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 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.

When I was at Sony, we were launching EverQuest. Asheron’s Call, I think that was the beginning of the “modern MMO” and the grind that you’re talking about. There’s a couple things, I think the biggest thing is in the advancement mechanic itself. Grinding is from the basic MMORPG mechanic of kill some stuff, get some more XP [experience points], get a little bit of a higher level, get some better skills, kill some bigger stuff, get some bigger loot, and on, and on, and on. That’s the grind.

What we did is we took that mechanic which is pretty understandable to people and is in the game and then added the whole trait system on top of it, the whole system of deeds. The idea there is you’ve got these persistent objectives that are, first of all, more long-term, more passive in a way, and are something you kind of discover by accident. It’s not a quest that you get from somebody that you go do and then solve and then get a very specific reward for that one objective and then it’s done. This is more, a whole other level of experience happening through your exploration, though meta-objectives, kill 1000 orcs, discover all the landmarks in the Shire or whatever it happens to be. They happen in lots and lots of different ways. It’s an experience layered on top of questing, on top of killing, on top of grinding that is always available to you and happening by accident; a little bit more surprise, a little less routine. You never know exactly what’s going to be coming next.

The second thing is the rewards that it actually gives you. First of all, titles. You’re getting something for your… you’re getting a new type of reward for your advancement in a different way. The second thing, the more important thing, is the traits themselves. Through these deeds, these great deeds that you can do in Middle-earth, you are getting capabilities that you can use on your character to make your character more special, more differentiated from other characters. It adds a lot of depth and alternative paths in your advancement. Not only can you do things that are completely different from going out and killing or going out and questing, but you’re really impacting your gameplay mechanics by virtue of having gone through those experiences. We think that in combination with crafting, in combination with the fact that we’ve created this kind of multiple tier structure for a lot of the systems in the game so that whether it’s combat or crafting or just straight advancement you’ve got different levels of involvement that you can apply yourself to. There’s crafting where I can go through each profession and get proficient in that profession and basically have access to all the recipes. Or I can go way beyond that and become a master crafter and now I’ve got a whole other tier of advancement available to me. When you layer all that stuff together you’ve got a lot of different options, a lot of different gameplay styles, a lot of different paths through your advancement. That’s a huge thing that we specifically focused on to combat the grind.

IGN: During our play time we’ve seen the more general traits, the class and race traits, but how do you get the legendary traits? How powerful are they?

Jeffrey Steefel: The most powerful thing about legendary traits is kind of what they give you. In general, until you get to legendary traits, what traits are doing is they’re enhancing skills that you already have or they’re maybe making skills that you don’t have access to available to you for a short period of time. What legendary traits do, generally, is they unlock new skills at a high level. You’ve gone through your normal MMO experience, you’ve been leveling up, you’ve been getting new skills, you reach a certain point where you’re not getting a lot of new skills. At a certain point you just have so many skills it’s not fun anymore. Then you have the traits for a while to balance that out and make it feel like you’re still growing your advancement capabilities. Then you get these legendary traits that will unlock all new skills that are available to you when you’re at level 40 to level 45 range. It opens up a whole new set of opportunities for you that you really didn’t even know were there at a very high level when you need them most.

The ways you get them are many and varied. Some of them are more related to, um, having to do a lot of stuff over a long period of time. Some of them are related to having to do something that’s almost unattainable. We have a level 20 survival trait for basically not dying for 20 levels. Not an easy thing to achieve, but you can actually do it. Then sometimes they’re story-based, it’s a deed that’s tied in with the epic story where you’re a significant part of solving the problem.

IGN: Toward the end of the game, how do drops from monsters compare to master level crafted items?

Jeffrey Steefel: What my designers like to say is the biggest thing you’re going to get is uniqueness. You’ll be able to create great quantities in mastery which is just a useful thing if you’re actually trying to manufacture and generate some commerce. You might create an item that just simply doesn’t exist any other way. It’s rare. So it may or may not be more powerful than, from a pure statistic perspective, than some of the really, really high level drops you get, but it’s going to give you some capabilities you can’t get in other ways. It’ll give you some augmentation to your existing skills in ways that no matter how powerful some of the drops you get are they just don’t give you that capability.

