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A wounded land: The sights of LotRO's West Rohan
In past developer walkthroughs of Lord of the Rings Online: Helm's Deep, Turbine gave us a broad overview of the expansion as well as a look at the next portion of the epic story. For our third tour, we got to check out the vistas and landscapes of West Rohan. One of our concerns was that after the expansiveness of East Rohan, the wast would be, well, more of the same. Lots of fields, horses galore, and so on. While the horses are still ever-present (this is Rohan, after all), West Rohan establishes a unique identity as a land that's more developed, more diverse, and more wounded. The theme of the region is simple: War is coming -- and is in fact already here. In our tour through the five ridings of West Rohan, the developers stopped to point out how they crafted the region to do the country and its many fans justice. If you think you know it all from the movies or from base assumptions, you might want to open your mind to a richer experience that's coming soon to LotRO.
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.
