The Lord of the Rings Online Developer Diary

Turbine’s official The Lord of the Rings Online website has been updated with a new developer diary penned by world builder Chris Pierson. In it, Chris talks about the creation of The Old Forest:

The biggest challenge with the Old Forest is that it has to feel big, but it can’t actually be big, because no player actually wants to have to walk for days to get from Bucklebury to Bree. (Yes, you in the back, I know you do, but trust me, you’re an exception to the rule.) Plus, of course, there’s the challenge of giving the players some semblance of the feeling Frodo and that lot had when they were wandering around in it feeling lost, and constantly being diverted away from where they’re trying to go. We thought for a bit about how to do that: do we make the trees actually shift around? No, too hard on performance, and you could never really capture that “trees moving when you’re not looking” feeling the hobbits had. Do we make a bunch of pockets of woodland, and teleport people between them in strange and unpredictable ways? That’s kind of a game-play nightmare, and it’s hard on the servers to have people bipping around that much. How about something simpler, like a maze? Well, that would… wait.

How about a maze?