Interview: Turbine’s Jeffrey Steefel Talks LOTRO, Design Philosophy, Part One

The MMO Gamer: As sort of a bookend to that question, can I ask you a hypothetical?

Jeffrey Steefel: Absolutely.

The MMO Gamer: Let’s say it’s one year before launch, and you know everything that you know now. What would you do differently?

Jeffrey Steefel: I think probably what I would have done—and this would be controversial both internally and externally—but, I think we probably would have launched the game without Monster Play at first. We would have had some time to spend on it to have it further along in its inception when we launched it.

That was something we had originally talked about, but there was a lot of pressure, in the marketplace and internally that we had to have some kind of answer to a PvP solution at launch.

Even though Monster Play has been something that was part of the design from the very beginning, something very important to what we’re building, because it’s so different from quote-unquote “traditional PvP,” it requires a lot more experimentation and iteration, and, quite frankly, time to put in front of players and see what happens and what doesn’t happen.

So, if I’d had my druthers I might have done that. But again, that might or might not have been a good thing. That’s the first thing that comes to mind. Give us a little more time to flesh it out a little bit more, which is something that now we’re doing, slowly, incrementally, over time… which is harder.

The MMO Gamer: One of the things I found interesting when I was doing my research back in June to do my review of LOTRO was that the Saul Zaentz Company, which owns Tolkien Enterprises, only has the rights to license the three books of the trilogy, and not any of the other works Tolkien set in Middle Earth.

Do you anticipate that being any sort of a stumbling block? Say, it’s three years down the line, you’ve got some expansions under your belt, maybe you start running out of content from the original trilogy?

Jeffrey Steefel: First of all, they have the rights, and so we do, to the trilogy, and The Hobbit, so that opens up the world a little bit for us. And, there’s an awful lot of information in the appendices from Tolkien’s books that flesh out some of the Second Age, and even some things that happen after the time of The Lord of the Rings.

One thing we don’t worry about is running out of content. It is a gigantic, gigantic universe in terms of the land itself, the story and mythology, characters, all of that kind of stuff.

In fact, we just extended our license this week, so we have ten more years of open runway with this license to begin with, and then we can always extend from there, assuming we’re having a good time still and Saul Zaentz is having a good time, which I’m sure he will be.

Running out of content isn’t really the issue, it’s more about sustaining interest. What’s cool about the way that Middle Earth and the story itself is laid out, and we’re trying to follow that in a very, very general way, is we haven’t even gotten to the really cool stuff yet. We’ve been in Eriador all this time—and don’t get me wrong, there’s some cool stuff in Eriador, and Angmar is very cool as something that we were able to flesh out for launch—but, we’re at the edge of the Misty Mountains now, and this is when it gets really, really interesting in Middle Earth.

You’re talking about Moria, and Lorien, and everything that’s going on in Gondor and Rohan, and the real wars happening on the other side of the Misty Mountains… So, it’s just going to get more, and more interesting and rich and energized the more we go forward into the story and the world.

So, I’m more worried about actually getting everything done than I am about running out of content.

The MMO Gamer: On a similar subject, I also asked this question of the game director of Funcom earlier this week: There seems to be something of an emerging trend in the MMO genre towards an increased number of licensed titles.

You take SOE, who started out with EverQuest and went to Star Wars… Mythic started out with Camelot, canceled an original title, and went to Warhammer… Turbine started out with Asheron’s Call and are now into Dungeons and Dragons and Lord of the Rings…

Do you think this is a pattern that’s here to stay, or is this just a lull between more original titles on the horizon?

Jeffrey Steefel: I think it’ll be a combination. I think there are two big reasons for what’s been going on:

One is a business reason. These things have gotten so expensive to create that just at a corporate level the people that are investing in these games, whether they’re the companies themselves, or investors, or whoever it happens to be, are saying “Look, we’re spending tens of millions of dollars making this, we need to make sure that we’re going to get a huge audience,” and that whole built-in audience that comes with a high-level high-profile IP is something that those businesses gravitate to.

This happens in all kinds of media, which is why sometimes the film industry would rather make the second or third sequel to something rather than come up with something new. It’s why Lord of the Rings can come out from New Line Media and be unbelievably huge, and Golden Compass can come out and be “Eh, kind of OK.”

There are other reasons, too, the quality of the work and everything, but IP really helps broaden your audience and bring in a bigger audience. Since we’re still kind of an emerging industry, this part of our industry, the massively multiplayer part of our industry, I think that drives it.

The other thing is that, even creatively, these games are so hard to build, on every level. There’s the infrastructure, there’s the actual mechanics and technology behind it, and then there’s the sheer volume of content and work, artwork and everything that has to go into the game, that having a really good, well-written IP that gives you some kind of structure to start from is a good thing, it gives you some boundaries to work inside of, I think that also drives people.

But, at the end of the day we’re all creative people and we want to create our own stories and our own worlds, and you’re definitely going to see people doing that. But, this is a good time for us to focus more on how to tell stories, how to create worlds—because even just doing that is really hard, and I think as an industry we’re getting really good at it, but we still have a lot more to learn.

Once we have that down, then it’s going to be easier to focus more on what we want that world to be, and what we want those stories to be.

So, I think you’ll continue to see both, but certainly in the short term, 3-5 years, you’ll continue to see a lot of IP-based games, just because of the business risk and all the other risks involved.

Click here to continue on to Part Two of our interview with Jeffrey Steefel.

Pages: 1 2