Marveling at Elven cities in the sky and walking through Turbine's low-key experiment in Lothlorien.
By Allen Rausch | March 4, 2009
Nobody hurries in Lothlorien. The fabled home of the Elves in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth is a place of quiet contemplation and ethereal music, possessing an almost otherworldly quality. For the developers at Turbine, the proprietors of the electronic version of Middle-earth, this presented a problem. The Lord of the Rings Online is an MMO. Players expect to be challenged, excited, intrigued and entertained by new content releases. Yet once the Mines of Moria expansion pack had been released, Lothlorien was the next logical place to go. How do you make what sounds like a combination of a Zen retreat and Xanadu an interesting and exciting place for players to go after they've just come out of the sinkhole of Moria?
"In a lot of ways, designing Lothlorien was very much like designing the Shire back before release," said Aaron Campbell, The Lord of the Rings Online's Live Content Producer. "We have to be true to the books so we need to design content that's based around the essential character of the land." That's what began Turbine's low-key experiment in Lorien. "We divided the content in Lothlorien into three basic types of experiences," said Jeffrey Steefel as we began our tour of Volume II, Book 7, the next big content expansion for the game. "They basically revolve around exploration, information gathering and fighting." On screen we appeared at a small camp of humans and dwarves that currently sits in the Dimrill Dale, the doorstep to Lorien.
Curse Their Foul Feet!
Lothlorien utilizes The Lord of the Rings Online's penchant for dramatic lighting and screen overlays to good effect. Whether the player is in Lorien during the day or night, the visuals will be suffused by a soft, gauzy glow that puts a silvery halo around the white trees by night and bathes the area in a warm golden glow by day. The effect is to make the place seem a bit alien... not hostile exactly, but more a place that's a bit out of step with the rest of Middle-earth. My comment to that effect seemed please both Steefel and Campbell, who both take obvious pride in how good the now two year-old MMO continues to look. "That's the benefit of having your own engine that can be scaled and extended to do what you need to do with it," Steefel said.
I followed my guide through Lorien proper to a section of forest in a small valley just northwest of it. I could tell we had left Lorien not only because the glow went away, but because the trees changed from white-trunked golden-leaved towers to more ordinary-looking pines and firs. This area also put to rest the idea that there's nothing to fight in Lothlorien. Many of the trees had been cut down and the place was absolutely crawling with orcs. Campbell reminds me that with the Fellowship now resting inside Lorien, the game had arrived at that point in the story where the orcs, stirred up by the Ring's passage through Moria, have boiled out of their holes and are testing Lorien's defenses. It's the battle to protect the land's borders that makes up much of the big fighting content in Book 7.
"We've had a lot of success with instanced challenges," Campbell says as I follow him into an instanced version of Lothlorien that finds us staring at several Elf NPCs and a number of barricades between Lorien and the devastated forest to the north. The barricades will bring instant recognition to any LotRO player that's fought through similar fights in Angmar and later in Moria. In such repeatable combat instances, players must defend barricades against waves of orcs, often in widely separated physical locations. It takes a tremendous amount of coordination and good players to be where they need to be and to kill specific orcs to keep the NPC defenders from being overwhelmed. According to Campbell, the challenge in the battle of Lothlorien will be ramped up considerably, as players will need to not only defend the initial barriers but also climb the hill into the ruined forest, destroy orc idols, and plant new barriers that must be defended.
What's more, the battle will have various challenge levels depending upon how many optional conditions players choose to fulfill. There will be optional named bosses that players can kill, conditions (such as named defenders that must live) that must be met, and even timed runs that players need to complete to get a certain rating. Obviously, the more difficult the challenge, the greater the amount of barter tokens and loot that will be garnered. In an odd way, it's a fuller embrace of the "achievement" mentality that LotRO incorporated into its gameplay as the "Book of Deeds."
We've come to the city of Caras Galadhon, an extraordinary space where the Elves of Lothlorien build in and around the enormous trees that make up their home. Clickable ladders and circular ramps allow players to get up and down the trees and some of them go remarkably high. As a test, I jump off one of the highest points in Lorien and find that, no, the upper levels of the trees are not an instanced area, nor are there any barriers to keep players from flying off the platforms. Indeed, had my special Gamemaster character not had a death immunity placed on it, she surely would have suffered a lot of item decay, as I spent the next five minutes leaping off every tree I could find.
