Interviews// Jeffrey Steefel, Exec Producer, Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar (Online)

SPOnG: I suppose Sony with the recent PlayStation Home announcement is obviously taking these types of Web 2.0 ideas to the mass market. Or at least, is hoping to.

Jeffrey Steefel: Yeah, well that’s their challenge and honestly, I never thought I’d say this, but I think Microsoft has genuinely done a great job with Xbox Live. So, Sony’s now playing catch-up in that market. But if they put their mind to it, they have all the right assets to make it work…


SPOnG: Back to the game –all the in-game music was composed in-house. It’s very good, very atmospheric. But one other cool music-related feature you mentioned was the option that characters have to play music instruments together online – effectively jamming together in a band in Middle Earth! So, you can learn to play a rudimentary instrument in the game?

Jeffrey Steefel: Yep, whether it’s a lute or a flute or a clarinet or a guitar, plus more instruments to follow after launch… You basically map that instrument to your computer keyboard and you can play interactively… So, you and I could jam and play in harmony and all that kind of stuff.


SPOnG: Is that connected in any way to in-game quests?

Jeffrey Steefel: Well, it could be, but right now it’s just a fun mini-game for players to enjoy playing. But you could imagine how it could be tied into all kinds of things, with certain instruments only available after successfully completing quests or whatever.


SPOnG: This actually made me think back to playing MERP [Middle Earth Role Playing] as a kid, where most of the time games would just disintegrate into chaos and just mucking about and having a laugh, just forgetting about following any set quests…

Jeffrey Steefel: Well yeah, it goes back also to the original Dungeons & Dragons games. No matter how much money they cost to make and how complex they are, games are something we do while we socialise together - because we’re just not good at sitting in a room and socialising, without having ‘a thing’ between us. All D&D was, was a guy with a rudimentary story and some dice and some tables of numbers… it was basically ‘an excuse to be together’.


SPOnG: The writers in LOTRO: Shadows of Angmar are writing new stories based on Tolkien’s world, which is maybe quite a frightening thing to do for a writer?

Jeffrey Steefel: Yep!


SPOnG: How many writers do you have on the team?

Jeffrey Steefel: Well, we have different types of people, so I have a group of guys who are game designers first: some of them writers, some content designers, they work out the basic architecture of the story and how it all fits together, and they have a very detailed understanding of Tolkien-lore, more so than I can ever hope to have.

I also have a professional writer who is a full time editor for us as well as being a complete Tolkien-freak! He knows everything ever written by or about JRR Tolkien. So, he controls editorial to try to make the Tolkien-voice consistent. Plus we have some other published fantasy writers on the team. But yeah, it’s daunting, to decide that you’re effectively writing an addendum to Tolkien’s story.


SPOnG: I think another interesting thing that you mentioned earlier is this idea that as you play through the game, you are IN the Lord of the Rings story – kind of like a meta-story – is that what you’d call it?

Jeffrey Steefel: Yeh, there’s a meta-story of the War of the Ring, which is that there is a battle between Sauron and the free people of Middle Earth that’s been raging for thousands of years, and that this is the latest scrimmage which happens to centre around the ring of power… and one of the big themes of that is the ring being taken by the ring-bearer to Mordor to be destroyed…

Then another theme, which we’ve created, is the theme of the Witch King, under Sauron’s direction, razing Angmar and basically trying to occupy the whole region of Eriador. So these two themes are both woven together, so you really do feel like you are part of ‘the bigger story’ without having to constantly be following Frodo around or whatever – as that clearly wouldn’t work.


SPOnG: Say, in an ideal world for you guys, we’re sitting here in three years time and you have eight and a half million paying subscribers or even more than Warcraft’s managed to drum up in that period of time… How will the game actually work with such a huge number of players? How will your game and your story pan out?

Jeffrey Steefel: So, as with WoW, those eight and a half million players are broken down into groups of two or three thousand or whatever…There are many, many, many worlds … So in reality those few thousand in your game-world are the people you are actually playing with. We will have, I hope, eventually ways in which those individuals that so wish can join each other across different worlds – for example, competitive PvP tournaments and things like that…Something we’re very interested in.

Second of all, as really all you are thinking about is how your world of up to say three thousand people evolves as everything is contained in that, which is really quite a different issue that we have to deal with in terms of ‘how do we scale that up to 200,000 versions of that’ or whatever. But that’s not something the player need concern themselves with.