Lord of the Rings: Conquest Post Mortem - Interviews

An action title featuring some of the most intense battles of the Lord of the Rings movies seems like a no-brainer when it comes to offering a great target-rich environment for gamers to play in. And while maybe it didn't hit the Metacritic score the team hoped for, Jon Katz, Associate Producer at Pandemic Studios, is still proud of the work they did on Lord of the Rings: Conquest. We ask him about the cachet of the license and the restrictions they might have faced with the license, playing as the bad guys, cross-platform play, old school gameplay mechanics and the proper way to do Downloadable content.

Thanks for your time, Jon!

Newsletter

Be notified of site updates. Sign-up for the Newsletter sent out twice weekly.

Enter E-Mail Address Below:

Lord of the Rings: Conquest Post Mortem Q&A Conducted by Aaron Simmer

The introductions: Your name, how you got into the industry, what titles you worked on previously, and your role on Lord of the Rings: Conquest.

Jon Katz, Associate Producer at Pandemic Studios. After a few years as a production assistant in the television industry I decided to switch over to the games industry (I realized I played more games then watched TV). I got my start in the games industry with THQ as a QA tester and then as a Mastering Lab Tech. From there I went to 2K Sports (Kush Games) as an Associate Producer and worked on several sports titles NHL 2K6 and 2K7 were exciting because they were each launch titles for the Xbox 360 and PS3 respectively. After this, in February 2008, I ended up signing on with Pandemic. LoTR Conquest has been my first Pandemic title and it was about a year away from shipping when I came on

To date, Conquest has sold pretty well. Are sales numbers more gratifying than Metacritic scores?

That depends on who in the company you ask :) The accountants who focus purely on the sales figures probably think that it is. For me it’s gratifying to jump onto a multiplayer server (anonymously) and to hear how much fun people are having. Is the Metacritic score lower then we hoped and strived for? Yes. But are people, not critics, having fun playing it? I know they are.

Does the Lord of the Rings license still have the cachet that it had when the movies were in theaters?

I think the appeal to some may have died down but the world of Middle Earth is one that is so captivating that it’ll hold swagger for a long time. I mean it did pretty well

Advertisement

on its own for a long time before Peter Jackson made those movies :) I also think interest in LoTR is continuing to stick around because of The Hobbit movie coming out in a few years. Middle Earth is still very much in people’s minds even if it’s not right up at the front the way it was a few years ago.

How restrictive is it working with the Lord of the Rings

Advertisement

license? By that I mean, were there aspects of the game eliminated or changed to better fall in line with the “lore” of the movies?

Obviously with any licensed property everything has to be approved by the licensor. Were there initial ideas and designs we were asked to change? Of course. But there were other things we were allowed great flexibility on too. For instance the hardcore LoTR fans will tell you wizards were not common at all, in fact there were only 5 in all of Middle Earth. But for gameplay variety we wanted a magic-using class and the licensors allowed us to do that, but we had to call them Mages and not Wizards :)

Developing a game from scratch must take up a lot of time with concept designs and how the world will look and such but with something so defined like Lord of the Rings presumably there was more time to work on play balancing. Was this the case?

Working with an established world does save you some time of inventing it from scratch. But the process of creating a game doesn’t change because of that. We still did extensive concept art of every level, character, and weapon we created because you have to take ideas from the books and images from the movies and then adapt them to how they will work in a video game. In the movies you may see several location shots of a city like Minas Tirith, but in a game you have to be able to run between each of those locations so we have to “fill in the gaps” so to speak.

Conquest features the chance to play as the bad guys. Were there any objections made by fans with altering the ending of Return of the King so players could play as Sauron’s forces?

Any objections? No. In fact when we showed the game at E3, Comic Con, and several press events that’s all anyone wanted to talk about. The overall attitude was “finally!”.

There have been complaints made that Conquest features too many random instant death scenarios, such as getting hit by an oliphant tusk. Was this design decision made to fit the overall chaos of the battlefield?

Those types of deaths may be random the first time they happen to you, but after you get picked up by a fellbeast the first time I bet you’re paying attention to them from then on. In parts of the game that are more… hazardous to a player… we try to give them some extra lives.

Like anything in life, Conquest must have experienced some lows and highs during its development cycle. What were those lows and highs for Conquest and what did it teach the team?

