The latest developer journal out of Turbine looks at the work of Live Designers and their efforts to create content for Lord of the Rings Online.

If there is one thing that Live Designers share in common across Turbine, it is our desire to (try to) do everything ourselves. It is not uncommon to see a single designer writing quests, developing deeds, making scripts (both story and game), and tinkering with game systems. We do this out of a sense of ownership in our work – we want to make something our own from start to finish.

In our current development environment, it is difficult for a designer to truly say they did everything from start to finish on a single piece of content. Sometimes it is our schedules that prohibit us from doing so (we are very busy people, some more so than we ought to be), sometimes it is a general lack of understanding of how a certain system functions (my current weakness is the loot system, I look at it and have a greater respect for all the number crunching our Game Systems Designers do) or a missing skill set (as much as we’d like, very few of us are artists). Make no mistake, collaborative efforts are equally rewarding – but sometimes it is fun to challenge yourself by striking towards the unknown on your own.

Read more about Live Designers and Lord of the Rings.

Bad link.

 Hi guys.  The link at the bottom of this article is broken.  Current link says: http://www.mmorpg.com/LINK

Thanks.  Looking forward to reading the remainder of this article.

Found it on lotro.com:
http://www.lotro.com/gameinfo/devdiaries/343-developer-diary-solving-problems-and-making-friends-part-i

Just went to the forums to report the link is broken, but this was done already :D

Thanks for the link, StrikeFear

Strikefear, Thank you for the link. Definitely a "must read" article! :-)

I think this a great series of additions, the instances are a very cool idea, you get adventure, and crafting and rep items for a 30 minutes play session. Its good stuff. Turbine has a history of adding things like this to test the waters, i foresee more of this trickling down to the lower levels/tiers.