The Lord of the Rings Online Interview, Part One

[GameBanshee News]

The MMO Gamer has conjured up the first portion of an interview they did with The Lord of the Rings Online executive producer Jeffrey Steefel at this year's GDC.

The MMO Gamer: Let’s say it’s one year before launch, and you know everything that you know now. What would you do differently?

Jeffrey Steefel: I think probably what I would have done—and this would be controversial both internally and externally—but, I think we probably would have launched the game without Monster Play at first. We would have had some time to spend on it to have it further along in its inception when we launched it.

That was something we had originally talked about, but there was a lot of pressure, in the marketplace and internally that we had to have some kind of answer to a PvP solution at launch.

Even though Monster Play has been something that was part of the design from the very beginning, something very important to what we’re building, because it’s so different from quote-unquote “traditional PvP,” it requires a lot more experimentation and iteration, and, quite frankly, time to put in front of players and see what happens and what doesn’t happen.

So, if I’d had my druthers I might have done that. But again, that might or might not have been a good thing. That’s the first thing that comes to mind. Give us a little more time to flesh it out a little bit more, which is something that now we’re doing, slowly, incrementally, over time… which is harder.