Forging the Rings

Oh yeah. In fact, the version we're showing today is a couple of versions behind what we have in development - which has significant performance improvements. Optimisation and performance tends to be, unfortunately, the last thing you do. If you start to do it too early, then you change systems and you end up optimising something that isn't actually the system that you're going to have.

It'll never be everything that we want it to be - I would love everybody to be able to play it at the level of graphics we saw today, on, you know, a 1982 machine - but that's not going to happen!

We have a fairly good idea of what our plan is, and we're certainly building to that plan right now. We're not talking about what that release schedule is, obviously, until we get much closer to the first release - but the basic philosophy behind it is that we want people to get new content in the game very frequently. That's something Turbine has done in the past, and we're talking in the order of months. Not quarters, not years.

Some of that will be free content, and then from time to time, some of it will be retail content. The goal is for you always to have something new to look forward to - and you're not going to have to wait very long for something new to come along. How that actually takes shape over the next year is really going to depend on what we're able to validate about the way people consume the content that we've built. We've made some assumptions, based on our experience, that what we've built for launch is going to last people a certain amount of time - but we won't know until we get there.

It's a pretty strong feeling, in terms that we want to add things to the gameplay that don't ruin the integrity of the things which make the game important - like the fact that it's a believable Tolkien world.

So, yes, it feels isolated right now, in that there's one region of the world where you can actually go in as a monster and play - although you are interacting with player characters as well, who are coming in there from the rest of the world. When there are many of these regions, and there are just some places that do have it, and some places that don't, it's going to feel a lot more like there is PvP throughout the world; there are just some places where there aren't PvP, because it just doesn't feel right.

Of course, there are places in Middle Earth where you can imagine there being PvP all the time, right? You can imagine Helm's Deep, or Mordor, places like that which are going to be constantly in battle - that's the place where large groups of players and large groups of monsters are going to be meeting.

What we did was take a look at what's really important to a PvP player. Is it that it's a race? Or is it that there's persistence, that there's permanence, that there's ownership? Those are the three things that we decided are the most important things to PvP - so we're making sure that you have that. Your monster is your monster; people know who it is; you can create some sort of infamy for that monster, and that monster can grow more powerful over time, through virtue of what you do.

Yeah, that could happen, by choice! But what you're more likely to do is to choose, as a guild, to play on one side because of the benefits that are available to you - or you'll choose to be a monster guild, taking your whole guild and creating a monster guild, and fighting on that side.

The benefits and rewards to groups over time, just like anything, are going to be more attractive. For example, taking over a keep is not something you can do by yourself - you're going to want to do it with your raid group, or you're going to want to do it with your monster group. We think that will encourage that.

Currently, that's the plan. Again, we reserve the right to decide that having a completely PvP server is a possibility - so we might do that, but the question then is, do we just open up PvP to everywhere in the world? Technically, we can do that. The game is built to handle that, so there's nothing technically we have to do - it's just a question of, what does it do to the overall feel and quality and balance of the game?

Now, we may find that there's a group of people in our audience who don't care. They feel like, "we love being in this world, and we love beating the crap out of each other - that's all we need, just give us a server to do it on." In which case, that's certainly something we would entertain - but right now, that's not part of the plan.

Well, what WoW did for everybody, really, is that - like you said - it took the genre to a new level. It expanded the audience in a tremendously huge way, and it also established a new bar, which says that MMOs need to be polished, and stable, and work, and be easy to understand, and be functional, and compelling.

That set a new baseline for us. The other thing it did is it helped us to learn a little bit about player habits, and what players are used to doing. So for example, if you look at our interface, there are certain things about our interface that are very familiar. That's by intent - not so that it looks like another game, but so that someone's not trying to re-learn something that really, is just the interface. When I get into a car, I know where the steering wheel is - okay, that analogy doesn't work quite so well for me in the UK, but still, I know approximately where it is! Left or right is different, sure, but I wouldn't put it in the trunk just because that's my design. I want someone to be able to sit down and drive away.

If players are used to pressing the M key to get the map, why would I make it something different? Why not make it M, to make it easy and accessible to them? On the other hand, if there's something that I feel could be better, or needs to be different - for example, our combat controls for groups need to be different, because we have group combat that we offer in a way that isn't available in WoW or other games - then we'll enhance it, or make a new type of interface, or do it in a different way.

The goal really is for someone that already plays those types of games, in places where it doesn't make the game any better to change it, make it as seamless as possible - so that their focus is on experiencing the game, enjoying the world, exploring, and not on figuring out how to play.

I think one of the things that WoW, and the whole change to the market, has shown, is that the days where figuring out how to play the game was a big part of gameplay, and where making it work was a part of gameplay... I was one of these guys, and I think we all were to some degree. I was at Sony when we launched EverQuest, and just making the game function was a part of gameplay, in the very beginning. That's not acceptable any more. This is mainstream entertainment now, so the gameplay needs to be about the experience, the entertainment. Let's let the interface fade away, become invisible.

Well, I think in some cases it answers some questions that people have had with the experience that they currently have. You know, in terms of, what are some things I can do as a group? How can I have an advancement path that has a little more complexity to it, a little more durability and flexibility to it?

They'll be attracted to some things that are just different, right? You know, with the PvP, some people will feel like that's not what they want - but some people will feel like, oh, that's an interesting approach, I've never done that before. We're also finding, just in market studies that we've done, that a lot of people who currently play WoW and other MMOs, who don't really like PvP or haven't really tried it in the past, are much more likely to try it in this game, because it's more accessible to them.

On top of that, they can do everything that they love to do... In Middle Earth. With the context of Middle Earth, with the wrapping of Middle Earth all around and through it. I'm not just talking to An NPC, I'm talking to Elrond. I'm going to A Place to get The Thing, I'm going to Rivendell to get the Vial of Galadriel. It just has so much more resonance to people that have grown up with those books.

Then there's the fact that it really is the next generation, in a lot of ways. The look of it, the graphics of it, the audio, and in some cases the interface and gameplay itself, they're all taken to the next level.

Thank you!