MMeOw is currently down for the count, but please visit the LOTRO Combo Blog. It aggregates content from some of the best LOTRO-related blogs and podcasts on the net.

Turbine’s Console MMORPG New IP?

Tony posted this on September 18th, 2009. It has 1 Comment »
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2174

QJ is report­ing that Craig Alexan­der, Turbine’s VP of Project Devel­op­ment, con­firmed some details on their upcom­ing con­sole MMORPG at the Austin Game Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence. Accord­ing to QJ:

“Appar­ently the project has been in their pro­duc­tion house for a year and a half now, with over US$ 20 mil­lion already spent on it. The as-yet-unnamed MMO is being opti­mized for a 2011 release on PS3 and Xbox 360.“

We don’t know too much about it, but the word now is that it is based upon a new IP. You might remem­ber that there was some dis­cus­sion on whether or not The Lord of the Rings license (not nec­es­sar­ily LotRO specif­i­cally, mind you) might be involved in some way. Sounds like this isn’t the case.

Guess we’ll see. I’m con­tent with the idea of them being sep­a­rate projects, quite honestly.

Update: Mas­sively is also report­ing on this:

Craig has now said, and we quote, “Under no cir­cum­stances should you attempt to port a title.” This now looks to be a brand new con­sole IP for Turbine.

I’m a fan of yours, Mr. Alexander.

MMeOw is currently down for the count, but please visit the LOTRO Combo Blog. It aggregates content from some of the best LOTRO-related blogs and podcasts on the net.

Building Middle-earth: Ered Luin

Westnovote posted this on June 9th, 2009. It has 3 Comments »
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw1719

When Tur­bine looked at design­ing the areas of Middle-earth, some regions, like The Shire, were blessed with sev­eral detailed maps which could serve as invalu­able ref­er­ence mate­r­ial.  Other regions, how­ever, were less well mapped, and some, like the Ered Luin and the sur­round­ing low­lands, were hardly mapped at all.

The Ered Luin (Blue Moun­tains) are one of only a few sur­viv­ing fea­tures of Bele­riand, the far north-western area of Middle-earth which was destroyed at the end of the First Age.   The moun­tains were homes to two impor­tant Dwarf set­tle­ments, Nogrod and Belegost.  We are told in The Sil­mar­il­lion that both were ruined in The War of Wrath, when Thang­oro­drim was bro­ken and Bele­riand was sub­merged.  The Ered Luin them­selves were thrust apart in their midst and the sea rushed in, cre­at­ing the Gulf of Lhun and chang­ing the course of the river.

The lands to the west of the moun­tains were in the First Age called Ossiriand, the land of seven rivers, and was also named Lin­don by the Noldor.  It was set­tled by Nan­dorin (Green) Elves and for a time housed both Beren and Luthien towards the end of their lives.  East of the moun­tains the land rolled away into downs and thus to Eriador.

It is impor­tant to note that the Ered Luin and sur­round­ing lands have been home to Dwarves as well as Nan­dorin, Sin­darin and Noldorin Elves, but never to any sig­nif­i­cant groups of Men.  In this Tur­bine have been consistent.

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MMeOw is currently down for the count, but please visit the LOTRO Combo Blog. It aggregates content from some of the best LOTRO-related blogs and podcasts on the net.

Isengard — Only those dedicated enough may enter

Chris posted this on May 17th, 2009. It has 6 Comments »
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw1710

MMeOw is currently down for the count, but please visit the LOTRO Combo Blog. It aggregates content from some of the best LOTRO-related blogs and podcasts on the net.

Building Middle-Earth: The Shire

Westnovote posted this on May 11th, 2009. It has 6 Comments »
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw1624

I some­times need to remind myself how amaz­ing 3D com­puter gen­er­ated worlds are. When I was a lit­tle gaming-brat I used to dream of being able to walk around a fan­tasy world and actu­ally see all around me, go wher­ever I wanted and do any­thing. 2D worlds were fine, but it was hard to get immersed in them. You would dream that one day, far in the future, peo­ple would be able to design games which really made you feel like you were there.

The first game to give me this sense of actu­ally being there was Elite, the space trad­ing game. It was 3D, albeit using sim­ple line graph­ics. What I really wanted was to be able to explore worlds which were famil­iar to me, and top of the list, surely top of everyone’s list, was Middle-Earth.

If you’d have told me 20 years ago that I would be able to log into a com­puter gen­er­ated 3D ver­sion of Middle-Earth and walk around with hun­dreds of oth­ers peo­ple, I would have made some very excited noises and then prob­a­bly said “Yeah, sure”.

But you can. Now. Every day. And it’s awe­some!
Or is it?
Does the Middle-Earth that Tur­bine have built bear resem­blance to the Middle-Earth that Tolkien envisioned?

I’ll have a stab at answer­ing this ques­tion, tak­ing each of the game areas in turn. I will look at the basic geog­ra­phy of the zone as well as exam­in­ing the inhab­i­tants found there. I’m not look­ing to pick at lit­tle errors and changes the design­ers made, but I will high­light any glar­ing dif­fer­ences between the books and the game. To assist me, I will be mak­ing ref­er­ence to The Atlas of Middle-Earth by Karen Wynn Fon­stad, an excel­lent guide, the con­tent of which is gen­er­ally accepted as being canon.

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MMeOw is currently down for the count, but please visit the LOTRO Combo Blog. It aggregates content from some of the best LOTRO-related blogs and podcasts on the net.

Turbine and the ‘Lore’: Part 2. Game Mechanics

Westnovote posted this on April 8th, 2009. It has 9 Comments »
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw1471

Lord of the Rings Online is a pretty generic MMORPG.  It bor­rows heav­ily from ear­lier games and intro­duces lit­tle in the way of inno­va­tion.  There are dif­fer­ences, but any player of Everquest II or World of War­craft will feel very famil­iar with the UI on LotRO, which was nat­u­rally the inten­tion of Tur­bine when they designed the game.

So, whilst the game can, at first glance, seem like WoW with Hob­bits, it is worth tak­ing a look at how Tur­bine has taken sta­ple MMO mechan­ics and tai­lored them to fit into the world of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.  In this fol­low up to my pre­vi­ous post on how Tur­bine uses the back­ground mate­r­ial in it’s game I want to exam­ine the role-playing game itself.

Of course, every fan­tasy RPG ever made, be it com­puter or paper and pen­cil based, has drawn heav­ily on Tolkien.  Games like Dun­geons and Drag­ons were almost iden­ti­cal in their use of cer­tain char­ac­ter classes and mon­sters.   Com­puter RPG’s, sin­gle player or oth­er­wise, have used Tolkien as inspi­ra­tion for a ‘class based’ approach.   Bilbo Bag­gins, the clas­sic fan­tasy Bur­glar, in The Hob­bit is the main inspi­ra­tion for this approach.   Tolkien makes it clear that the job of Bur­glar is a spe­cialised one, and a Dwarf sim­ply can­not do it.  The idea of clear roles being applied to char­ac­ters in books was noth­ing new, but the way in which Tolkien used it so promi­nently in a fan­tasy set­ting was, and it’s effects are still felt today.

So the basic idea of a fan­tasy RPG is essen­tially com­pat­i­ble with Tolkien, regard­less of the set­ting.  Tur­bine had it easy in this respect.  Their ini­tial choice of classes was easy as well one would imag­ine, but the way in which they have linked the mem­bers of the Fel­low­ship to each class was inspired.  Some of the choices take a bit of imag­i­na­tion to rec­on­cile, such as Sam Gamgee as a Guardian, but you can see where the devel­oper is com­ing from.

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