Lord of the Rings Onlinehas been going strong for 16 years, allowing Tolkien fans to thoroughly explore one of the most beloved fictional worlds in history while meeting characters both new and familiar. Like all MMORPGs,Lord of the Rings Onlinehas continuously updated with massive expansions that introduce new regions, classes, and stories, and the upcoming Corsairs of Umbar expansion looks to be another major milestone for the game.
In an interview with Game Rant,Lord of the Rings Onlineexecutive producer Robert Ciccolini spoke all about the new expansion, and he also went in-depth about many of the game’s systems and the development team’s process as well as some of their goals for the future. With lots of new content to look forward to and upgrades to existing systems, the future looks bright for the fantasy MMO.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q:Lord of the Rings Onlinewill be introducing a new class, the Mariner, in its upcoming expansion. What was the team’s approach to this new class? Were there certain goals the team had in mind?
Ciccolini:Our previous classesdidn’t really bring new support options to the table, and so one of the things with Mariner is that it can do DPS, but it also can add support. That’s been interesting because support is tough. When you’re buffing other people, it’s hard to measure that as a goal. It messes with your DPS meters, you know, “How valuable is this person?”
The Mariner also uses a Balance system where you don’t want to get too far out of balance to either the fore or aft. With DPS, I think it’s a more straightforward problem of making sure that the people are using a variety of skills to keep the balance. Support also uses that system, and I think it’ll be interesting to see how as a support person you’re going to manage that resource as well.
It sounds like the Mariner class is more buff-oriented in its support role, rather than being something like a full-on healer.
Ciccolini:Yeah, and it’ll have a sea-shanty vibe. I think that that’s going to be super cool because Bill does awesome music, and I really want to get the vibe right. One of the difficult things is how can we make the sea shanties cool when you play it, but not repetitive enough that it’s something that you want to turn off after a certain amount of time. There’s a lot of work going on to balance that.
Q: It’ll be interesting to have another musical support class alongside the Minstrel. Was it difficult getting the Mariner to contrast with the game’s other musical class?
Ciccolini:I don’t think so, because I think the Minstrel has more classical music, and sea shanties are so distinct. I think it will be fine in terms of that. I haven’t played the class with the sea shanties turned on yet so I think that that will be an interesting thing for me to see. I have heard the sea shanty music, which is awesome, but hearing it as little blurbs and then feeling it in-game is a whole different thing.
Q: As far as DPS gameplay, how does the Mariner stack up to other DPS classes in its moment-to-moment gameplay with the balance system?
Ciccolini:With the balance, it’s not really moving from fore to aft. The goal that our system team is working on is managing balance. What ends up happening is using certain skills throws you off balance, and then you have to use other skills to bring you in the middle.
So it’s not likea class in other MMOswhere the balance moves back and forth, and you have to react. It’s more like keeping your center, so it’s a little different vibe. It’s not like there’s this pendulum, and you’re trying to do the best things, it’s that you do stuff to make the pendulum move, and then you have to do stuff to drag it back.
Q: Players will be visiting Umbar, south of Gondor, in this expansion. Can you talk about what players can expect in terms of content, narrative, and landscape?
Ciccolini:Umbar is really exciting because there are a lot of new elements to the landscape, which we call the “biome.” It’s been a long time since we’ve introduced a land that has to, by design, have a different look and feel. The last time we did something like that was Mordor, but Mordor is the penultimate of things that we had already done. We added a lot ofnew things in Mordor, but I think that the vision for what it was had been there for so long that it was easier on the world team.
When you go to Umbar, all of a sudden you have to evoke a different kind of seafaring culture, and so new trees, new grasses, new stones, and different buildings. We’re asking ourselves, “What is the armor? What does the clothing look like?” and so there’s a lot of world-building stuff happening that really hasn’t happened before. I really think that the world team is going to knock it out of the park. They’re iterating much more than something where the vision was much more clear. That’s both exciting and frightening at the same time.
The other thing about it is that we have this really cool group that players will begin to interact with that controls Umbar. I think that players are going to really like all of the personalities and the different ways that this group has affected the region, which is a little different from some of the other stuff that we’ve done because who the villain is might not necessarily be as clear to you as in the past.
