LOTRO Dev Talks About Bringing MMOs To Consoles

Jeffrey Steefel, executive producer for Lord of the Rings: Online recently spoke to Eurogamer about the game's upcoming expansion and its future in the MMO market. One thing he mentions is the challenge of designing an MMO for consoles, which have a larger player base than PC games. He admits that UI development would be a huge issue, but also thinks MMOs could benefit from splitting tasks between various devices. "Long term, for me, the real exciting vision is ... thinking about a game, a franchise, as this centralised content. There's this thing called Lord of the Rings that sits on a bunch of servers ... and whether you're on your PC, your console, your mobile device, those are all just access points, and they're all good at different things. ... The console is great for fast action, immediate activities. Combat, raids, things like that could be a lot of fun sitting on your couch. And some things that are necessary but slightly rote and boring, like managing your inventory or setting up for a raid, or some elements of crafting — those are things that you can do instead of playing Bejeweled when you're sitting on the train or on a break or whatever it happens to be."

Comments

You know what's even more fun?

[liquiddark]

Punctuated entertainment that doesn't try to consume every second of every day of your life. Magine that - there's other things to do besides play a fucking videogame. Be nice if some MMO developers stopped thinking up game ideas before they take their OCD meds.

Re:You know what's even more fun?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Punctuated entertainment that doesn't try to consume every second of every day of your life.

You're anthropomorphizing. How can a (your words) fucking videogame do anything other than sit there and wait to be played? How can it "try" to do anything?

Here's a novel idea: Play the same MMO everyone else plays, in moderation.

Re:You know what's even more fun?

[liquiddark]

Don't be intentionally stupid. The game is built by a set of humans collectively organized into a business. They not only do try to do something besides sit there and ask you to play, but in the case of the majors, they have a legal requirement (to their public shareholders) to encourage you to become completely addicted to the game so that you keep playing and keep paying.

MMO games are addiction machines. This article points out just one of the slippery slopes they try to grease to get you to invest so much that it is psychologically damaging to play.

As for moderation, I played WoW for years, and the one thing I noticed in that time was there were very few people playing "in moderation". The prices at the auction houses, the time it took to accomplish any goals, and the lack of any punctuated content meant that you had two paths - play til you got bored, or play constantly (definition in this particular case: 20+ hours a week).

I don't know who your "everyone" includes, but the stories I heard from the players I met - in real life I'm talking, not in game - were all at least that deep in the game. It's how the thing is made - there's a stack of shit ten miles deep that the developers are trying to bog you down with in the name of "pacing mechanisms" and "meaningful progression". In the end, it's timesink so that you keep playing and keep filling their pockets.

Punctuated content, on the other hand, should take the line that a person can accomplish a complete task in a set time period, and there are limits to how much an individual can crank through in a given time period. Think movies versus TV. You go to a movie and you pay your fee, then two hours later you're done. You sit down in front of a TV and nine hours later you stand up and crack your back and realize it's dark outside and your life is passing you by.

Not what everyone wants. But holy christ, come on. These guys are suggesting that you could do part of the artificial shitty task list they've made up for you in your free time. If that doesn't sound ridiculous to you, you're a little crazy.

Re:You know what's even more fun?

[0123456]

"MMO games are addiction machines."

Guild Wars seems to have done OK without a permanent grind; I'm sure they haven't made as much money as WoW with its monthly fees, but I'm equally sure they've made a decent profit.

Re:You know what's even more fun?

[Spy der Mann]

Punctuated entertainment that doesn't try to consume every second of every day of your life.

Maybe what MMORPGs need is a "quick save" feature (how they implement it, is not my problem). A friend of mine has had countless arguments with his mom because he doesn't get on the dining table when he should. He always answers "I'll go when I can save".

Game designers need to understand that we weren't born to just play games.

Re:You know what's even more fun?

[LRayZor]

Actually their ideal situation is probably that you keep paying WITHOUT playing (too much). That way their content doesn't get old so fast, the resources required to run the game aren't as high, etc. etc.

Re:You know what's even more fun?

[liquiddark]

I see where we're having a disconnect. You don't believe in non-physical addictions. You're wrong. I'm done here.

Raids on your couch?

[SanityInAnarchy]

I haven't played WoW very seriously, but from what I've seen, at least some classes need to be pretty focused, and have quite a lot of things to keep track of -- more buttons than exist on any console controller.

I guess I don't see how raids from your couch would be fun. After all, MMOs aren't the only genre that a keyboard and mouse is better for -- and especially if you're actually fighting other humans, why would you deliberately cripple yourself?

I can see exploration from the couch, or soloing.

