Interview: Jeffrey Steefel on LOTRO Mines of Moria, Part One

The second thing is, there's so many things Tolkien did describe that it kind of creates a ruleset. If you read everything he's written and you see the world he created, even if he didn't describe the way Angmar specifically looks, you know the kind of world that Angmar exists inside of. You have some clues about Angmar from the Second Age, you know what the Witch-king is like, so you create these guidelines. As long as everything you create from your own imagination fits within those rules, then you tend to be fine, because you're building a world that still feels internally consistent.

The third piece that you alluded to is that this is a game, and if we were strictly literal, there's certain things we would never do regardless. But this is a game and it needs to be fun and people need to feel like they're playing an RPG, so.

It's interesting. People always say there's no such thing even slightly related to magic in Middle-earth with the exception of the wizards. And usually what I say is, that's true, except let's look at Elrond and Galadriel and some of the other characters who have the ability to draw on some of the energies in Middle-earth and do things that are magical. So we've created a character for this expansion that's able to do that. Without being trite, you can say Tolkien doesn't describe floaty, fiery, spinning gold rings hovering over people's heads either, but we do that because that's part of the game. In that example, it's how you're able to quickly locate quest-givers.

You promoted Mines of Moria with a few web based mini-games. How did that go?

It went well. We got a tremendous amount of attention and traffic. A lot of people came to the site, which was really the whole point. We wanted players to have fun, but we also just wanted to get lots and lots of people to come to the Mines of Moria site, so they'd be exposed to the fact that we have this game coming out, and they could learn about the game.

The mini-games themselves were pretty much unrelated, other than that you were either a slightly drunken dwarf throwing axes, or playing a Risk-like strategy game. But they were really just meant to attract people to a location so we could talk to them about Mines of Moria. We had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of hours of gameplay logged, so that was really cool.

I think it was like a baby step. Not really related, but a baby step in our overall mentality, which you're going to see a lot of in the next year. The web is really another platform, and it's an extension of the game environment. The mini-games were just that, but it was an attempt to start to understand how the web platform and our in-game immersive platform relate to each other.

Since that time, we've built an entire technical layer between our game databases and the web. So you're going to be seeing some really interesting stuff, social networking kinds of things coming out, surrounding our games, starting with LotRO, where you'll be able to do a lot of the things that people have gotten used to doing. Especially more mainstream people with MySpace and places like that. Around the game, around your character, around your actual player account, and tying those things together so it's seamless. That was a first little toe in the water for us with those mini-games, but now we view it as a part of the entire game environment we're building.