The Lord of the Rings Online Interview

Following up on their book 13-specific interview with executive producer Jeffrey Steefel, Eurogamer now interviews the man about a broader range of LotRO topics.

Eurogamer: Would you consider a Dark Age of Camelot-style graphics update in years to come?

Jeffrey Steefel: One of the wonderful things about Turbine, without sounding too Hallmarky, is that we started life as a tech company and at the core of what we do is our engine. It’s not that simple, but for an example, we were not building our game as DX10, because when we started making it DX10 didn’t exist (one of the joys of MMOs – like building a space shuttle with an 8086 computer). We saw we could be the first MMO to launch with it, so the core technology team built that into our renderer and engine and built it back into core products that we were building.

We are constantly merging tech back and forth in this continuum. We don’t need to upgrade the graphics of our game, because we’re constantly doing it – updating animations so the way characters move is much smoother, we’re doing a complete overhaul of our UI system, which we’ll talk about over the coming year, so it’s a continuum. What I hope is that we continue to evolve alongside the industry and we continue to be out front.

Eurogamer: Could your tech team move LOTRO across to consoles; it already works with a gamepad, and 360 is dying for want of a decent MMO.

Jeffrey Steefel: The standard answer I give, which is genuine; our license for the Tolkien properties is across all platforms. That’s not by accident. How and when is the best time to leverage that capability? We’re evolving our engine; part of that is making sure we can distribute content wherever players are, so that’s part of our core strategy.