That’s an interesting question. For obvious reasons, in terms of having actual effects on you from smoking weed, that’s something we’re probably going to steer away from. But there’s a lot of things you’re going to be able to do with smoking, most importantly things like blowing smoke rings and making a kind of mini-game out of blowing smoke rings.

IGN: Sort of like the music system?

Jeffrey Steefel: Sort of like music, exactly. Your ability to acquire or harvest pipe-weed is going to be tied to that kind of mini-game.

IGN: So you use different keys on the keyboard to do different kinds of smoke rings?

Jeffrey Steefel: Yeah, or it might be different types of emotes, or, I mean it’s something we’re still working on for post-launch, so I’m not sure exactly what the mechanic is going to be. My guess is like many things it’ll start out fairly simple, either as a set of emotes that always give a predictable result which is obviously the easiest thing for us to do in terms of animation and particle effects and things like that. I could see down the road a more complicated version where you actually are, like you’re talking about being able to in real-time interact with what’s happening with those smoke rings. That’s obviously more complicated. We tried to roll out these kinds of things in phases like we’re doing with music to see how popular they are, how much time should we really put into one individual feature. We’re guessing people are going to like blowing smoke rings.

IGN: Probably. Just like people like playing music. You know it’s amazing how many people go straight to the Star Wars theme once they get an instrument. That’s the first thing they try. That and Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Jeffrey Steefel: And Christmas songs in front of the Prancing Pony, which is always interesting. We’ll probably be hearing Christmas songs in the summer too.

IGN: Everyone’s crowded around Bree right now. Where does the game flow after that, after the level 15 cap gets removed at launch?

Jeffrey Steefel: You move out and up. You move into the Lone-lands, North Downs, you’ll move out into the Troll-Shaws and then into Rivendell eventually, and then up into Angmar.

IGN: This game covers Book 1 [The Fellowship of the Ring] in The Lord of the Rings right?

Jeffrey Steefel: What we’re starting to do, to make ourselves a little clearer is…we have an epic story in the game, which is kind of our story of Angmar right now that’s going to expand into all sorts of other things beyond the Witch-king and moving out into the rest of Middle-earth, that’s divided into books and chapters. In fact if you’re in the game and looking at a quest you’ll see “Book 3: Chapter 4.” We’re shipping with the first eight books, our books. And then it’ll continue beyond that. Our first update will be Book 9, for example. The first X number of books, and certainly all the eight we’ve done at launch are coincident with the first book that Tolkien wrote. The first volume, if you want to call it that. So all of Eriador, pretty much all the way over to the Misty Mountains and then north and south and all the way over to the water in the west. That encompasses approximately the period of time in terms of where the Fellowship is of the first book. It’s not exact, but it’s a decent match. At a certain point in the updates we’ll start the path across through Moria and across the Misty Mountains and we’ll start moving into book two, or volume two, in terms of Tolkien’s books.

IGN: With these updates you mention, are they free updates or boxed expansions?

Jeffrey Steefel: We’re going to have all kinds of different things that we release, depending upon what we think is the greatest need for both the community and the franchise. As Turbine has become pretty well known for doing, we’re going to be releasing quite frequent updates that right now are part of the subscription. Then we’ll have retail presence at different times that will include some of that content, some new content, it really depends on what we think is the best thing for the market and the consumers at the time. We’ll be talking more about that after launch. People should expect to see the game grow a lot and pretty quickly.

IGN: You put a pretty big map in there and you can’t explore all of it yet, so we keep asking ourselves when we can get to the rest of it.

Jeffrey Steefel: Oh absolutely, but that’s part of the fun, right? To some degree. Really that was a big question in the very beginning, is it going to be frustrating for people not to be able to get to Helm’s Deep in the launch product, not be able to get to Mordor in the launch product. You’re left with a choice in a game like this, you can either try to touch all those important landmarks and then have a really thin path or you can build something that’s deep, and rich, and dense and feels like a real place and has continuous landscape but then you’re only going to be able to do so much at a time. Obviously we went with the latter. You get to walk around the theme park instead of take the tram ride between the cool rides.

