How Turbine made Lord of the Rings Online's Rohan region
"Enough painting outside the lines. Enough being coy. The Riddermark. Rohan. Finally."
Thus begins a brand-new developer diary on Lord of the Rings Online's latest expansion, Riders of Rohan. The article tackles the development of East Rohan, which we're told is six times larger than average landscape releases in the game to date.
The team decided early on to split Rohan into two major sections, both for practicality and for thematic purposes. East Rohan will represent an earlier timeframe in the book as well as a more "classic" locale that fans remember from the books: "For now, we're dealing with the time when Gríma Wormtongue still holds sway over Théoden, the king's son is dead, orcs are running rampant, and the beleaguered Rohirrim can barely keep it all from falling apart."
The dev diary speaks of the challenges of crafting the region, geographically and visually, and how the team's had to deal with the gaps in Tolkien's explanation of the culture.