People in the video game industry are driven by passion and a desire to do great work. Whenever that’s the case, you have good days and bad days. I had some amazing times working alongside the Lord of the Rings team. And of course we had some rough days as if planets failed to align. It really does feel like a family at Pandemic with all the highs and lows. But of course we keep coming back because the good so outweighs the difficulties. That’s what I’ve learned from working on creative teams and that’s why I keep fighting for a gamer to tell me “that was cool”.

Conquest shipped on three different platforms. Will we ever see the day that players on the Xbox 360 can play against PC and Playstation 3 consoles? Would this cross-over play help extend the online “lifespan” of a game like Conquest?
If we could wave a magic wand (or keyboard) and it “just worked” that would be great and we’d love to do it, but there are technical and legal issues and challenges that make the development of cross-over play very difficult. So I don’t think we will be seeing this any time soon.

Balancing characters in any kind of versus or team mode is a challenge for any developer, but how did Pandemic approach the problem of evening out the sides without making them identical? Was it all just down to play testing?

We had multiplayer playtests every day and even weekly team-wide tournaments that helped with most of the balancing. We also had a test level that was like an arena the combat designers and animators could use. We eventually took the arena idea and released it as free DLC.

How much has the game been tweaked since launch in order to address issues of balance?

We have not tweaked the existing characters but we did do a lot of balancing on the new Heroes, Boromir, Arwen, and Gothmog.

The limited number of lives has been cited in a few reviews and on fan boards as something they don’t like about Conquest. Why include such an “old school” convention?

To save gamers from themselves :) Without a lives system we found that players would keep walking into situations and trying to slug their way through an obstacle when that really might not be the best way. With a lives system we sort of force the issue by making you think about what you’re going to do.

Though there may be many, what part of Conquest can you point to and say, “We nailed that!”

The Evil campaign. I feel we delivered on all our promises there 100%, and it’s a lot of fun to see how the story unfolds all while you’re killing hobbits.

Is there anything about Conquest that identifies it as a game produced by Pandemic Studios (besides the opening logos)?

Well it obviously bears a lot of similarities to the Star Wars Battlefront games which were also done by Pandemic. Conquest carries on the tradition of fast paced intense action fans of Pandemic have come to expect.

There’s already been some but what other downloadable content is in the works for Conquest? And maybe you can touch upon the importance of timing when it comes to launching downloadable content (i.e. what’s a good interval for DLC?).

We just released the second DLC package and at this time have not announced any additional DLC. There is a desire to keep working on DLC and growing the game but unfortunately at this time all efforts by what was the LoTR team are being applied to Pandemic’s other projects. That could change however, I’ll never say never to more LoTR DLC. For the timing we wanted to release the first package shortly after the game launched. This is always a tricky situation because people feel that if it’s too close to the game’s release then it should have been in the game initially. The truth is it takes several weeks from when the game is “done” to when it ends up on the store shelves. In those several weeks the team gets started on making DLC. So while the timing may appear that the content could or should have been in the regular game it usually could not have been.

Was there any thought given to including overt mini-games in Conquest? I’ve always thought an Orc Mining mini-game would be awesome!

I agree, mini-games can often be that extra goodie like taking a frosted cake and then adding sprinkles on top. But unfortunately you have to finish making the cake first before you can add the sprinkles. Every person we would have had working on mini-games would have been one less person making sure the regular game got done.

I imagine that during a project like Conquest, members of the team may have picked-up some Lord of the Rings paraphernalia for “inspiration” or to run through the halls late at night LARPing the escape from Moria. What’s the weirdest piece of LotR merchandise that was acquired?

Well the life sized 3D models of Lurtz and Aragorn we had were always moving around the office. One day you’d get off the elevator and there was Aragorn welcoming you to the main lobby, or Lurtz was standing over the design team making sure they met a deadline. We have all kinds of LoTR toys and models including a little catapult and little hobbits. Let’s just say the hobbits fit on the catapult very nicely and fly very well :) Periodically we hold company wide meetings where every team gives an update to all the others about what’s going on with their project. For one of those meetings I delivered the Conquest update wearing a full Witch-king outfit, and before you ask those pictures have been burned :)

(March 6, 2009)