LOTROstream chat with world builder Scenario (Matt Elliott) about making Wildwood and other landscapes – notes and partial transcript

 

LOTROstream chat with world builder Scenario (Matt Elliott) about making Wildwood and other landscapes – notes and partial transcript

On Wednesday 17 February 2021 Standing Stones Games ran a fantastic talk with one of their team via their LOTROstream on Twitch TV. Matt Elliott, known as Scenario, is a senior world builder for LOTRO with 15 years experience. The next LOTRO update, U19 Wildwood, will be his R&D project and he talks about the various aspects of world building, landscape design and the process of game making.

The chat can be found here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/917971232

Spoilers for Wildwood in the video link and potentially in the notes/partial transcript below!

Tolkien, landscapes and LOTRO are something I am really interested in learning more about and currently I’m gathering information for a personal research project, so this talk was right up my alley.

I have made notes and a partial transcript below. Any mistakes are my own, apologies in advance. This isn’t a polished writeup, but hopefully will give you some insight into what was said.

Notes and Partial Transcript

(Notes taken 18/2/21)

Quick Bio
Name: Matt Elliott
Forum name: “Scenario”
Position at SSG: Senior World Designer
Background: Working on LOTRO for 15 years “on and off” - did not work on Gondor/Mordor – returned for U24

U29 - Wildwood

• First for LOTRO - Low cap content
• Inception in Matt’s R&D project: after wrapping up principal landscape development for Minas Morgul, Matt had a little bit of time in his schedule to dedicate to R&D
• “flex some design muscles”
• “see how quickly I could build a space”
• “build a space that was maybe a little bit different than what we had done before”
• Chunk of space in between Shire, Breeland, Shire and Evendim –
• By and large undeveloped - “Ripe to take advantage of.”

Trestlebridge

• Blocked off gate way
• New section to town and road out of town
• Two Factions in region/village:
• Trestlebridge - Woodcutters Brotherhood
• Other side of area - League of the Axe

Q&A

• Favourite area of game: Shire - calm and relaxing place
• Large blocks of space unused: we only have so many people/time working on the game. Need for strong narrative, certain areas don’t get filled up or designed/populated
• Future areas: desire to have Tower Hills completed, connected and further the story
• Wildwood – how long was it an idea before greenlit? After Minas Morgul completion
• Side project
• ”I wanted to see how much time and effort it would take to build out a space like this just from the world side of things not necessarily including content and game systems associated with it. Just to see how much time it would take. And once it was built we didn’t really have a home for it. We didn’t have a place where we felt it could fit in with what we are doing because we were trying to tell the story leading up to the gates of Gundabad. That kind of thing is very important to us if we want to able to tell our story and to drive our story forward.”
• Talks with content designers about ideas we could have for content in the space when we were ready to do something.
• Time to in our schedule this year to actually build it
• To actually make it a living breathing playable space
• Favourite parts about it:
• Dynamic areas
• All monster camps are in area are “switch state”
• Internal term – they can change the loadout at intervals
• Brigands populating now, populated with something completely different – orcs, half orcs, goblins etc
• Even some of the Decorations in the space would change based off which creature type is populating it  
• Chance if you clear the camp it will respawn as something different
• Favourite areas to work in design?
• “I tend to find things that I really enjoy working on in every place that I get a chance to touch.”
• Revamp – name?
• “Because we had such great more modern looking asserts that we could go in and really help bring in more atmosphere to that space that was already oozing with atmosphere.”

More areas like Wildwood?

• Interest in the team doing this
• Need to make sure have they right time and space when they do it

Connect Gundabad and Angmar?

• Considered, no specifics
• On radar, like to do
• Connection via teleport – eg Vale of Anduin/Misty Mountains

How different were world designs MEO (Middle-earth Online) vs LOTRO?

• Effectively same art and design teams
• Changing product over to different style of game
• Greater reliance on older world building techniques in MEO
• More simplistic techniques – allow to build out landscape more quickly, it wouldn’t necessarily allow the kind of detail that we would want out of everything

Designing alternate landscapes - Mordor Besieged / Flooded Isengard – how helpful is it to have those spaces already pre-built?