We’re venturing out of Eriador so we’re going to encounter much more evil and dread, though there’s plenty of pockets of good and hope along the way. In terms of the PvP, the region that we launched with for the game, Ettenmoors, is one, the first of many Monster Play regions we’re going to build. There’ll probably be other parts in the world where you can do Monster Play. To your point, we’re still in discussions about exactly what’s next and don’t want to talk about it in great detail, but you can imagine some of the major points of conflict in Middle-earth from the stories to be great places for those PvP regions to exist.

IGN: But it would still be region-locked so you couldn’t run a Monster Play character all the way across the map?

Jeffrey Steefel: Right. It’s very unlikely in the current incarnation of the game that we’ll open up the full, open-ended world PvP anywhere in the world any time. That’s, for example, a place in which the lore does guide us to some degree. We want to preserve Eriador, for example, we don’t want the Shire to be a place where people can come in and gank people whenever they want to. We feel like we’ll lose some of the spirit of Middle-earth in general by doing that. But we feel like we can scratch all the itches that a PvP player wants with the system that we have and expanding it the way we’re planning on expanding it. So you’ve got persistence, you’ve got competition, you’ve got this sense of my own personal monster that is growing in power and that I can show off to other people and can acquire a certain amount of notoriety from competition over time.

IGN: Some people are going to get to level 50 pretty quickly, the level cap. Is the new content going to be all level 50 content or is there going to be low, mid, and high level content all the way out?

Jeffrey Steefel: It’s mixed. We’re never going to release just high-level content. As conscious as we are about making sure that there’s plenty of end-game and high level content for the high level players, we know that we have to keep everybody occupied and happy. We also think that there’s places in the 20 - 40 level range that would benefit from having a lot more content right now. We’re going to add content everywhere with expansions, but the further along we get the less likely it is that we’re going to add a lot of significant content in the early, early newbie areas. We want everyone in the game to feel like their experience is expanding one way or another. Sometimes that’ll be features and sometimes that’ll be extensions of the content, and sometimes that’ll be different types of functionality with each other.

IGN: There’ll be new starting areas?

Jeffrey Steefel: There won’t be new starting areas as you know them right now.

IGN: What about the possibility of more races, such as more specific races?

Adam Mersky: Is this an April fool’s joke? You bring up a good point there, right, you’re going back to the original question of was the license limiting. It’s going to be hard to…

Jeffrey Steefel: Well it depends, right? Probably not to the degree that we’ve seen in some other MMOs. But for example when we get to Rohan, the Riders of Rohan, the Rohirrim, are a different race. They’re a really different type of the race of Man who live differently, function differently, ride horses, do all kinds of things that are different. Is that another race? Possibly. Are there unexplored parts of Middle-earth that allow us potentially in the future to add other races or types of races, prestige races for example? Those are all possibilities we’re considering. While on the one hand I’d say we’re not going to have tons and tons and tons of different races and things you’ve never heard of that we’ve just kind of made up, we are probably not going to stay limited to just four races over time.

IGN: What kinds of enemies do you fight in the higher level zones with the initial release content?

Jeffrey Steefel: We’ve got orcs and we’ve got trolls and we’ve got drakes, which are essentially dragons, we’ve got all kinds of nasty things. Giants. In the foothills around Rivendell there’s a bunch of giants, which are from the lore. There’s all different kinds of trolls, there’s snow beasts, essentially a giant troll in the snow areas, there’s wood trolls which are these really scary looking, I couldn’t even describe them to you; things that look like they grew out of trees that you find in some of the marsh lands. The crebain are always flying around giving you trouble. There’s wargs and barghast. At a little higher level you get the wargs, which are the giant, sentient wolves that Tolkien talks about quite a bit. Of course the Nazgul and the Witch-king. There’s a whole army of wights and a wight-lord that commands them. There’s ethereal creatures called shades, which are these floating, half-translucent undead creatures.

It’s always that fine balance between how much do you want to give too early so that the cool stuff later on doesn’t look quite as cool. There’s only so much you can do with a cloak, after a while it’s just another fancy pattern. The color gives it a little bit of differentiality. I mean I think the truth is that if we, I’m sure we would like to do more with our cloaks. I think probably the way cloaks work going forward is going to have more complexity to it. As the graphics capabilities improve on client machines there’s lots of things we want to do with them, then you’ll probably see them change. It wasn’t intentional to make everybody look exactly the same, if that’s really the question. I think it’s more a matter of we felt like in the first 10 level in particular we didn’t want to blow all the cool that we could put on the capes.

