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LotRO's Devs of the Roundtable sally forth on Update 5's instance cluster
What's better than one developer sharing the thought process behind a major update to a game? Six. Cut out the middleman and go right to "six," we say. Ergo, it's lightning development caught in a bottle to see a half-dozen Lord of the Rings Online designers and worldbuilders gather together to talk about the instance cluster of the upcoming Update 5. Update 5's five instances -- including an epic raid confrontation with Saruman -- presented unique challenges and exciting opportunities for the team. Worldbuilder Dan Ouellette says that Turbine didn't want to limit itself to merely Orthanc: "After looking at all our ideas we knew we didn't want to have them all in the tower, because that would be a very boring cluster. It's a very small space and in general... just really long." Instead, the team branched out to focus on the surroundings, inner workings, and underneath of Orthanc for the five instances. The different types of instances -- three-, six-, and 12-person -- allowed the team to try out different tricks as well. "It's an exciting and difficult demand when working on a three-man," Content Designer Bob Hess says. "The types of challenges you present to people have to be a little more outside-the-box." It's a smörgåsbord of delectable information, so if you're craving good group content in LotRO, you'll definitely want to scoop this up.
The Road to Mordor: Inside Isengard
It's one thing to sit down during a beta and poke around on your own, making educated guesses about why what went where and who what is wherefore. It's another thing entirely to pick up the phone and go, "Hey Turbine? Drop everything -- no, not your pants! -- and take me on a tour of Rise of Isengard! Um, magic word? Oh! Pretty please? With a cherry on top?" The first approach is good, but I wanted to get a more in-depth look into the making of Lord of the Rings Online's third expansion from the people who actually made it. How does one approach fleshing out an area that received relatively little source support from the books? What is Turbine trying to do differently in its fourth year of LotRO development? And why should we be afraid of an old guy in a bathrobe who won't come out of his tower? See? These are good questions to ask, which is why I sat down with Bob Hess, Aaron Campbell and Adam Mersky, who graciously took me on a whirlwind tour of Rise of Isengard. I wanted to cut through the PR-speak and learn about the real stories of the making of the expansion and what we'll be encountering within, and the devs were happy to oblige. Hit the jump as we travel further down The Road to Mordor and take the Hobbits to Isengard!
March into the Gap of Rohan with LotRO's latest dev diary
Horses thunder, horns blow, and the forces of the Free Peoples of Middle-earth ride out to meet the Enemy on its own turf. It's in the Gap of Rohan, one of the newest areas featured in the upcoming Lord of the Rings Online: Rise of Isengard, where players will finally encounter the Rohirrim proper. Turbine is excited to introduce this long-awaited nation of horse-riders to the game, and in a new developer diary, an overview of this infamous region is given. While the Gap may not be large in size, it is critical to both armies to control, as it commands one of the best crossings of the river Isen. The developers also share some behind-the-scenes info about the "tricks" used to simulate large armies fighting alongside player characters -- all while still running on your average computer. We have several new action screenshots of combat in the Gap of Rohan for you below, and the full dev diary can be watched after the jump! %Gallery-9579%
Lord of the Rings Online dev diaries discuss new skirmishes
Turbine has given us a two-for-one deal today with the addition of two new dev diaries. The diaries -- from Turbine's Bob "Maurath" Hess and Joe "jwbarry" Barry -- detail two of the new skirmishes being introduced in Lord of the Rings Online's Update 3. The first skirmish, Attack at Dawn, takes place in the North Downs and sees players dealing with multiple different mechanics simultaneously. The second, The Icy Crevasse, is the first skirmish to take place in Forochel and is described by Barry as "a quick bite-sized romp," with the skirmish taking about 10 minutes to complete. It's truly an interesting look into not only what the skirmishes themselves entail but the design process that goes into bringing them to players on the live servers. Whether you play LotRO or you're just curious about the work and thought process that goes into these skirmishes, the diaries are certainly a must-read. If you're interested in gaining a new degree of respect for the effort that goes into the game, both dev diaries can be found on LotRO's official site.
Lord of the Rings Online: "Solofication" is the word of the day
Ever since Turbine modified the first volume of its epic storyline for Lord of the Rings Online, players have eagerly anticipated the same revamp of Mines of Moria's Volume II. With the upcoming Echoes of the Dead patch, this will in fact take place, and Turbine's ready with another illuminating dev diary to shed some light on the process on the "solofication" of Volume II. It turns out that reworking Volume II wasn't as simple as scaling down mob health or just slapping Inspired Greatness (a huge buff) on characters. Every stage of the journey -- which contained many large group instances -- had to be reconsidered, and Turbine's Bob Hess details how the content team broke down the journey, adjusted it and then reassembled it to be a more solo-friendly experience. "Overall, I feel as though the changes made will allow a great number of players who previously could not proceed through the epic to see the rest of the story unfold," Hess said. Volume II's solofication includes taking battle instances and transforming them into skirmishes, adjusting the levels of the different books and making quest objectives simpler. You can read the entire article over at LotRO's website, and don't miss out on five new screenshots from Echoes of the Dead below! %Gallery-101902%
PAX 2010: Counting down to LotRO's relaunch with Turbine
TweetWith the launch of Lord of the Rings Online's biggest patch to date a scant few days away, we touched base with Turbine's Aaron Campbell, Brian Aloisio, and Bob Hess at PAX Prime to see how their nerves are holding up at this point. It is, as Aloisio laughed, akin to launching the game all over again, and LotRO is definitely under close scrutiny because of it. Many players were surprised to hear that LotRO's free-to-play update was going live much sooner than anticipated, and we asked Campbell whether this was due to a preset schedule or better-than-anticipated beta feedback. He said that they weren't going to release it until it was ready, but by the team's reckoning, the beta process went so smoothly that there was no reason to delay any further. Compared to the betas for Shadows of Angmar, Mines of Moria and Siege of Mirkwood, the F2P beta -- according to Campbell -- was the most upbeat Turbine's ever had, with far more positive feedback than negative. Hit the jump to hear more and see the latest screenshots and video from PAX.