• Most alternative spaces are meant to reflect a different period of time in that region
• Sometimes the difference in time is very short – nominal changes (eg Isengard flooded vs Isengard not flooded – not drastic change)
• Mordor Besieged – very different era – changes can be very drastic
• SSG learned from the experience from Mordor Besieged and hopefully corrected in with warzone in Elderslade
• Mordor Besieged – disappointed didn’t feel like it was at war
• Feedback taken into consideration
• Actively changing the landscape in the warzone version and not making it really feel like it was a changed space

How does working remotely affect world development?

• Changed officer actions
• Required good amount of fast and fancy work by IT departments to get hardware and software at a point where they could easily work
• Tools to build LOTRO really work almost as well connecting remotely as they do in person – credit to IT people working their magic

Strange easter eggs that offmap explorers have found over the years?

• Hobbit dancing with a bunch of squirrels / Place between North Downs and Lowlands
• Remnants of old prototypes
• Developers spending time having fun themselves
• More Easter Eggs hidden in the world than you are likely to know
• Evendim – terrain polish – textures on beach, a designer had hidden their signature in effectively in invisible ink on beach - different terrain texture type using same artwork
• Same designer - Ered Luin – hidden on a tree somewhere in Ered Luin his initials and his then-fiance’s initials in a heart on a tree
• Lots of those Easter Eggs
• Out of bounds – remnants of prototypes or versions of the game gone past
• Hobbit villages – original E3 demos – no longer accessible
• Was at one point a lot more prototype stuff happening around the entirety of the map – as they approached launch looked at what we were making for playable space and what they had as broken prototype stuff - made decision to try delete some of the bigger more complex prototype spaces so that there weren’t accidental exposures and bad things happening to characters
• On the Test server – further underscore the dangers of unfinished spaces – Matt was trying to check out a space SSG are developing for U30 later this year and accidently broke his character doing it and had to do some shenanigans in order to unbreak him

Why did SSG choose to make this area (Wildwood) dynamic and changing?

• Purpose of trying to make things a little more interesting
• First time come through space or even playing different characters on different days- experience is slightly different - feel like a little more living and little more breathing
• Mines – half orcs or orcs or goblins
• Hunting animals – hunting camps will change
• Extension of content they had in the game years ago – eg some camps in Breeland would change, content built to support the areas didn’t take into account randomness of spaces – eg quest to kill boars but there are bears – couldn’t complete quest
• With this space in mind – spawns in this space support the content in this space – not going to be waiting for a respawn – quests work with this notion

Will development go South into Umbar or Harad for desert action?

• A place they want to go
• Need to have the right story to tell in those spaces
• Currently story is going into Gundabad
• Doing an interlude until they get there
• Elderslade left at gates of Gundabad
• This update – palate cleanser for everyone, something fresh, something a little different from what we have seen before
• Give players a reason to enjoy their lower level experiences again

Frill heights?

• Always trying to have a balancing act with frills
• Piece of tech to get – pretty low priority to get – will help with issues
• Certain areas use shorter frills used where they can
• Room for improvement
• Bug found today – Old Forest instance needed frills trimming

Plans for Grey Havens in close future?

• Probably not in close future
• Tricky thing with a place like the Grey Havens – really represents the conclusion of a number of characters’ journeys
• Still a lot going on in Middle-earth in terms of story – defeated Sauron, destroyed the Ring, just celebrated a wedding
• Still a long road for player characters and npcs to travel before we call it day
• “Honestly don’t think any of us want to see that day called.”

Hobbit and squirrels – responsible?

• No, he can’t take credit for that

Tower Hills/Grey Havens – Any other zones didn’t make it?

• Certainly a lot of plans for the entirety of Eriador
• Efforts became more focused on telling the Epic Story and because of that led SSG away from a lot of other areas that are nice and fun to see
• Hopefully as we progress through the Legacy of Durin and return to epic story and look at where we want to go beyond that, that there are opportunities for us to jump into some of those areas of world

Texture stretching on top of hill in the Attack of Dawn Skirmish?

• Not aware
• Adding note
• File a bug
• Happy to have bugs for landscape or games system stuff
• If Filing bugs for landscape: add a /LOC string so they know exactly where to go
• Not everyone has worked on everything, so it can be sometimes hard to know where exactly an issue is happening without that very specific area

Graphical improvements?