There are a lot of stories to tell about this world and how all of the evil is now more distributed because it doesn’t have a central controlling vision to it, and now it’s almost worse because they’re out there causing havoc in different ways, and how people are profiting from this post-war world. I think there are some really cool themes that we haven’t been able to explore.
Q: It’s always fascinated me how massiveLord of the Rings Onlineis in terms of raw square footage. What is the team’s approach to developing these enormous spaces?
Ciccolini:There are two parts to it. There’s world-building, and there’s art. We have good tools, and a lot of talent in building the world. We have people who have been here for 18 years who have been doing this, so a lot of it is their sweat and tears and just having the passion to do that.
We’ve had three anniversaries this week that were over 15 years. Because we have that collective vision, we can also have a consistent vision over the course. I talked about this before, but essentially, the way we approach the gravitas of which Tolkien delivered stories, I think we have a certain voice in the way we attempt to emulate Tolkien. I think that that voice has been consistent in how we tell stories, and I think that’s very valuable to the players because the game sounds authentic to them.
Part of it is because we attempt to beauthentic to Tolkien, but part of it is because we have a consistent voice, so it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. So that’s the first part: we have these consistent, very talented, hardworking people who know our tools inside and out and can do amazing things with them.
The second thing is that we have good story people, and sometimes it’s hard for them to go in and take these wonderful world vistas and fill them.
Q: How do you strike that balance between keeping in mind the wealth of established Tolkien lore while also including your own narrative twists?
Ciccolini:We have a Tolkien scholar, Chris, who’s fantastic. Rather than trying to micromanage everything, I think that one of the things that he’s very good at and the team is very good at, is when we’re going to go to a new area, he extensively and exhaustively researches it, and then he comes up with a “vision document.” Then he has a storytime, and the storytime meetings are wonderful because he tells the story of the region, in a consistent voice that evokes the gravitas of Tolkien.
So what happens is every content person can hear this and engage in the story and ask questions, but they have a collective vision that they’ve bought into before they go to create their content. That storytelling meeting really helps them focus on “What are the goals of this place? What’s happening in this place? How can the stories that I tell tie back into the main thing? What does it feel like to be in this region? What is the history of the region?” All of that is told almost like a fireside chat. It’s a storytime.
That helps them not only understand the vision, but instead of reading through it, they get emotionally pulled in by Chris’s storytelling, and then the storytelling goes off of that. That gives that collective vision so they can move in the direction of the vision of the region.
Q: A lot ofLord of the Rings Online’s expansions featured gameplay twists like Rohan’s mounted combat or Mordor’s Light of Earendil. How will Umbar mix up gameplay for players?
Ciccolini:One of the things that we tried and learned a lot of lessons from is that it’s really tough to do systems that go outside the core gameplay.Rohan was fabulousbecause it was different, but it was also problematic because it was different. Essentially, when you’re riding on your horse, you’re outside of the core gameplay loop. You built this character, and you practiced this character, and suddenly you have a whole expansion where you’re outside of that gameplay loop.
It was the same thing with Epic Battles. It changes the way you play the game, but instead of being a light change of pace, it’s too much. So any gameplay things we do in the future will try to keep within the core gameplay loop of how things are done.
The difference for Umbar will be following along with a different kind of story with different kinds of antagonists. Being in a new place with a new culture with people that maybe have a different look. People of the sea living along the ocean and how the antagonists are interacting with everything. I think it’s going to give it a different feel.
In addition, we are revamping crafting, as you know, so that your professions and vocations are no longer tied together. I think if we do that right, and we can provide enough crafting support, crafting is going to become an interesting gameplay element in itself and the revamp will be like “Okay, I think that I can really make good gear with my crafting.” It’s not just an afterthought. I think that even though that’s a core system, it will feel new enough and some people will re-engage. In some ways, I would rather reinvent the systems the players already know rather than introduce new ones on top of it and leave crafting languishing.
It’s nice to see that crafting will hopefully start to matter more, since crafted gear has fallen by the wayside compared to most other sources of gear.
