The Great River
By: Budgeford
Introduction
Region content is the backbone of The Lord of the Rings Online™. What would our game be without a landscape to explore, monsters to kill and quests to reward you for your tireless efforts? This content is the primary way to advance your character, and everything else in the game is arguably extra. (It’s all still very important, but extra nonetheless.)
New art assets for this zone began pouring in not long ago, and we had the pleasure of watching the formation of an entirely new territory in Middle-earth. The Great River not only offers something fresh-feeling and new, but also some fairly epic eye candy. This region delivers the first established Rohirrim-run town, a settlement called Stangard, with interiors and exteriors unlike all others in the game. As you roam through this zone, you will likely feel a rekindling of your early sensations as an explorer of Middle-earth.
The Purpose of the Great River
We occasionally release updates that contain interim regions between major expansions. The Great River is an example this interim regional content, much like Enedwaith or Lothlórien. Enedwaith was a taste of Dunland before the Rise of Isengard expansion came out, and the Great River is a little taste of what’s to come in Rohan.
The devs here always have many, many things going on at once, so while half of us are in pre-production for exciting things to come, the other half works on making sure the game feels alive and vibrant between major releases. If you’ve been with us for a while, you may notice that our releases between expansions offer all kinds of things: instance clusters, raids, festival updates, end-game regions such as the Great River, etc. These content types are meant to cater to all of the types of players we expect to see in our game: casual gamers, soloers, groupers, and the hardcore audience. While folks may get frustrated when an update comes out with nothing to cater to their preferred style of gameplay, chances are high that there’s another team of devs right in the middle of building something to look forward to.
Our hope is that the interim regions will scratch the “Gimme something new!!!” itch for a lot of player types. The Great River is a level 75 end-game region, designed mostly for solo or duo gameplay.
For solo and duo players, there is a new reputation faction with notably better barter items than the rep stuff found in the Rise of Isengard release. Quests will also give upgrades to the level 75 quest rewards found in Dunland/Isengard. There is plenty of content to help you earn these rewards without having to grind, and that’s a major goal of these interim region updates: keeping things fresh.
If you prefer to do more challenging content in groups, there is a new landscape division just for you: the Limlight Gorge. There is a separate reputation faction just for the brave folks who want to tempt their fate against terrifying trolls and enraged huorns, with higher-end loot to barter when you earn rep with that area.
There is also a long-term benefit to having regions such as this in the game, even if it doesn’t directly contribute to leveling your capped character at this time. For non-capped people still going through the game for the first time or on an alt, this will be prime content for getting those last couple of levels. These zones are wonderful alternatives to the longer regions in expansion packs; there’s nothing quite as satisfying as getting high enough level in the tunnels of Moria to go out into the sunlight of Lothlórien. Progress through Middle-earth becomes much more exciting when you have diverse alternatives, and the Great River will likely be a welcome change of pace to anyone who hasn’t finished the Dunland/Isengard content yet.
Process of Region Development
In case you’re interested in a little look into our process, feel free to keep reading!
In the beginning, a really crude map is made, and the terrain is loosely built by one of our most senior worldbuilders (who happens to also be our main Tolkien expert). This ugly, unhelpful map (no offense to he who made it) is shown to the region content developers, usually while they’re still very much immersed in other work. This is our first glimpse into what we’ll be doing over the next few months. This part of the process is always so strange, because we’re generally so distracted when this is going on due to our full attention being fixed on another feature.
Awesome ugly map, right?
At this first stage, we all try to call dibs on the divisions we want to make based SOLELY on this crude map. Usually we’re yelling over each other like a bunch of kids fighting over candy. “I want the swamp!” “I want the one with the creepy name!” “Please not the Brown Lands!” Before long, we’re all assigned to our divisions.
Over the coming weeks, our amazing worldbuilder/Tolkien-expert holds a very large meeting for our whole team and gives us an impressively thorough verbal Tolkeinpedia presentation from memory, explaining anything and everything Tolkien ever recorded regarding some of these very remote areas. We all really enjoy these meetings, though we often leave gaping after the overwhelming and inspiring amount of fodder crammed into our heads.
Before we get a chance to see what this place looks like, it’s time to request art and set aside what monsters will appear. These deadlines always make us a little crazy, but planning really does have to start early. At this phase, I always feel like I’m an embarrassment of a designer – just guessing, and it makes me feel very guilty. “Uh…orcs! And, um, bears! Yeah, bears and orcs. This will make a good division.”
In actuality, though, the seeds are planted here. The brain really starts chewing on all of the pieces, and before we know it we’re jotting down or discussing little bits of actual ideas and plans. At this time, we’re usually just finishing up the previous feature.
This is the early map of the Great River, and we received this around the time that we began writing our specs. Zooming down into this zone usually gave us just enough insight to start thinking about monster camp layout, quest hub locations, and even a little bit of our quest flow. We start making strange abstract-seeming flow charts indicating quest flow through each division, and they seem quite perfect and reasonable at this blind stage. We flesh out our plans for quests for each area, and try to remain loyal to our optimistic flow charts. (We also rag on each other relentlessly for flow chart color choices during this phase, which is very important to the process.)
Next comes the fun part: building the puzzle pieces and assembling them. For the next several weeks, the various teams within dev work together to build a beautiful world, make things to do in the world, and create rewards to make you want to come and play in this exciting new region.
The trickiest part of this phase is not to get lost in polishing and perfecting. Forward momentum on the structure of the division is crucial, and it won’t do to have one quest arc be flawless and bug-free while the rest of the content isn’t even built yet. Polish could go on forever because perfection is impossible, so we have to go forward even when things are a little rough around the edges, and cringe at reviews when we get to show some of our clumsy phases to the rest of the team.
See? Very sad business.
Eventually we have the satisfaction of seeing it all come together. We’ve collectively learned so much over the years about making region content, both from LOTRO’s own successes and failures, and also from those of other games in the MMO/RPG genre. There is never a shortage of inspiration for our new regions; Tolkien’s lore is getting more exciting as the fellowship marches ever forward through the pages. It was really fun to work on the Great River, and it’s gotten us very excited to move forward into Rohan.
호빗
드워프
엘프
인간
