Ask Turbine #9

In the latest "Ask Turbine" feature on Warcry, executive producer Jeffrey Steefel reflects back at the successful launch of The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar.
In the first week and a half the game has only been offline once and in that case, it was intentionally taken offline by Turbine so they could patch some minor bugs and exploits that had cropped up. Historically, MMORPG launches are train wrecks and Turbine - now on their fourth launch - seems to have avoided that precedent. Overall, Steefel called it the best launch he'd ever been involved in and scored it "9 out of 10", with 10 being a completely perfect MMO launch.

The technology has not disappointed them, what about the game itself? Steefel told us it was too early to draw broad conclusions, but so far, they have not had many surprises. Players seem to be behaving just as they did in Open Beta and no one has broken away from the pack and capped out their character.

"The content itself, it has been performing the way we expected it too," he told us simply.