Ciccolini:We want to challenge that too. I think MMOs have gotten to this problematic behavior that you can’t make progress unless it’s with a group, and it’s hard to the point of not being fun. I like challenges, Iplay hardcore gameson the highest challenge level sometimes. But also, I like just playing solo and enjoying the game. Not everything has to be like, “Oh my god, I’m gonna get punched in the face and die!”
Don’t get me wrong, I do play games hardcore, and sometimes it’s both fun and frustrating, but it’s gotten to the point where you can’t play solo and make good progress in some of these games. We want to balance it so that there’s a reason to raid, but also you’re actually making progress solo, and I think that if we do our job right, crafting is going to provide that at least in some slots. I can actually make awesome items with crafting.
Q:LOTROis affectionately regarded as an old-school MMO and that appeals to many of its players. How doesLOTROmaintain that old-school appeal while keeping in mind modern MMO design conventions?
Ciccolini:One of the things that we’re trying to do is that wetalked about remasteringLOTRO. But instead of trying to do it all at once we’re doing it in stages. So you’ve seen some avatar revamps on humans, now you may change the face shape and have sliders and change it, and that will be propagated to other races.
We’re exploring ways of changing the shadows, shaders, and lighting so that it looks more modern, because as we compare the game screenshot to screenshot, the later zones hold up fairly well. It’s just that you can tell that the tech is older, but I don’t necessarily think the players want or need some of the more modern things that really stress your graphics engine. Instead, we need some really fundamental upgrades to our tech.
The other thing is some of our systems still require old tech. We have to remove dependencies on DirectX 9. There’s no reason for us to have that. That makes installing the game sometimes problematic. So some graphical and installation tech there that we need to upgrade, there’s some avatar stuff that we need to upgrade, and then we’re working to make our scaling tech inLOTROa little smoother to helpsupport 4K monitors. All of our game elements right now scale, but none of our panels do, so if you’re on a 4k monitor, you’re kind of like “Okay, I have everything the way I want it” and then you open your character sheet, and you’re squinting.
Other things that we’re doing, well, we obviously released Before the Shadow and that gives a new starting zone, and you can use the starting zone you prefer, but the nice thing about that starting zone is if you’re starting with someone else, and you’re playing different races, you can choose that. One of the problems in the past was that if I’m playing a Hobbit and then someone else is playing an Elf, you can’t actually group until both of you get through with the intro.
For the long-term capacity of the game, we just did a big stat squish. I think that there are still some outliers there that we’re cleaning up now. I’ve heard that there are a couple of really deadly wolves that use an effect that was missed, and they’ll just chomp you. So we’re going through that quickly as players mention it.
Q: Speaking of the stat squish, a while back there was talk ofLOTROrevamping its stat system in general. Is the team still interested in looking at some of the other core systems?
Ciccolini:One of the things that we were doing was we started working on redefining what the main stats did and were in order to make them more valuable. But when we did that, the players came back with some good feedback questioning how that would change things and some of the concerns they had. We realized that doing that with the stat squish and the expansion was too ambitious. It would turn things upside down too quickly, so we backed off on that for now.
We did revamp the power system so that power was meaningful again, but our goal was to do that without making it feel bad. We wanted to make it something in group combat that you had to pay attention to, but we don’t want you to have to stop every two fights in landscape content either. I think from the player feedback, that went fairly well. So those are some systems that we’ve revamped, but we’ll go back to how we want to make the different stats feel manageable.
The only other challenge we have is sometimes there are certain caps on parry and other avoidance skills that the player is trying to get to, and I think that we need to fine-tune what they need to get to those caps and how those caps are managed as you go on.
Because right now, it’s a diminishing return where it doesn’t feel meaningful to upgrade your stats, and so they start going to vitality. I think that we need a more competitive system where it’s easier to get to those so it feels good gearing up to them, but then when you go to the next tier, the effectiveness is reduced, so that next tier will bring them up.
Q: Amazon’sRings of Powerseries has brought some renewed attention to Tolkien. What is your approach to these other licensed Tolkien works? Do you look to them for inspiration or work with them in some capacity?
