The Lord of the Rings Online: Art, Creatures, & Design

GameSpy has published three separate articles exploring the artistry, creatures, and design that have gone into Turbine’s The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. A snip from the design article:

The influence of the IP was even felt in the game’s class system. “One of the things we wanted to get away from was the Dungeons & Dragons idea that you ‘are’ your class,” Davidson said. “How do you assign a ‘class’ to someone like Faramir or Aragorn or Gandalf?” The team’s goal with The Lord of the Rings Online’s system was to get away from the idea of “class as prison” and allow players to better define their roles more in the way the protagonist of a story would, by their actions.

“One of the key elements in maintaining the integrity of Tolkien’s world was the use of pronouns,” Kerr said. “Players can’t be a wizard. Tolkien wrote that there are only five wizards in Middle-Earth, period.” This made it difficult initially to serve the needs of the MMO systems. Player parties need characters to fulfill several basic functions – tanking, healing, crowd control and damage-per-second (DPS). What the team eventually figured out was that those functions shouldn’t be confined to a specific class. Aragon was cited as a specific example of this multidisciplinary approach. He combines the outdoor tracking abilities and marksmanship of a ranger/hunter class with the damage dealing abilities of a warrior and some limited healing abilities.