LotRO Executive Producer Jeffrey Steefel Talks Moria, Monster Play, and Boar Quests

Jeffrey Steefel single-handedly talked me into going back to The Lord of the Rings Online last year, after our first meeting at GDC.

This year, with GDC once again on the horizon, I decided to give The Mines of Moria a shot, in part so that I would have fresh material to discuss.

This strategy worked out well. Rather than having to resort to griping of a generalist sort, as I have to with most of my interviews, I was able to hone my gripes for him to a fine-tipped point.

Of course, we did manage to squeeze in a few non-gripe related questions, as well…

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: I’m sitting here with Jeffrey Steefel, who is still the executive producer of The Lord of The Rings Online, so no need to reintroduce himself.

Let’s start off by trying to fill everybody in on where LoTRO is, as compared to last year. You just launched your first expansion in November, and had a major content patch, how has everything been going?

Jeffrey Steefel: Great! I mean, Moria has been awesome, everybody loves it. All of our players have gotten into it, we had a huge adoption of existing players. It’s also brought in a whole bunch of new players, which is what we wanted to have happen.

It’s won awards, all that kind of stuff, but bottom line is that we accomplished what we wanted to do. We set out to make it a place that feels unlike any other place anyone’s ever been in an MMO, just in terms of size and scale.

I feel like we really did that, and kind of getting that coming back from players, so that’s cool.

Moria came out in November, and just last week we launched Book 7 which opens up a lot of Lothlórien, an all new reputation faction, and a bunch of other things that we did to the game, including some things we did to the early part of the game.

For some of the new players coming in, we really streamlined the first 15 levels, so that players get pulled in much more quickly than they did before.

You know, MMOs and their audiences have changed a lot. What five or six years ago was fun is a little less fun, now.

The MMO Gamer: You also lowered the leveling curve in your last patch, how are players responding to that?

Jeffrey Steefel: Overall, I think really good. Change is always hard for some players, so there’s always people who feel like-

The MMO Gamer: I’m sure people who were already 60 were like “You screwed us over!”

Jeffrey Steefel: Exactly! [laughing] But I think overall it’s been good, and we tried to make it a nice balanced change across all the levels.

The work that we did in levels one to fifteen we’re actually starting to continue forward to some of the later levels, too.

So, some of the spoke-and-wheel quest dynamics that were in the game at launch, “go get it come back,” “go get it come back,” “go get it come back,” we’re trying to get rid of that and make it feel more like “I am going to find the thing I’m looking for, and succeed. The things that I need to continue on my adventure are nearby.”

We’ve learned over the last three years that there’s a difference between exploration and aimless wandering. So, we’re trying to do that as much as possible.

We also added a quest guide, which is in beta and in a few weeks we’re going to turn on for everyone.

You can turn it off if you don’t like it, but it basically gives you an awful lot of direction when you’re on a quest about where you need to go.

The MMO Gamer: On the subject of that hub-and-spoke quest system…

I’ve been playing Moria for a couple weeks now, and I was hoping that it would address one of the major gripes that I had with the game.

I brought up one of my other gripes with you last year, the size of the map, and that gripe I thought was addressed with Moria, you guys nailed the size dead on.

So, my gripe for this year is quests.

I had high hopes that you had learned from your past mistakes, as you said, the “back and forth, back, and forth, back and forth…”

But then, I started on the epic quest line that begins the opening of the door to Moria.

The first quest was to bring some guys their lunch. The quest after that was “fix our pickaxes.” And the quest after that was “move some rocks.”

I have to tell you, I was not really feeling the hero for quite a while.

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