IGN: So you do eventually get better designs later on?

Jeffrey Steefel: They do diversify, yes. And not only that, you can dye them, and dye parts of them. There’s different cloaks that have different areas that can be dyed and you can build or buy color pots that you can use to dye them.

IGN: A lot of people even in the press have compared this game to World of Warcraft, what do you think about that?

Jeffrey Steefel: We’re shocked [laughter].

Adam Mersky: Never heard of it.

Jeffrey Steefel: I mean it’s natural, right? This is where a large part of the audience has been the last couple of years, it’s been pretty much everything everyone’s been hearing about, and I think that in some respects, knowing the audience that we were approaching, knowing what this IP could do and the kinds of people that this IP could reach out to, we are trying to solve some of the same problems Blizzard was able to solve. How do you take this very, very complex environment of a massively multiplayer RPG and make it much more accessible to a much broader audience? Really focus on the fun, the experience, the community and connectivity, and having less time focused on how do I play this game, how do I figure out where I’m going, the game is a whole puzzle to solve.

The natural comparison there is that we’re reaching out to a, in some respects, similar audience. In other cases I think even broader audience because of the IP. They’re the big game out there and we’re the next big game coming out so everybody wants to put those up against each other and see what’s different and what’s the same. From our perspective what we’ve done is taken what — made sure we’d delivered to MMO players the things that now they expect. Kind of like getting into a car. You know, steering wheel, the clutch…well we don’t use clutches anymore do we, I’m dating myself…but the steering wheel and the accelerator are all in the same basic place, there’s really no reason to move that stuff around unless there’s a reason to do it that makes the experience better. So give a baseline interface and functionality that’s familiar to you and then start to evolve some of those pieces like giving you fellowship feats so you can do group attacks in a way you really can’t do in any other game and really work together with a group of people in combat. Give you Monster Play which is a different way of doing PvP, give you more richness of story in an interactive way in the game than you might have in another game. And then just the whole look and feel of the world, the whole immersion of the world.

I think the comparison is, no matter what kind of game we made, I think that the comparison would be there. People are curious to know where does this take the genre, where does this take the industry?

IGN: Do you think Lord of the Rings Online has a chance of matching those [World of Warcraft] numbers?

Jeffrey Steefel: And that’s always the next question, right? [laughter] They built the 3000-foot skyscraper, can you guys build a 3100-foot skyscraper? I don’t think it matters, really. What matters is can we grab a hold of a mainstream audience — by mainstream we don’t mean mom and dad and every person on the planet, but mainstream game-playing audience whether they’ve been MMO players or not. Can we grab them in the same way that Blizzard was able to reach them? Can we bring in people that haven’t been brought in before? We definitely think this is going to be the next big MMO game. We definitely think this is going to grow the genre and grow the audience, and we think it’s going to be huge. We know it’s going to be global more quickly than any MMO ever before. We’re going simultaneous Tuesday [04/24/2007] in Europe and North America hence the number of our grey hairs here. Then very shortly thereafter in Japan and then within the same 12 month period China, and then beyond. This is going to be a large, mainstream, global phenomena. Whether it’s the same numbers, who knows? We can’t pretend to know what our competitors’ numbers are and what their business is really, we’re just in the business of making sure we build a product that achieves our goal which is to capture a large part of the existing audience.

There’s lots of indicators. We set a whole bunch of different indicators for ourselves which were what kind of feedback from lifting an NDA [non-disclosure agreement] on the product. Just looking at what normally happens with these games when that kind of milestone happens. What kind of adoption do we have of people that actually want to come play in the open beta, which is huge. How many pre-orders are we selling, what kind of interest there is in the press, what kind of interest is there online, what kind of self-perpetuated community growth is there. We have all these things lined up as metrics, we’ve surpassed them all. I obviously can’t talk about numbers here, but I mean honestly, we said we need this many people to sign up for our open beta, we had way more than that. And we were pretty ambitious with the numbers. We need this many people to go out and pre-order and an awful lot of people are doing that here and also in Europe. And you start seeing YouTube explode with this sort of community creativity with people building videos of the game, and just watching that become a part of the pop culture.