Ciccolini:I loveRings of Power, I’m excited for thenewRings of Powerand I’m excited for theWar of the Rohirrimanimated series that’s coming up. I think we’re all getting inspiration from those, but keep in mind that a lot of that is going outside the source material, which we use. We’re very careful to use source material from the books, and so when these things are mentioned in passing in the books, then that’s great, but we don’t want to go outside of those because then you’re getting away from the source material we’re trying to stick to.
And also,Rings of Poweris awesome. I really like that they’re trying to do new things with the mythology of Tolkien, but their voice is different from ours. That’s not bad, that’s not good, but if you like our voice, some things in theRings of Powermay ring differently and sound a little off.If you likeRings of Power, some of the ways that we do things might be different. I think that’s very interesting, and I think that there’s a world where you can be excited about both, but also recognize the voice of each is different.
Q: Looking ahead, what is the team most interested in improving or updating inLOTRO? Are there certain aspects of the game that are a big focus for the team?
Ciccolini: The kinship system is something that we would like to improve and give players reasons to play together with their kinship. I think that that could be revamped, and maybe new goals added for kinships to help that kind of togetherness is one of the big things on the horizon.
I think continually doing avatar revamps and moving on to the other races is something in the shorter term.
The long-term journey is kind of interesting, because we do have areas that we want to visit, and I think that the team in their mind has this vision of thejourney through Middle-earththey want to show the players, and they’re really excited about doing that.
Q: During the Battle of Pelennor Fields quest, one character can have a drastically different outcome depending on a choice earlier in the quest chain. Is theLOTROteam interested in creating more quests that have branching paths?
Ciccolini:So we’re constantly working on performance, and we are aware that there are players who are looking for us to improve performance. One of the things that we’ve run into is the size of the player, and one of the things that affects the size of the player is quest data. We have to be careful every time we fork a quest because we basically double or triple the data it requires for that quest.
When you’re programming a new game you really have a hard time imagining how big the quest data will be in 16 years, and when you’re serializing a character and moving them from server to server,place to place, and that character is getting bigger and bigger with every update, now we have to take quest data and sequester it away if you don’t need it so that stuff isn’t just hanging out on your character, which it is currently.
So even if we wanted to do theprogramming of forking quests, that is tremendously expensive in terms of storage. One quest isn’t a problem, but when you do that regularly, you’re kind of blowing that up. We want to be careful about that which kind of limits the amount of stuff we can do.
That is one of the considerations and why you’ll see it infrequently. We want to make sure that if we do that, that there’s a big story bang for the buck that you’re gonna get, and it’s not forking all over the place. I would love it if we could have a different quest system where that information was more readily available, but in a way that we didn’t carry it along with your character. So we could do that, but that’s a non-trivial technical issue to tackle especially in an older game.
Q: DespiteLOTRO’s age, it still has a very active community that’s playing many years later. Why do you feel players keep coming back toLOTROdespite the MMO genre having so many other offerings available?
Ciccolini:Everygame is as good as its community. One of the reasons that people come back toLOTROis because the community is so good. Our players support us very well, not only in the ways that you would think financially, but also, they just love the game. They love the voice of the game, and that enthusiasm tends to draw players. They’ll go out, and they’ll play other games and try them, but they come back.
The other thing aboutLOTROis that it’s comfort. The world is a joy to be in. In an environment where everyone is doing “kill, kill, kill, survival, survival, survival, zombie, zombie, zombie,” you kind of lose track of how some of Tolkien’s point was that the best things in life are those smaller moments. I think the team is very good about celebrating the common smaller moments as well as the big epic moments and the gravitas. I think that that’s something that draws them back in.
Q: Earlier we were talking about past expansion systems like Epic Battles and mounted combat. Is there any interest in revisiting those?
Ciccolini:We were just talking about Rohan andmounted combattoday, actually, and we definitely want to do that. I think that one of the things is that when it came out, we did a good job of making it feel like horse riding. But since it’s outside your core gameplay, there are a couple issues. The inertia of the play makes it feel bad when you first start it, and then you get skills to make it feel better. We’d like to relax that so it feels good up front, and then feels really good later. We’ll probably play with those numbers.
In addition, I think the distinction between war steeds and horses needs to go away. I would like to see your horses and your warhorses be more of the same like you can interchange them more. We just want to verify the players don’t feel as though we’re taking something away, because one of the reasons they like the warhorse is they’re slightly faster, and one of the reasons we don’t like the warhorses is also that they’re slightly faster.
