Turbine Inc. is the developer of Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. In this telephone interview, GameShark talks with CEO Jeff Anderson (pictured above) about LOTRO present and future as well as the state of the MMO genre and where he sees it heading.
You're the CEO of Turbine. In general, what's involved in being a CEO of a company like Turbine and how much direct involvement did you have with the development of Lord of the Rings Online?
It's the place where all the responsibility ends. You're responsible for the overall company's success and failures. You're responsible for trying to give people opportunities for growth and advancement, for making the company create value for its shareholders.
With Lord of the Rings Online, I was pretty involved. You know, I don't want to take any credit away from the hardworking men and women who really made the product on a daily basis. I was originally in the team that put together the pitch that got us the license. I was involved -at the beginning- with helping to set the vision for the project.
I let a lot of the people do a lot of the heavy lifting, there's no way I could've personally done a fraction of doing what these guys were able to pull off. But, you know, I probably filed as many bugs as the hardest working QA guy in the building. I was very involved in giving feedback on the systems and I think I try to take a consumer-oriented approach and give people insight as to what it would take for the average person to get inside the game. But boy, you know, I think that there are so many people who contributed to the product, but I definitely did in my own way.
How did Turbine end up acquiring the Lord of the Rings license?
We had started doing work as a developer for Vivendi a few years back and they had hired us to build out the product. At that time it was Middle Earth Online. We had made some progress on it, gotten few a through milestones and we were kind of moving ahead. Vivendi at the time was trying to figure out what it wanted to be as it was going through some management and organizational changes. They weren't sure if they wanted to be in the MMORPG business - this was, obviously, a lot pre-WoW - and thought that this might be an opportunity for them to re-focus their energies back into what they wanted to be, and that was really on the console side at the time. So we were obviously passionate about the franchise and we made the pitch to buy the rights.
What went into deciding the timeframe for Lord of the Rings Online? Did you know that you wanted to put it into the same setting as the books or was there debate about having it take place before or after the books?
Well there was a slight difference of opinion there from when it was being run by Vivendi. Even the name change itself reflected that. When it was Middle-Earth Online it was almost timeless in its placement. We wanted to go to a much more specific role where we talked about the Fellowship, where we talked about Tolkien, and we really talked about the timeline around the trilogy itself. So that you felt you were in the middle of the War of the Ring and you were watching the events unfold and you were at the places when these things were going on.
That change meant a few things to us. Obviously, we sat back and we started talking about how we wanted to build out the world and the choices were obvious. Either we could go out and try to write all of it the first time, but if felt that the world would be overly small and you'd be able to walk from The Shire to Mount Doom in 15 or 20 minutes. Or we wanted to create a bunch of instance areas, which were geographically separated, but you could kind of teleport between them. And that's all less than epic. Both of those felt flawed. And the outcome that we took was just to follow J.R.R. Tolkien's approach and break it up as a series of large chapters or books or volumes or whatever you want to think of it as and roll it out over time.
We started with his first book and created the world that covered all the regions from The Shire all the way to Rivendell and North Angmar and in doing that built -I think- a richly detailed and highly authentic recreation of that part of Middle Earth.
Lord of the Rings Online has drawn a lot of praise for the stability of its launch. And certainly in comparison to a Vanguard -and I don't mean to directly lampoon that game- LOTRO was incredibly stable at its launch. Were you, personally, happy with the state of the game when it went live and are there areas of the game that are causing problem and need to be improved?
Well, first of all I think it's been terrific. The guys did a terrific job of building out a nearly bug-free launch. The content is rock solid, the performance, the customer service, all the tools have worked as predicted and I think that goes back to Turbine's tradition of being able to launch high-quality product.
We wanted to, with Lord of the Rings, set a new bar for how a quality launch should be handled in this space. We found that Lord of the Rings had an opportunity to bring in a lot of new customers and we wanted it to feel as robust as a single-player game. So the excuse that other companies have made throughout that, "oh these games are hard," we thought you know what, we've now gotten to a state in this industry after over a decade of working on these games that we really shouldn't hide behind that anymore and we should do the best that we can at making great products from the beginning - all facets.
I think an enormous amount of that success goes to the team that worked and put the launch together. And we're really more than thrilled at the way it went. Are there things that we're still focusing on? Absolutely, and that goes back to our constant desire to improving the launches that we've done, the quality of the product that we're making, and the overall stability of the service.
Lord of the Rings Online has drawn a lot of comparisons to World of Warcraft, and I've seen that spun both positively and negatively depending on whose doing the talking. Can you comment on how much influence you think World of Warcraft had on the development of Lord of the Rings, in particular as it relates to gameplay?
Well I think that the industry had a huge impact on Lord of the Rings. I wouldn't cite one particular product, but certainly World of Warcraft is as good any. You know when we looked at all the products -and this isn't taking anything away from World of Warcraft- they copied some of the same mechanics that we had all pioneered when I was working at Ultima Online or people who worked on Meridian 59 or all the different products that had come before us. I think we looked at it, from Turbine's perspective, as a body of work that existed in the industry that we as a company wanted to continue to innovate on and evolve. And so we took the best of those features, melded them together and continued to put in new things that we found exciting, whether it's the deeds system or some of the new features like monster play or the music system to continue to elevate the overall artistic creative vision of the world.
With regard to World of Warcraft I think it's a natural thing that if you're comparing us to the most successful game out there, that's a nice compliment that we get and I think we'll take that every day. I think that -to our credit- there's things that we're doing that are different from where they were and I think that a lot of players feel are significantly better. So we look forward to having those kinds of comparisons, all the time.
Is the upcoming expansion, Shores of Evendim, still set for a June release and what can we expect from it?
Yes, we're getting set to launch out the new lands, Evendim, just to the North; it's a whole new region. It's got, obviously, a ton of storyline and a 100 new quests. There's just a variety of new land to explore. We've got new raids to fight against, nine brand new monsters, a bunch of boss monsters and new features, like armor sets and a new music system.
It's about five, maybe six million square meters for level 35 to level 45 players. It covers just to the North -it's all contiguous, so you just keep walking North of the Shire, you'll walk right into it. Or you can actually walk all the way West of the North Downs and you just walk into the region.
It's centered around this big, giant lake in the middle, around this main town, just to the South of the lake, called Annúminas, which was one of the original Tolkein - back in the Second Age, if there was a Washington D.C. of the time, that's what Annúminas was. It became deserted after the brothers who were ruling it got into a fight and they left and split the kingdom up into three at the end of the Second Age. So you can back to Annúminas and see this old capital of the Kingdom of Arnor and explore it and search its ruins. The story backdrop is that Aragorn is preparing to leave Rivendell with the Fellowship and they need to re-forge, the sword, Narsil. And so Gandalf has asked you to help Aragorn search the ancient lands to find these artifacts to help them re-forge the blade.
As you explore the area, you'll find these 100 new quests. There's a big giant battle "raid" for this place, called Helegrod. And the nine monsters, everything from these new creatures -actually, all the geometry is brand new on these things - so there are things like Salamanders, which are giant oversized lizards. There's the Boggarts which are small goblin-like creatures, but they run around in packs of four and five or six monsters fighting together. The Gauradan, they're kind of like this wolfkin that work and run with wolves at their side. And some big boss monsters, like the Rogmul. So, if you know what a Balrog is -there's other 'rogs in the world and one of them's this Rogmul. It's kind of a demonic spirit that you get to fight; there's also a dragon. So there's some really interesting kinds of new monsters that we've got in the product for the first time.