IGN: Are you seeing a strong interest in Asian territories as well? Personally, I just don’t know how popular the Lord of the Rings brand is there versus here. [North America]

Adam Mersky: We haven’t had the massive betas going on, but we’ve been working with great partners over there. Japan’s coming up first and the one thing we know about the franchise and the license over there is that the books really were huge in Europe and North America and the movies were too. The movies are really what broke the IP into the Asian market. I just don’t think there were a lot of Tolkien fans in China, let’s say, probably before the movies came out.

Jeffrey Steefel: It depends on the market too. Japan is much more western than, for example, China and Korea. We did quite a bit of research both on our own and with Tolkien enterprises into what kind of penetration both the books and the games had in those territories and globally, there was a lot more penetration of the books and movies in China than I would have expected. But to your point, it’s not the indigenous mythology that it is, for example, in Europe and certainly also here in the United States which is why it’s so important that as much we believe that, and certainly in the west and in other places the IP brings people to the table, people are not going to stay because this is Lord of the Rings. People are going to stay because we built a really good game and we continue to make it better and better and continue to operate it well and grow it and expand it. We think that is going to appeal to people in Asia just as much. They like the look of the game, we’ve built functionality in way they generally like to play, they seem intrigued by the PvP Monster Play mechanic, we’re learning more about that. The other thing is, Asia in general is starting to get into that loop of “I may not think it’s cool but I know a lot of people think it’s cool therefore it must be cool,” right? They may not all have read The Lord of the Rings but they know everyone everywhere else in the world is talking about The Lord of the Rings, so it must be a big deal. But you’re right, it’s not the same as in Europe where everyone there grew up with a copy of the book under their pillow, but there’s also a much bigger audience in general over there, and a much bigger audience for games.

IGN: Did you make any specific design tweaks for Asian territories? Different color schemes?

Adam Mersky: I think it’s fair to say that certainly our art department always keeps in mind that, especially when we’re working on higher level armor that’s got an over-the-top, colorful eccentricity to it that Asia likes. There’s some changes to gameplay, I won’t get into it in great detail now because I don’t want to pre-empt partners, but there’s some basic how I use the mouse, how I use the keyboard kind of controls that are different in Asia than they are here and we make sure that we support those. Then there’s all the localization stuff. But in terms of a major restructuring of the way the graphics and art work for Asia, that’s not something we’re going to do, we don’t think it’s necessary. Probably some gameplay changes, but mostly in terms of UI usability, how you move about the world, and the rest is really going to be an exploration with our partners. Japan is not that different from here or in Europe, it’s really in China and Korea where we’ll be working on that mutually with our partners in both regions; our partner that we’ve announced in China, Korea is another area we’re interested in expanding into. Partnership in an area like that is going to involve their expertise on culturalization, I think it’s fair to say the Asia markets are huge, they’re growing, they all really, really want to get western product into the region, and they’re still trying to figure out the best way to do that. So we think the best thing for us to do is to be open to that partnership and figure out how to do it. It’s going to be interesting to see what happen in the next year in that respect.

IGN: What about pricing structure? Will Asian territories see a flat subscription fee or pay-per-item or usage structures?

Adam Mersky: We don’t know. As far as what our plans are for monetization, it really depends on what our partners want to do in those regions. They’re essentially licensing the game from us and working with us to bring the game to those markets, part of the reason we partner with them is they know the market, they have marketing assets in place, they have sales assets in place, and they have the infrastructure. I can absolutely confirm what you’re saying which is that the markets right now are very focused around internet cafes, focused around paying for small chunks of time, and they’re beginning to convert those business models to all kinds of things. We’re certainly open to what our partners suggest is going to be successful in those areas.

IGN: I just didn’t know if you were planning on setting something up where you pay for specific items.

Adam Mersky: That’s a long, complicated discussion in itself that I think the industry’s having over the next couple of years. Again, I think there’s no question that Asia is interested in those sorts of things. Whether or not our partners and us decide that’s a direction to go with this particular product, I think that remains to be seen. I think we all know the business models of this industry are going to undergo some really interesting changes over the next two to five years. We intend to be right with the rest of the industry when it’s happening.