The Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria

What you see in Monster Play is the tip of the iceberg. Now that we're moving across the Misty Mountains into the place where war is really happening in Middle-Earth, it opens up a lot of possibilities. One can imagine that by the time you get to Minas Tirith, you want battles to be happening there, and you don't want it to be an army of NPCs against a bunch of players, you want players to be able to battle against each other.

But, it's really important that players know that at the end of the day we believe that this is a world game, a PVE game, the best of its kind. We're not going to do anything to destroy that in any way. The story is always going to be predominant. But I think there's a way to weave the two together when we get to the more martial parts of middle earth. Also, the launch in Asia exposes us to a lot of players who really, really, really love Monster Play and want more of it.

Oh, it's a snap, we talk a lot about the console button, you just push it and then the game is there. I'm kidding.

It's a huge challenge on a lot of different levels, but it's also a gigantic opportunity. The size of the console market is huge compared to PC and it always will be. It sits in the living room, which is a really interesting place for these kinds of social environments and social interactions. And there's an immediacy to console that you just can't get on the PC, not really.

The challenges break down to a couple of things. The first is UI. One of the great things about the PC is that it's a productivity tool, it's designed to manage lots of moving buttons and resources and stuff like that. But consoles only have a certain number of buttons, so how do you help someone use a console controller to manage inventory and skills and traits and deeds and crafting items and all that stuff in a way that's not just painful?

Then you add on top of it the challenge that this is a persistent world. The solution that most games do when they go from PC to console is that you simply stop the game while you go to a full screen UI to do some of this inventory management or configuration - that's what happens in for example Oblivion. We can't do that, you can't pause a persistent world. So how do I allow players to do that kind of thing without getting killed?

And then there's the challenge of the platform itself. PCs are fairly limited in processing power, and fairly unlimited in memory. Consoles, on the other hand, have more specialised and more diverse processing power, but are extremely limited in RAM. So there's challenge there - how do you create these lush, immersive, very compelling worlds at high fidelity in a different way.

Oh yeah, it's a more comfortable environment, it's a way you can be more co-operative - I mean literally co-operative, where you can play co-op on the console in a persistent environment. You can imagine how cool that would be. Very challenging to do, but again, possible.

We're talking right now about taking games and putting them on console, or building games specifically for console. Long term, for me, the real exciting vision is... thinking about a game, a franchise, as this centralised content. There's this thing called Lord of the Rings that sits on a bunch of servers... and whether you're on your PC, your console, your mobile device, those are all just access points, and they're all good at different things.

That's the part we haven't been able to get to yet, and I think now that they're all connected, the technology's pretty much there, the consumer behaviour's almost there. The PC is great at what you're talking about, sitting down by yourself and working on stuff.

The console is great for fast action, immediate activities. Combat, raids, things like that could be a lot of fun sitting on your couch. And some things that are necessary but slightly rote and boring, like managing your inventory or setting up for a raid, or some elements of crafting - those are things that you can do instead of playing Bejeweled when you're sitting on the train or on a break or whatever it happens to be.