• Lot of interesting adding more improvements to the game while also keeping things still performing
• Focused attenuated lighting system
• Huge thing for SSG
• Less apparent on landscape
• In dungeon spaces and other interior spaces (eg dungeon space in Wildwood) – much more apparent
• One of the Challenges – from a lighting perspective prior to this – have gorgeous normal maps that a lot of assets have – hard to light them effectively considering the restrictions the engine had previously
• Great thing with attenuated lighting system – now they don’t need to use certain more expensive lights to get in order to the normal maps to really pop out
• Drawbacks to the system - 15 year old game and so much content
• Places where Lighting doesn’t feel quite right - had to do some other trickery to make lighting look good in the space at the time with that engine
• Building this game with us, so if you find any things off – do a bug report so they can check out and fix

Do you have design and create each little section of the map? Like every little turn, nook and rock?

• Do bulk higher level broad stroke designing – take a grey scale image used as foundations of a height map and engine will interpret the greyscale image to know where hills and valleys are
• Also use procedurally placed scene assets to help speed things along
• Every tree/frill are procedurally placed – not driven crazy
• Trick is to figuring out the properties and settings needed to have in place to make something feels good and natural
• Over years – lost knowledge, trying to re-attain – people left company or moved on to other projects – kind of things that they were doing, that information wasn’t passed on and so they to try to relearn it
• Vale of Anduin/Wells of Landflood – areas where Matt specifically spent a lot of playing around with scene files system – to get something that felt good and natural without requiring to do a lot of hand placement.
• Terrain textures are hand painted – eg see in distance with rocks – larger rocks are hand placed, add extra detail to terrain.

First step in designing a new region?

• Designing a new region for a world design really depends on kind of space it’s going to be
• Wildwood – doesn’t have a lot of story/lore attached to it - able to get in and start sculpting the terrain and building the landscape – see where we have story overlap once we have got things going
• Brand new whole cloth areas - places not touched by them or in-between adjacent to things - start off with a Region personality
• Most focused Lore people – take the idea for region
• Eg Vales of Anduin, Elderslade, Gundabad and U30 update – start by researching with existing maps - Fonstad Atlas – a major resource for where things are likely to go on the landscape
• Deep dive into entirety of the Tolkien canon
• Pieces of source can’t be used, stick to LOTR and Hobbit, looking at other materials helps them have a give bigger picture of the world at large and bigger picture of what the space could be even if they can’t reference some of the things in those spaces

Thoughts on reusing assets? Colour scheme being out place?

• Pros and cons to that conversation
• Goals with Wildwood – preview board for players that have not experienced Moria and beyond yet – see in Wildwood – primarily creature types but also deco and artwork are things they will see later on – teaser/taste for what is later on
• Buildings in Cotfast (Note: in Gondor) – really nice structures, not built with very a specific culture in mind, straight forward crofters houses – reused in other places – Angmar has a crofters stead (Note: new area Traders wharf reuses these)
• In Wildwood - appearance applied to buildings – fit in more with the Bree aesthetic – aspects have original artwork but also parts too that bring in the Breeland style – roofs and stone foundations – meet things halfway in that conversation

Professor Corey Olson – will you ever be able to go into Radagast’s house in Rhosgobel? He wants to get a better view of the town with the bird houses

• Wouldn’t rule it out
• Not currently on to do list
• If they had time/need they will go there

Under-level aggro ping?

• Put in place a long time ago in order to prevent some exploitive behaviour happening at the time
• There was a reason for it going in because of some degenerative gameplay that was coming out of it

Will LOTRO be around in 20 years?

• Hopefully, maybe, who knows what the future holds. Certainly not planning it going anywhere in the foreseeable future

When building landscape, what is the interaction like between art and animation teams? Do you ever feel constrained by limitations of how long it takes new art to be produced?

• Convents and ideals behind project management and production – “Restrictions breed creativity” – time or available resources
• Benefit to not being able to get everything they want – allows to better think about what they really need for a space
• Have such a large library now after so many years – particularly for building landscapes – can get a lot what they want and need done using what they have
• Ask for certain things polished and cleaned up - not that they don’t want to ask for things – Everyone’s time is precious – there are going to be times when we need more support for an area than others.
• >> During the gameplay show, the area Matt had visited about 15 mins ago had gone from goblins to orcs as he was talking

In respect to the instance design process do landscape devs sketch out the area or do content devs come up with their mechanics and get landscape to match?