"That is so much fun," I said to my guides. Both Campbell and Steefel laughed. "Please tell me players will be able to do that somewhere without dying." "I suppose we could look into doing an "Assassin's Creed sort of thing where you leap into a pile of leaves," Steefel says. I leave it at that, hoping he's serious because it seems inevitable that the first few days in Caras Galadhon will be quite hazardous thanks to falling adventurers.
Of course, the first few days after the content rollout, nobody will be in Caras Galadhon. That's because Lothlorien represents an experiment in yet another way. This marks the first time Turbine is walling off an entire area of content behind a reputation barrier. Apparently players will need to reach "acquaintance" level with the new "Elves of Lorien" faction to enter the forest area and reach "Friend" level to enter the city itself. As a player's reputations increase, more and more content will open up to them.
It's hard not to miss the tension in Campbell's voice as he explains that this too is very true to the character of the land in Tolkien's books. The Elves of Lothlorien didn't trust easily, and let very few people into their lands (Gimli was the first Dwarf to enter the land since Moria fell). While not the onerous rep and gear challenge of World of Warcraft's high-end raiding game, it's nonetheless a big change from the team's determination to be sure that all content is open to everybody.
Never ones to let an opportunity go to waste, Lothlorien's reputation barrier will also house an even smaller experiment, that may have some bigger repercussions. My guide brings me back outside Lorien to the camp of Dwarves and humans where I'm directed to take a quest from a dwarf standing next to a campfire. The name of the quest is "Poaching," and it directs me to kill eight deer inside Lorien and bring him their meat. Not much different from any fetch and gather quest save for the reward... a few nice rings and the loss of 700 "Elves of Lorien" reputation points. Within Lothlorien, players will see animals that have "protected" under their names. That means that killing them will also result in a small but noticeable reduction in rep points. This is the first time in the game that a player will be able to lose reputation.
"We're looking into providing... at least in a small way... some element of moral choice in our quests." In this case, the player merely has to either fulfill the dwarf's request or accept a quest from a nearby elf turning in the dwarf poacher for a big rep increase. Either choice offers the possibility of loot and a quest chain that culminates in a title for the player. Given that the two chains are in opposition to each other, though, it means that either one or the other title will be forever denied to that character. It'll also be a challenge for players who never read quest text.
"It's important to realize that whichever way the player chooses, they'll still be able to get into Lorien and access all the content," Steefel says. Apparently players will never be able to drive down their rep to the point where they become shoot-on-sight, but neither man would rule out the possibility of doing more with this in the future... possibly having players make irrevocable choices. For myself, I immediately thought of Rohan under Wormtongue and the danger of the country falling into civil war as different factions of Rohirrim might back King Theoden or the exiled Eomer. Once again both Steefel and Campbell grunted noncommittally as I mentioned this. "We're always experimenting with new ideas. Session play started out small and got bigger. We'll have to see where this goes and what the player reaction to it is."
Unexpected Help in Dark Places
The last two element of the Book 7 update will undoubtedly be the most controversial. It's a "Quest Helper"-style UI update that points the player toward the locations where quest objectives can be found. For quests that require items from mobs in a specific area, it will limn a section of the overland map in white and put an arrow on the minimap. Other quests will have more specific markers. Only five quests will be able to be tracked in this manner at a time, and certain quests (such as the Moria "riddle quests") where puzzle solving is part of the challenge, will not have markers at all. In a game that prides itself on making the journey the game, not the destination, this seems counterintuitive. Steefel points out that many of the hardcore players on the forums agree with me. "We thought about that a lot, but the fact is that this is a feature that new players have been overwhelmingly asking for," Steefel said.
Campbell goes a bit further and asks me to try to play through the game's first twenty levels again and remember what it was like my first time through them. "Players who are on their fifth alt know where everything is because they've done all these quests before, but for new players it can be very intimidating," he said. Indeed, that's why the team has redesigned the opening quest areas for both Dwarves and Elves in order to flow better and get people more involved in the story right away.
"Our designers looked at those areas and asked themselves just what we were thinking when we originally put them together," Campbell says. He points out that a new Elf character begins in an Elf city under attack by the forces of Skorgrim. After it's over, the plot jumps forward by 500 years yet the player was initially directed to leave the area right away.
"We had this huge area that was basically empty," Campbell said. "We never gave the player the chance to appreciate the destruction of the city and the amount of time that had passed." That's all changed with a number of Elf quests in that starting area that do a much better job of helping the player appreciate what's happened to the city, the strain between the Dwarves and Elves, and the rift between the Dourhand and Longbeard Dwarves. "In the end, it's all about getting people into Tolkien's world," Steefel says in reference to both new features. "Anything we can do to make that process easier is a good thing."
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