Allen Rausch at Game­spy had a chance to take a tour of Book 7, guided by Jef­frey Steefel and Aaron Camp­bell. There’s a lot of inter­est­ing insights in their com­ments on the area’s design and their thoughts for the future.

One thing caught my atten­tion as I hadn’t heard of it before. We knew that the elves of Loth­lórien weren’t exactly trust­ing of strangers. Appar­ently there are oppor­tu­ni­ties to actu­ally lose rep­u­ta­tion with them as well. What path you choose changes a cer­tain quest chain and gains you one of two titles. You can’t have both. I though this con­cept was pretty cool:

Never ones to let an oppor­tu­nity go to waste, Lothlorien’s rep­u­ta­tion bar­rier will also house an even smaller exper­i­ment, that may have some big­ger reper­cus­sions. My guide brings me back out­side Lorien to the camp of Dwarves and humans where I’m directed to take a quest from a dwarf stand­ing next to a camp­fire. The name of the quest is “Poach­ing,” and it directs me to kill eight deer inside Lorien and bring him their meat. Not much dif­fer­ent from any fetch and gather quest save for the reward… a few nice rings and the loss of 700 “Elves of Lorien” rep­u­ta­tion points. Within Lothlo­rien, play­ers will see ani­mals that have “pro­tected” under their names. That means that killing them will also result in a small but notice­able reduc­tion in rep points. This is the first time in the game that a player will be able to lose reputation.

“We’re look­ing into pro­vid­ing… at least in a small way… some ele­ment of moral choice in our quests.” In this case, the player merely has to either ful­fill the dwarf’s request or accept a quest from a nearby elf turn­ing in the dwarf poacher for a big rep increase. Either choice offers the pos­si­bil­ity of loot and a quest chain that cul­mi­nates in a title for the player. Given that the two chains are in oppo­si­tion to each other, though, it means that either one or the other title will be for­ever denied to that char­ac­ter. It’ll also be a chal­lenge for play­ers who never read quest text.

“It’s impor­tant to real­ize that whichever way the player chooses, they’ll still be able to get into Lorien and access all the con­tent,” Steefel says. Appar­ently play­ers will never be able to drive down their rep to the point where they become shoot-on-sight, but nei­ther man would rule out the pos­si­bil­ity of doing more with this in the future… pos­si­bly hav­ing play­ers make irrev­o­ca­ble choices. For myself, I imme­di­ately thought of Rohan under Worm­tongue and the dan­ger of the coun­try falling into civil war as dif­fer­ent fac­tions of Rohirrim might back King Theo­den or the exiled Eomer. Once again both Steefel and Camp­bell grunted non­com­mit­tally as I men­tioned this. “We’re always exper­i­ment­ing with new ideas. Ses­sion play started out small and got big­ger. We’ll have to see where this goes and what the player reac­tion to it is.”

I per­son­ally think this is a really cool idea. It doesn’t block any Loth­lórien con­tent, but it gives play­ers a sim­ple moral choice with some level of con­se­quence. Even if that’s just a title and some rep­u­ta­tion points, it’s bet­ter than sim­ply ignor­ing the effects of your choices like MMORPG’s gen­er­ally do.

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