• Very collaborative process – depends on the needs for the space
• Sometimes the Instance designer will have a high level idea for what they want and put a map showing how they want the layout of the space to work and kind of leave it up to the world designers to do it, to build it up
• Sometimes instance designer may be like “I just need it to take 10 mins to get from point a to point b and needs to be this thing here, and this is the high level of the space, going to be a fight with orcs in a city or a spider cave”
• Lot of checking in and back and forth – “take a look at the space now” or “Does this work for you?”

Midsummer festival music was amazing!

• “I cannot say enough good things about Bill’s (Champagne) music. He has done some very fantastic stuff for Lord of the Rings and it is easily some of the best music that I have heard both in this game and in general. He deserves every reward he can get for this, for his work.”

The Lord of the Rings Online:The Great Wedding | Bill Champagne ft. Tera Catallo

Per-pixel lighting attenuation

• Taking old system – vertex based lighting module – where light influences lit polygons  based off where their vertexes were. Is making It a pixel-based system – allows lights to have a much great coverage and more accurate reflection of the volumes that they comprise. On top of that the system also makes it so lights can cause normal map effects to pop where old system needed a very specific kind of light to cause that.

Can you give us non-programmer types a quick simple crash course on the process of worldbuilding?

• Worldbuilding – comprises a bunch of different things on LOTRO
• High level physical sculpting and design of a space.
• What it looks like - taking the building blocks of things like plants, rocks, trees, bushes. What the sky looks like.
• Taking them building blocks and pulling them together into a single cohesive thing
• “I often explain to my grandmother that I am a landscaper in a digital space. Probably one of the most effective ways to explain what it is we do. Everyone understands what a landscaper is and what a landscaper does. We don’t necessarily grow the trees but sometimes I do. But I am responsible for placing them in such a way they look good.”

How often is concept art created before developing environment?

• Often concept art is created for specific points of interest – major city/tower, something very specifically called out and more – want to get concept art for it
• When working on an area from starting it out – if they don’t have a specific purlieu they need - go to photo reference for it – take a look at what is out there existing in the world, the kind of caves that are out there, landscapes out there. Did this for Moria. One things they did to prepare for Moria was there was a great National Geographic documentary series that was all about caves. For several weeks they had Friday afternoon documentary watching sessions - sat down, have some drinks, watch the NG documentaries to wrap their heads around what cave systems would look like.

What is the most surprising and humorous landscape bug they have come across?

• Monster behaviour being played with – untargeted – troll throwing boulder, dodged the boulder, boulder hit a deer and it attacked the troll and actually beat the troll. “Don’t know how it happened but I sat there and watched it happen for 15 minutes and it was amazing.”

What kind of level design advice for junior level designers?

• “Your goal as a designer is to balance performance with fun. You want to make sure that the space you are building is something that is enjoyable and appealing but you don’t want it to be something that is frustrating to get through. Me saying this, you know, I’m sure has a little bit of bemusement for some of you because some of the spaces we have built are not the most enjoyable of spaces to work your way through and is something that is definitely a learning experience for all as we proceed in the game. And we try new things, they may not work out. Trying stuff is definitely also very important. Seeing if you can make something work in as a non-destructive way as possible.”

When play as you create a new landscape do you run the ambient lighting maxed out?

• Do not play with ambient light settings set to default - don’t want to assume that this is the default people are running on
• Matt personally doesn’t design with any sort of ambient set
• Will have a light toggle turned so he can see what he is working on
• By and large – tailor lighting good for the space
• Ambient lighting slider – to help account for difference in environment – video cards, own lighting around you, monitors

Any regions Matt would like to redo?