Good idea, though, with the "centralized content" -- not entirely original, but good to see it catching on.

Then again, I'm really not sure I want to see people inevitably logging in just to text... txtspk is even worse than 13-year-old WoW griefers, if that's possible.

Re:Raids on your couch?

[Negatyfus]

I can see it happening. Have you ever tried to set up a gamepad profile for a PC game? There are certainly ways to set up quick access to 12 or 16 hotkeys on a gamepad using shift buttons. On top of that, MMO's aren't the twitch affairs that FPS games are. Usually there is a cool-down of a second minimum between skills, and a player with some experience on the gamepad could hold his own in raids for sure. Most raids are fairly repetitive, anyway.

Re:Raids on your couch?

[Awptimus Prime]

I haven't played WoW very seriously, but from what I've seen, at least some classes need to be pretty focused, and have quite a lot of things to keep track of -- more buttons than exist on any console controller.

Funny, I've got a keyboard attached to my 360.

Secondarily, when I played WoW, I played it on my 50" HD panel while on the sofa with a wireless keyboard and mouse on the PC. This actually resulted in the play being more fun since I was able to use my primary surround system for listening to music, able to stretch out and relax while playing, and while waiting for groups to gather, I could simply go split screen and watch something on the Tivo.

At the time I had wished the game ran on the Xbox, primarily so everyone would have a standardized way of communicating with their voice, instead of having to spend another 20 minutes trying to help some random person set up Ventrillo, have it sound like garbage, or not work for whatever reason.

I can't speak for the Wii controller, but if you wanted to make it a controller-only game, the 360 controller has a keypad expansion that could be utilized, and even without that, you can do enough chording of buttons and quick pop-up menus to satisfy most MMO games.

Not sure what is so terribly insightful by making vague, negative predictions of how things could be. Those tend to be tripe since, well, companies want to make money by delivering goods people will want to buy, people won't buy a game that's horribly crippled by the system's input these days. Not with free demos being the norm, so folks can see what they are getting into before throwing down a credit card.

No Keyboard/Mouse support mention

[alvinrod]

I haven't played LotRO, but from what I hear its interface closely mirrors the WoW interface which would make it pretty much unplayable without a keyboard/mouse setup. Movement and using different skills are such a large part of both games and being unable to have precise control over both ends up making things ridiculously difficult in some PvE encounters and most PvP settings.

Entering text would be a complete pain in the ass and unless LotRO has built in voice support that everyone uses the console version would suffer due to a lack of Ventrilo or Team Speak support as voice communication is fairly vital in executing raid encounters. I suppose it could be included with the game, but that means getting it to work on both or either the PS3 and Xbox 360 and all the additional hassles that go along with that.

It'd probably work out decent for solo play where one joystick controls character movement, while the other moves the camera and cursor, and commonly used abilities are mapped to buttons. From my experience when I was grinding while playing WoW I never really used more than one or two abilities. There's probably a lot of other things that I'm overlooking, but as I haven't played this particular game, my knowledge is a little general.

It seems like something that won't draw a lot of additional subscribers and will probably end up costing more to develop and implement so that it works well than they'll see returned in increased revenue. I'm not saying that a console MMO couldn't be done, but it would need to either solve the problems I mentioned above by adding good voice chat functionality and allowing keyboard and mouse input or be designed from the group up with console controllers in mind.

Re:don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything in LotR is set in stone. Your mary sue isn't going to save the day nor will the character be acknowledged by Gandalf or Sauron. The One Ring's going to be destroyed and everyone's going to live happily ever after once the elves cross over to the east.

Any game with 100,000+ players is going to have this issue. No one can ever be a truly epic hero or affect the story*. Every third WOW character is a level 70, if it were a solo game you'd be godlike at that stage but in Warcraft you're still just an average face in the crowd raiding dungeons for loot and bashing each other in arenas. The best you can hope for is being known for being part of a top tier raid guild or 3v3 arena team, but your character will never do anything at all that affects the game's lore (forgive me for not knowing too many details but I find the Warcraft backstory convoluted and kind of asinine)

That's not necessarily a bad thing though if you aren't looking to satisfy some inner Napoleon complex. Making a character who simply inhabits a world is pretty fun and satisfying too, if the world itself is a compelling place to explore and inhabit. Do you HAVE to be Strider or Gandalf or Conan or Merlin or Darth Vader at the height of their powers when you play a game ? Can't you find some satisfaction in being Hobbit Champion #2348 who doesn't save the world, but who does have a lot of fun adventures, makes some friends and finds some neat toys along the way?

* Eve may be an exception, but that's because it's an entirely different type of game.