Under the Banner

Brendon Lindsey of GamerNode.com posts an interview with Jeff Anderson, CEO of Turbine Inc. They discuss LOTRO, the current MMO market, and much more. I really enjoyed reading through the interview because it was more like a casual conversation rather than a scripted interview with a set of predefined questions. I also enjoyed hearing more about Jeff Anderson as a person than just as Turbine’s CEO. So make sure to add this to your list of recommended articles to read for today. I also want to thank TenTonHammer for posting a link to this interview!

Following are some highlights from the article that I found interesting, exciting, and Jeff’s pet peeve regarding Blizzard’s endgame!

First, the interesting! Jeff discusses their approach to how they dealt with healing in the game… it’s “the same as healing but isn’t technically healing”. Here’s what he says regarding how they got around it with using morale.

Yeah, and the reason behind that… At first you might think, “Yeah, that’s kind of stupid geeky Turbine stuff,” (laughs) but the real reason is that we couldn’t have people casting magic healing all over the place. It just doesn’t work that way. So we needed to come up with another way of expressing the same mechanic. It’s kind of like Rocky in the ring, you know, in Rocky IV, and he sees Adrian in the corner and he’s inspired and comes back to fight harder and win the day.

We saw morale as kind of a way to pay attention to how you’re doing in the battle, and if your morale falls you’re defeated and useless, you know. It’s kind of a combination of a death mechanic and a yield mechanic. So I now can inspire you, which is our way around healing.

Next the exciting! They discussed the lifetime pass in which Jeff replies they had three times the number sign up than they had expected. When asked if this would be offered for people who pre-order future expansions who may have missed the initial launch, Jeff mentions the following.

Well, that’s a great question. And, um…hmm… Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying this, but that’s one of the benefits of being me (laugh). You know, we haven’t really talked about this, but yeah, we’re planning on making a similar offer available to players. It’s going to be on a different pricing plan than the $199, just because that was for the founders, but we will be making the lifetime option available for new players.

It hasn’t been announced or launched yet, but it will be coming out shortly.

Now for the Jeff’s pet peeve regarding Blizzard’s endgame! I find it refreshing to hear comments like these made by Turbine’s CEO. As someone who’s first MMORPG was AC, the one thing I’ve found lacking in many other MMORPGs were the regular content updates that I was accustomed to in AC. I wish more companies thought the same as Turbine. Anyways, here’s the quote.

So we got…you want endgame, we got endgame. But my problem with the question, is that why the heck are you asking me about the endgame for an online product? I’ve been working on Asheron’s Call for nearly a decade now, and we’ve put out 80 updates for the product. It’s a constant opportunity to provide episodic content for our players. I don’t subscribe to the approach which is, “Hey you know what, we’ll put out a game, two years later we’ll throw out an expansion pack, and by the way we’ve just announced we’re going to do a new RTS game or whatever it is that we’re going to do, so all we’ll do in the meantime is pocket your money.” We believe that it’s almost an obligation of its own to be putting constant content out for the product.

These players are looking for updates to the game because that’s what they’re subscribing for. Why do you want to go through the same quests for the same race for four or five years? Our approach is — you know what, I don’t understand what the other company’s model is where they feel like they can just pocket people’s money and be okay with that and not give a lot back to the community, but we’re about giving back to the players. They’re the people who are looking for and paying for new stuff. The notion of — and this is just a personal pet peeve — of going “You know Blizzard’s endgame…” Well, what are you talking about? Why is there an end game for an online product? I wish someone could explain that one to me.