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

Jeffrey Steefel: Well, I guess the issue is… here lays the conundrum to making an MMO as currently defined:

You’re trying to cover a lot of landscape, a lot. You want everywhere you go in the world to have something to do. You’re also trying to cover large swaths of advancement, and there has to be a balance between… we could make every quest we build “epic.”

We’ve certainly demonstrated we know how make compelling epic quests, compelling drama quests, compelling quests with different objectives. It’s all the stuff that happens in between. We could boil down our game into something much more concentrated so that every experience you had was sort of big-T.

The MMO Gamer: But this was the big-T! This was the epic quest, delivering lunch on the epic quest.

Jeffrey Steefel: I completely understand the criticism, and the other question is that when you go through the arc of the epic story in Moria, did you feel like you were part of an epic story overall?

The MMO Gamer: Overall, yes. But for getting that first hook into the player, I just didn’t think that delivering lunch and fixing pickaxes did it.

Jeffrey Steefel: That’s a fair criticism. It’s a debate we have all the time. Do you put the steak at the very beginning?

We had this discussion the very first time we started talking about developing the game.

It’s as simple as wow, coming into the game for the first time, I’m level one and I don’t really have any skills and capability in the game, even if I’m an MMO player and have some player skill, but I just came to join Lord of the Rings Online, boy, it better feel like it really soon.

So, we came up with all these scenarios you’d be familiar with. The first five minutes I see a Nazgul, but I can’t really engage with that Nazgul, because there’s no way on earth he wouldn’t look at me and just kill me.

The first time I end up in Moria, do we want that immediately to be about the epic chaos that’s going on in Moria, or do we want to give you time to familiarize yourself with the environment and some of the other new things we’re throwing at you, before you get into some of the bigger experiences like with the Watcher?

So yeah, it’s ever going to be our struggle, unless we make the decision that we want to carve this very dense narrow path through this large world.

We are trying to make the critical path of the quest of the story be accessible to everyone, a little less demanding in terms of grouping, so “the extra stuff” is really that: do it if you want, not do it if you want.

Back to your statement, maybe it’s better for those “go help make your lunch” things not to be your first epic quest, but again, it’s a constant battle.

The MMO Gamer: On a related subject… I’m sure you remember in the pre-expansion world, boars were very, very popular with certain quest writers, to the point that there was even the in-joke of “More Boar Beer” in the Shire with the tagline, “because you can never have too many boars.”

Morbid curiosity: Just who were the quest designers that were so in love with them?

Jeffrey Steefel: [laughing] Oh, many. Many, many. The only thing I can tell you is that everyone involved has been appropriately flagellated and we have plenty of dartboards with boars on them in the shop, as well.

We have the same feelings about boars as players do, I think. One of the things in Moria we’re trying to do is make as many new monsters as possible.

The MMO Gamer: I haven’t seen a single boar in the place.

Jeffrey Steefel: I think that would’ve resulted in death for someone had that occurred! [laughing]

But having more variety, making sure that, when you get down into the fiery depths, the orcs down there feel like they really belong to that area and not just right-hand[?] orcs that wander down into the Balrog’s lair. We’re trying obtain[?] as much as possible there.

The MMO Gamer: Last year we talked a little about monster play. You said that if you’d had your druthers you would have left that out so you could have done it right.

I had the opportunity to give it a try after that interview, and I thought it was an… interesting experience… let’s leave it at that.

I shared your feeling that it could have been a whole lot more, if you had that chance to leave it out and do it the way you had intended.

But, at the same time, I found myself wondering-even if you’d held it off a year and rolled it out in the expansion, would monster play ever be particularly popular?

I’m wondering that because everybody who knows-anything-about The Lord of the Rings knows what happens at the end.

Would anyone want to play what are essentially the Washington Generals?

Jeffrey Steefel: [laughing] Well, it depends if you look in context of the Lord of the Rings mythos. There’s the story of the three books, there’s the ring-bearer taking the ring and destroying it, Sauron being defeated, but you have to step back and look at the macro-scale, at Middle Earth in general.

This is just a chapter in a long history. When you read the books, especially when you read the appendices, and really get a lot more about what Tolkien’s vision was, that this is a place that’s existed for thousands and thousands of years before and it will probably exist for thousands and thousands of years after.

It’s been this constant cyclical struggle between good and evil, so, just because the ring is destroyed does not meant that battles will not continue to rage in the future.

There’s always a future for the good and evil side, and it just depends on when it’s going to flare up again. We’ve already shown that we can experiment a little bit as long as it’s consistent with the universe and with some of the timeline things like resurrecting Angmar in the Third Age, not something that’s in the books but it’s very consistent with the fact that Angmar had been in a very active in the Second Age.

I think the deal with monster play is giving it more of a robust experience, so that my attachment to my monsters is more meaningful. I can advance and change my appearance and change my capabilities and group with other players and build tribes that actually mean something and fight for control of land, and those are all things that we’ve been slowly adding over time.

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