and adjustments in a positive way, to the game based on what players have been telling us and what we've observed, y'know, things that we've learned since we've had a really large audience in the game.IGN: You're rolling out another massive area of Tolkien's world. How many more areas can you do, and how long is it going to take to roll out all the planned environments? To complete Middle-earth?Jeffrey Steefel: Years and years and years. If you take a look at the map of Middle-earth, the regions that we've been covering in Eriador, which is basically the north-western corner of Middle-earth. Just looking at the map it's a small small portion of a very large world, and we have just focused on Eriador for now, and there are areas within Eriador that we've not even touched on. So Evendim for example, fills in the area between The Shire and Ered Luin which we had left non-contiguous during the launch product, now that sort of ties those two areas together. So one thing we're not worried about is running out of content and running out of land. Y'know, a decade from now when we run out of all of Middle-earth there's even more content to explore because Tolkien spent a lot of time talking about - in fairly vague ways - what lies to the east and what lies to the south and about some parts of the fourth age. There's so much to explore.IGN: Are there any events from the books that you're particularly looking forward to implementing? And is there anything that you simply can't include in the game?Jeffrey Steefel: There's nothing that we can't include in the game. As far as what we looking forward to, I mean, boy, if you talk to my designers we've got so many things ahead of us that we can't wait to do. We can't wait to do Moria, which you can see as the ultimate fantasy dungeon of all time. It's a whole city, it's an entire region in the Misty Mountains. We'll eventually get down into Rohan, and we'll have a whole group of humans who are horsemen, and you'll have all the other things we're going to get into - Mirkwood, Gladden Fields and Fangorn. It really just goes on and on. There are so many places we can't wait to get to.
IGN: What's the next really big feature change or update for the game, aside from the new content at the end of this month?Jeffrey Steefel: We're working on some stuff now that we're going to be releasing later in the year. We're not talking about it yet but it's going to be a substantial addition to the functionality of the game that we think people are going to love, and that people constantly ask for and have been interested in. There's a whole series of features that we want to add to the game. Not because necessarily we quote unquote 'couldn't get them done before launch' but because the game is going to be begin to evolve over time, the audience and the community is going to evolve, and the things that those audiences need are going to also evolve. So, where in the very beginning you want very solid, very very compelling gameplay - which of course you always want, but that's the real focus. How do I get into this game, how do I start my character, what is my gameplay going to be like, how's my advancement path, or paths in this case? So there's lots of areas now that we can begin to grow, for all the different types of audiences that we're going to find in the game. So we're going to have a hardcore audience that's going to be looking for more and more elder content, be looking for more and more challenging things to do in the monster play areas. Then you're going to have a more - casual's not really the right word, but a slightly less hardcore group that's going to be spending more time in the social areas and in social activities, and we're working on a lot of things to support that as well. IGN: Have any class imbalances reared their heads yet? Anything that's really standing out this early in the game which will require some class tuning?Jeffrey Steefel: Not really in terms of class. I mean, for our first launch pass we're pretty happy with what we launched with. We are going to be - and this is something that's going to start with Evendim, every update we're going to start devoting some focus to one of the classes. So for example, 'the month of the champion' will be part of the Evendim launch, and we'll do other classes as we move forward. Not really to fix things that are broken, but to just make them even better, to give them more depth and more interesting things to do, in a way that doesn't unbalance the classes. We feel that they're fairly well balanced right now. Don't forget also that we also have the whole trait system, which is really a whole other way for us to tune the classes, by introducing new traits we give capabilities to not just one but sometimes multiple classes, so that's something that's going to be happening continuously to flesh out each of the classes and each of the different character build paths that are available to you.IGN: It's a constant process. I guess that's the thing with MMO development is that even when you've released the game you've still got years and years of work and tuning ahead of you.Jeffrey Steefel: You have to love it. If you don't love that then it's probably the wrong kind of game to be building.
IGN: Can Oceania players look forward to an official server? Currently we're making do with Elendilmir.Jeffrey Steefel: It's something that we're talking about, we're never ruling out, I think in some respects it's going to be up to our partners Codemasters and the people that are doing distribution in that part of the world. I think it really is going to come down to what the needs are of the people there, how many people are playing, are there any issues that can be specifically resolved by having servers located more centrally, so we don't have any plans to do that right now, but it's not something we've ruled out, and it's certainly something that comes up in conversation. Not casual conversation. (laughs).
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