The Lord of the Rings Online Developer Diary

Turbine’s official The Lord of the Rings Online website has a new developer diary logging the world-building process of Forochel.

One of our chief goals for Forochel was to make it feel massive, and we were able to achieve this in two ways. Since the completion of Book 11: Defenders of Eriador, the World team has been working on Forochel. This allowed the World team plenty of time to develop and polish the landscape before heavy content development on the region occurred. This also allowed the Content team the time to fill the landscape with quests, and at the end of Forochel’s development, we have a region that rivals the North Downs in size. In addition to the scope of the playable landscape, we wanted the region to feel expansive, so we used region-impassables that are much lower than those found in our other regions. This gave us the opportunity to develop forests and tundra beyond the playable areas, giving this already large area a much larger feel. This also provides an excellent opportunity to expand Forochel in the future if we so desire.

Another special addition to the landscape of Forochel is the introduction of some brand new landscape technology – Dual Heightmap Landscape. This feature allows us to develop more organic cave settings on the landscape (similar to the Dwarf neighborhood) without having to use large numbers of rocks to plug the ceiling. This tech offers some very exciting possibilities for the future and we’˜re happy to introduce this feature to players in Forochel.