The Lord of the Rings Online Interview

GameZone has conducted an interview with Turbine’s Jeffrey Steefel, chatting with the executive producer about the recently released The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar.

Q: You were building a game based on a very popular title, both from a literary as well as a cinematic standpoint. How much pressure did that put on the dev team to not only live up to the books, but to try to capture that grand cinematic feel that the movies had provided?

A: No pressure . just kidding. A lot but it was also a huge, huge opportunity. The greater the opportunity the greater the expectations. There were huge expectations for the game, accentuated by the fact that the game, one way or another, had been in development for a very long time, across multiple developers, across multiple incarnations. There are people on our boards (forums) today, that were on our boards years ago when we were making Middle-earth Online for Vivendi. In addition to the fact that it is Lord of the Rings and people expect it to live up to their fantasy of what Lord of the Rings are; in addition to the fact that it has to live up to the great success of the movie and deservedly so. And then the last thing is I think the sense of ‘˜wait and see’ had turned to ‘˜well, we are not going to worry about Lord of the Rings right now if it happens someday then we will take a look.’

I think the way you get over being freaked out about that is to break it down into its component parts. What is that expectation? What are people really looking for and who are those people? When we started to do that we realized that what people are looking for are a number of things the first challenge is they want to be part of the Lord of the Rings. The movies really deliver on that; the single-player games really deliver on that.