Lord of the Rings Online Interview

Not quite as long as the books, but almost as much information.

Next up on the fantasy MMORPG launch pad is Turbine's The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, set to officially release tomorrow. This game has been in beta, both closed and open, for quite some time, and now everyone who didn't get a crack at it before will get a chance to hop in. We talked with Executive Producer Jeffrey Steefel and Director of Communications Adam Mersky at Turbine, discussing higher level content, plans for expansion, and distribution in overseas markets.

If you're looking for more specific information regarding the game's classes and crafting systems, check out our previous preview coverage. Otherwise, continue on to read about what development has been like and the studio's expectations for their latest MMORPG effort.

IGN: When working with Tolkien, obviously the fiction is very descriptive. Did you find that restricting in terms of the kinds of environments you wanted to create? Were there things that you wanted to include in the game that didn't mesh with the fiction?

Jeffrey Steefel: In general, working with any IP [intellectual property] and working with this kind of lore is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, sure there were certain things we can't do. But it also gives us a lot of context that we didn't have to create ourselves. We still have the flexibility to create Angmar, which [Tolkien] talks about loosely in the books but he never really goes into great description about what Angmar looked like, what kind of architecture existed in Angmar. There's a whole part of Middle-earth that we were able to build from scratch, so we were able to scratch that itch for the artists and the creative people on the team. In terms of places like the Shire or Rivendell, places that are familiar to people from the books, there's so much depth there, there's so much tone and history described for each of the places it actually gives us a lot of richness to work from. It wasn't very constraining on the art side.

Certainly the overall graphic look of the game is influenced by the lore. The thing that makes Tolkien's world so strong is that it's so real, and not real like literally real, like you and I walking out on the pavement real, but it feels like a place you could actually walk into, you know, tomorrow. It's not very, very, high, high, high fantasy with all kinds of neon colors and things like that. That certainly gave us some boundaries to work inside of. But we've had a lot of creativity available to us on the game because there's so many things he starts to talk about but doesn't give great, great detail on. It also depends what character, what place you're talking about. If it's Gandalf, he's described to a T, every hair on his face is described. There's not a lot of flexibility there. On the other hand the other characters are just given more general, personality kind of descriptions and then leaves it to us to visualize that. On top of that, working with Tolkien Enterprises has been great because they also have given us a lot of flexibility. I mean they get that we're building a game, they get that we're building out an entire world and that we're going to be creating places that weren't described and we're going to be going places that weren't described and we're going to be going to very important places that were only described in moderate detail.

IGN: What kinds of things has the team at Turbine had to create from scratch? What about Angmar?

Jeffrey Steefel: Basically what we knew about Angmar is that the Witch-king was from there. We knew that this had been a place of great evil in the past. We knew that there was this kind of darkness, lots of influence of harshly hinged steel that you get when you look at the descriptions of the Nazgul in the books, and the Nazgul are all directly associated with the Witch-king so we used that as our base. It's to the north of Middle-earth, so we know a little bit about the topography, what kind of mountain ranges and things might be in that area. But from there...we're talking about the incarnation of evil in Middle-earth, what does that look like? What would be an ominous, menacing kind of place to create? We knew what the Witch-king looked like, he was described in fair detail, certainly the helm that sits on his head. Very angular, built out of steel and iron with lots of pointed and sharp angles coming out from it and that is described in the books.

So we start with the helm that actually sits on the Witch-king's face and use that as a sort of architectural element to incorporate. Even if you look at the towers and the spires on the top of Angmar
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they have that kind of angular steel look. Even the stone around Angmar we decided was obsidian. Instead of just being grey granite, it would be this shiny, polished, very jagged, sharp-looking kind of material that things are built out of.

Then we added things like flame, torches and geysers and things that are coming out of the ground are a slightly different color. They are actually a little more high fantasy because we decided that the whole swamp land outside of Angmar, the foothills of Angmar was farmland that had been corrupted by industry from Angmar in the old ages. Therefore there was this reeking, sulfur-filled swamp place that had all kinds of nasty chemicals in it. Then we were able to take that to the next level and say what if that has poisoned all the rivers, and so all the water inside of Angmar is now deadly poisonous. If you stick a toe into the water in Angmar, um, you're dead, pretty much. It all starts from what we know, and then we try to extrapolate out from there in a way that seems logical. Rather than starting with a blank page and drawing what looks cool.


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The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar Image

The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar

Rated "T"
Release DateApril 24, 2007