• He doesn’t have any areas he would completely redo
• Some spots would benefit from extra clean up here and there
• Doesn’t want to burn down and start from scratch
• Stables – wants to improve. In Eriador built at a time when a different gameplay mentality within the team and MMOs in general – travel should mean something, journey definitely does mean something – why slow travel routes still supported everywhere, something great about being able to go your own way at your own pace and explore
• Space to add more stable routes, clean up routes, revise things
• Overall holistically look at how travel is handled and how both simplify and improve the system

>> Matt has a lot of Spidermen

Camps changing – a global thing? All players see the same mobs or per player kind of thing?

• Global thing
• Chance respawn is different mob
• Same for everyone, not per client

Housing – what next?

• Like to do more housing
• Thinking about and making some plans for
• Nothing specific to announce or say
• Yes, they want to do more housing – next? Likely be Elf, Hobbit or Dwarf – one of those three
• Not doing another human based housing neighbourhood next – plenty of those

Level scaling?

• Pushed idea for Wildwood, level scaling system used in Ettenmoors isn’t ideal for what they want to do there – lot of open questions about how coming into a space that is level scaling would interact with the player as opposed to teleporting into the space like you do in the Ettenmoors. Ettenmoors works because of a clear entry point. Wildwood – lot of crossing back and forth, don’t know how that would work

Areas not done?

• Plenty of places in the world they would love to get to - west of Blue Mountains, Lindon – no shortage of landscape for them, all a matter of time and opportunity – Matt hopes they have both

When working on world building does he listen to music?

• Matt has some sort of soundtrack running, changed over the years – remembers building Ered Luin listening to Breaking Benjamin and Chevelle – Currently his mix is a lot of 311, Dirty Heads and Twenty One Pilots - also his daughter’s music

New update release?

• Not announced
• New Bullroarer soon – updates and changes

Starter area maps

• Top level maps did change – Breeland, Shire, Ered Luin
• Inset maps like Thorin’s Hall did not change
• Original style maps were great, but didn’t help find landmarks – open to artist interpretation
• As game grown – change in mentality – product of thought processes on how people use maps at time – game has grown - Gamers in general have grown more sophisticated – wants out of maps have gotten more sophisticated
• Old School maps – people lament them going away – may be opportunities in future to introduce systems that allow you to toggle between and choose different versions of maps – talked about but not on radar right now

How does Landscape design interact with content design – does content ask for things to help to tell story? Or does story evolve from what landscape is provided? How much do you consider the story content when designing?

• Work close in tandem
• World designers responsible for physical aspects of the area – where roads, rivers, towns are – informed by research
• Content need – eg ruins – if space they try to accommodate or work with the designer to find an alternative
• Just as release up to the point it is ready to go to Bullroarer – Matt will go through and play the content and space – checking what content wants to do in a space is well supported by landscape
• Very collaborative
• Pandemic has forced them to be even more collaborative – no opportunity to discuss in person

Will Ferny’s worksite ever get finished?

• Maybe – some parts of what they have done in Trestlebridge will appeal to those who have fondness for the worksite

Why are Iron Hills close to Erebor – should be more space in-between?

• Balancing of landscape space and travel time
• If built a world that was realistically proportioned to how the maps are, there would be a lot of dead time running through a region
• Have a very large landscape – worlds built are very big
• Need to be careful making it too big – one of the placating parts of gaming – if you have to run through same area over and over again, and is such a long haul – a lot of time and investment on players part – can drag - decisions on scale of time for players – what is the threshold for frustration?
• Matt enjoyed the questions and giving talk and tour of Wildwood – in future could do other regions and some of other areas in-game and do a commentary track behind them

Docks?

• Leadup to Wildwood - Brandywine River now has a dock network – starts at Bucklebury Ferry and going all way up to Tinnudir - includes Traders Wharf and a few spots in Evendim
• Learning experience for Matt – scripting in UI to make overhead icons show up – nice tease – interested in doing for other major rivers throughout game – particularly the Anduin river, biggest longest most storied river of the game thus far

Different mounts?

• Warmounts - lobbied for. Wants more.

Rhun And Harad?

• A place he would love to go to - time and opportunity will tell

>> Hard no on 500% speed mounts – how landscape loads and over time, would not make landscape or players happy

What worldbuilder do you use to build LOTRO?

• Called “Worldbuilder” – proprietary tool developed and used for Asheron’s Call – versions used over years to make Asheron’s Call 1 & 2 and now LOTRO