What happens is the warhorse’s extra speed gives the server a little trouble keeping up with that extra speed. We probably don’t want to take the speed away, but we do want to be careful about when we combine the two, if we combine the two. It just depends on engineering how that works so that the players don’t feel as though we’re taking something away, but they feel as though they can use any horse in any situation. That’s a longer-term discussion we have to have that we haven’t figured out yet.
Q: Since you’re working on revamping crafting, what are your thoughts on the hobby system? Does the team have ideas for other activities?
Ciccolini:There are two hobbies that we’ve talked about in the past, and we still would like to do. So pictureLOTROas a big board full of magnetic things, and we’re moving them around, and when we need something new, we make groups of these in order to figure out what we’re going to do, and there’s some hobbies on there, but they always fall off. You have to be careful with the hobbies because remember how I talked about the core gameplay loop? Those are outside the core gameplay loop.
So we want to find ahobby you may pursue while you’re playing the game, instead of a hobby that you have to go to the side to pursue, and it feels as though it takes you out of the world instead of putting you into it.
One of the two hobbies that seemed to do that is some kind of thing where you identify different birds all overLOTROand catalog them and enjoy finding new things and building your catalog of those – assuming it doesn’t blow up our data.
The other one that Chris was talking about is kind of like a sage that collects writings of the world, and you’re able to go around in different places and collect those and that’s also a hobby that we were looking at, and we had other ideas for them. I would love to do a gardening hobby, but the tech for that is hard. Like I said, the problem with gardening is it’s not something that you do in the world, it’s something that you get out of the world. It’s really hard to design without making it feel like a side thing that takes you out of the core game loop instead of something that you experience while you’re exploring the world.
Those aren’t my ideas, those come from the team, but I really liked them. But no promises because those are not on our official schedule. I’m just sharing with you some of the whiteboard things that have come up rather than trying to give you a roadmap.
Q: Earlier we spoke a little bit about solo versus group play. Is Umbar’s content leaning more one way or the other?
Ciccolini:We’re trying to keep the same balance as previously. We will have three-mans, six-mans, and a raid, but obviously, with the leveling, we don’t want to put the raid and the six-man out immediately because we want people to have time and feel like they can level first and enjoy the game instead of rushing through it so they can get their six-man raid stuff.
In addition, I think we’re still planning on some missions there, and then this will be our first expansion with the landscape difficulty. So when you’re doing this, if you have the landscape difficulty cranked up, I think that will be a whole different level of fun with it. The landscape difficulty only came to live servers about three updates ago, and you really didn’t need it forBefore the Shadow, but this is the first end-game landscape-heavy expansion where that difficulty can get turned on, and I think it’ll be very interesting to see. I think it will add depth to that landscape play you’re going through – if you want it, because it’s opt-in – and I think it’ll be interesting to see how that affects things.
Q: Will that difficulty setting affect the reward structure in any way with Umbar?
Ciccolini:We want to revamp that, so I don’t want to talk too much about it, because we are definitely looking at that because we do want it to add some rewards. I think right now the reward it gives is that you do it for fun, and I think it increases your virtue XP and your XP somewhat.
One of the issues withLOTROis the players love exploring so much that they actually request us to give them ways to turn down the XP because they don’t want to overlevel characters. So I don’t know that mostLOTROplayers are really people who consider XP boosts to be a reward. Some do. Sometimes you just want to get an alt up, and you’re notin exploration modeso you want a boost, and sometimes you’re playing your main, and you haven’t done an area yet, and you don’t want to level through it. So I think that even with the same player, depending on your goals, that can be valuable or not. We were talking about dropping some kind of tokens that would give additional rewards. I think a revamp of that will come after the expansion though.
Q: Any final thoughts you’d like to share before we wrap up?
Ciccolini:This has been a joy. Thank you for interviewing me, and thanks to the people who might be reading this. Our fans have supported us wonderfully. I’m really psyched and blessed to be in this position and to have a fan base that’s as enthusiastic and supportive as ours. The team is psyched and happily working on our next expansion, and they’re excited to get that in front of our players.
