The Lord of the Rings Online Interview

The folks at Ten Ton Hammer are offering up an interview with Turbine’s Jeffrey Steefel and Adam Mersky about the team’s plans to bring The Lord of the Rings Online to Korea.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you looking to include some other elements into LOTRO for the Korean audience? Perhaps the development of a pet system?

Jeffrey: While we don’t have a pet system at the level of complexity that I think you’re talking about, we do have the item advancement system which is essentially a pet system as strange as that sounds. It gets its own advancement path, its own XP, and really gets a lot of benefits from being along for the ride with you. It satisfies some of that desire for a pet system.

However, a lot of the changes we’re looking at is finding ways for the gamers to feel special. While you do see some of that in the Western audiences, it’s very prevalent in the Korean audiences. They want ways to help them feel special. Many of them live in a city of 20 million people, and it’s hard to feel special and important. They play in PC bongs and PC cafes because they don’t have a lot of space where they live and experiencing that fantastic realm feeling while coupling that with a feeling of achievement really appeals to them.

There’s also some elements of Monster Play that we’re integrating into the game a lot sooner than I think we expected too. We’re not a PvP game, but I think they’re pushing us to accelerate some of the work we’re doing with PvMP and other expansions of that content that we wouldn’t have done this early. We would have done many of these things anyway, but I think serving an audience that is so focused on that that it pushes us to work on it even harder.

On top of that, there payment model is much different and they’re incredibly focused on customer service. We were really taken by surprise at how important customer service is to their consumers. In our industry, we think we’re focused on customer service, but they’re driven by the fact that their fanbase has incredibly high expectations of them.

For example, our partners have a walk-up window at their CS facility. If a player has a complaint, they can walk on down, show up at the window, and yell at someone.