The Journey Ahead, August 2023
Hello Ring-bearers!
Nick Reinhart, Game Director on The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth™ here! Welcome friends, new and old. For those who may be new to joining us, The Journey Ahead is intended to be a look ahead at what’s in store for the game as well as reviewing what we’ve done and how far we’ve come with the game so far.
Chapter 1 - The path so far…
It’s been around 3 months since we launched The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth, and since our last Journey Ahead it feels like a lifetime ago! We’re really excited with how the game has gone so far, from new characters, seeing the community develop new strategies and team compositions and especially the first raid in the game – The Mines of Moria – and the entrance of one of the most recognizable and beloved characters of The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf the Grey. As with most journeys, they’re not all smooth and while we’ve encountered hiccups and bumps along the way, we’re feeling optimistic about the coming future. So, let’s dive in and chat about our Raid experience so far.
As with any major feature release in the early days of a game’s life there were some bumps. That goes without saying and while we’ve overcome some, others remain a work in progress. But overall the team and I are pretty happy with the Raid and how the feeling of being in the Mines of Moria has been brought to the game. We’ve been watching the data closely coming in and seeing guilds reorganizing to be as effective as possible while also testing out a variety of different squads and faction combinations. What’s also been good to see are players trying and testing out the different difficulties – even if it’s just to explore what the next difficulty looks like. Having a multiple attempt system for the Raid allows players not only to test out difficulties but also to judge their own performance and redo if they think they can do better. Basically, players get to show up at their best for themselves and their guild. While it’s still early days for the Mines of Moria Raid as well as the Raid system in general, the observations so far have been close to our expectations on where we hoped players would be as well as progress through the Raid so far. While positive we’re still in the analysis phase and taking notes of course corrections that we will need to be making both short and longer term.
One area we see potential significant room for improvement is around the RNG nature of the Moria Bomber in Chapter 1 of the current iteration of the Raid. Your feedback has been heard and we have plans for tuning and changes in the future. Right now our approach is to wait and see to avoid any knee-jerk actions which might instead result in an overcorrection and making a situation less desirable albeit the opposite direction. Another area in which we had issues was around Raid reward delivery. We are building out better testing regimes around that part of the game and others where we want to focus on. While it might be cold comfort after the fact, I do want to call out when we see our own mistakes, own them, and try to remedy them as we move forward. While I won’t go into an extensive list of every mistake we’ve found, with all things considered we are generally pretty happy with how the game has been so far. We’re proud of the mammoth team effort that’s gone in to get us where we are now, and the experience we’re building. I can’t wait for you to get your hands on the next chapters and more…
Throughout our time so far, we’ve been listening to the community’s thoughts and feedback on things we could do better on. To that end there’s a couple takeaways from our side that we are committed to working on. Communication is one of them, and why articles like this Journey Ahead are key in keeping you informed on what’s on the horizon for us together. Given our attention is so much on the actual development of the game, we will work on trying to be better in what we show the community at the right times, when we can in terms of accuracy and timing.
Launch was especially exciting for us, for a number of reasons. One, we were excited to get your hands on something we had been working on for a long time, but two, bugs. There were several issues around the new player experience at launch, critically the new player Tutorial had several issues but we were able to resolve them quickly. We also acted decisively when it came to improvements on art, lighting and animation. The game looks and runs better now than what it did at our launch, thanks to our wonderful Art and Audio teams who have worked tirelessly on polish and improvement with every update. We’ve also been hard at work not just on the big things but also on the smaller things we know that can make a difference in the Quality of Life department. We’re glad to hear the positive feedback about players being able to continue to find shards while their character awaits to be promoted up.
Chapter 2 - The future to come…
While we’re still very much in the depths of the Mines of Moria Raid, there’s plenty more in store. We think the next phases are pretty incredible. From Cave trolls, more Orcs (you will see these are a bit different from the ones in Chapter 1), and a Balrog!!!
You know what…even Tolkien created illustrations of his world, so how about I just show you what visual explorations we have in mind for Chapter 4.
(Gameplay not final. Represents a game in development.)
It’s always exciting to show off the incredible creative process of the team. I hope you are as stoked to see our progress as we are in showing it off. With that, let me transition on to what is even further down the path. For the next few months coming, the team will be working around 3 major topics.
First is bringing more characters and content to the game at large. We’ve got some cool character ideas and notions coming up, along with our first characters from an alternative/’what if’ timeline. We’ve previously talked about ‘what if’s coming to the game and to be able to finally explore that is exciting. Up to this point we’ve shown an alternative story of a previously unknown Ring of Power, and characters that have been corrupted by a shadowy figure. Continuing that introduction, we’re going to be showing characters that are from timelines of what could have been. To be clear - we aren’t going to be rushing out the gate “What if Gandalf got the Ring?”, but we’ve got some more nuanced lore-based stories we think would be cool to explore. There are also ideas around events we’re looking to introduce and when would be the right time to do so. For clarity here, this doesn’t mean any of the events I’ve mentioned will come in the next few months, besides the rest of the Mines of Moria chapters, more so to let you know that we’re definitely ideating things and intend to explore the hypotheticals and “what if’s” relating to The Lord of the Rings.
The second thing we’re working on is the next major system we’d like to introduce to the game: Glyphs. Glyphs will be a character personalization system that will modify or improve your character’s combat stats and performance. To make it clear right away, this is not some fanciful things like funny hats or pink robes for Gandalf. This would be a system that would give players the ability to make characters even more powerful along with effects that will change the way they play in battle. I’m personally really excited about the idea of the set bonuses (sets will give your characters different battle advantages) that we’re coming up with, and I think we have an interesting take on how stats will change in the game currently being explored.
The third element, which is already in its initial stages and is in pre-production, is a multi-squad PvP feature. As you collect more characters from Marquee events and the Raid, and you make them even more powerful with the eventual Glyphs system, no doubt you’d like a place where you can really play and enjoy your new souped-up teams and characters. Multi-squad PvP would just be the beginning of where you could really flex your teams, as well as the start of a few different interlinked systems that will let you leverage your squads overall. It's certainly an interesting and exciting time for us as we think about the future of the game and where we are headed from here.
And with that, we end this Journey Ahead. Thank you for continuing down the path with us as we look to the bright horizon this game has ahead of it. You are an awesome community and we are so glad we get to play the game with you.
Nick Reinhart, Game Director
On behalf of The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth Dev Team
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