I’ve always felt that The Lord of the Rings Online is at its best when it’s departing the story of the War of the Ring and telling its own original tales in Middle-earth. Tolkien’s world is rich, varied and full of potential, and as much as I enjoy the narrative told in the books, The Lord of the Rings Online’s potential to tell original stories within Arda always felt compelling. And indeed, from the outset the team has had the chance to flex those creative muscles, from the original Shadows of Angmar stories in Angmar, to the addition of Evendim, or more recently the stories in Northern Rhovanion with the Dwarves’ reclamation of Gundabad.
I’m not sure I’ve been as excited for a new region to join the extensive map of LotRO’s Middle-earth as I am for the arrival of Umbar. It’s a region that was among the first I thought of when Executive Producer Rob Ciccolini teased the “smell of salt water,” and it’s one that has held a place in my mind ever since I read the book. It’s close to Gondor, yet also close to Harad where I’m hoping we see a subtle shift in the sky as we move further south. Longtime LotRO players, much like Aragorn himself, have crossed “many mountains and many rivers, and trodden many plains,” and now we have the chance to cross into Harad ourselves, “where the stars are strange.”
Last week, we talked about the beginnings of an expansion, from the planning phase to getting the ideas off the ground. But how does the team visualize and build the world itself, especially when building an area with very little written about it compared to some of the more well-trod areas of Middle-earth? In this part of our Building An Expansion interview series, we will explore building Umbar, from concept to replacing the placeholder trees with real ones on the map itself.
Constructing The Fabric Of Umbar
Before the first placeholder trees can be set in the region that will become Umbar, the team had to start researching exactly what Umbar was in Middle-earth.The process starts, as Senior World Designer Matt Elliot explained, with a high-level “efforts” the team does, one of which is a “region personality document.”
“Once we’re in pre-production, there are a couple of high-level efforts that we do,” Matt told me in our interview. “We have something that is called a region personality document, which is usually Chris [Pierson’s] workload, where he will go through all of the source materials, regardless of whether or not we have the license to it. He’ll go through all of that and basically compile all of the information there is to be found about the specific location we’re going. That includes the geography, the peoples that live there, any events or historical bits of intrigue that might be occurring there, what kind of cultures are there, [and] what kind of flora and fauna are there. And from that, he then goes through and distills that into a narrative direction for the space that fits within what we have the rights to.”
Building something like the region of Umbar, which is visible on basically every Middle-earth map, but isn’t featured more than just passing references to the Corsairs of Umbar in the story proper, is a tall order. For Chris Pierson’s part, he tells me that the start of world-building a new region begins with maps.
“It’s me diving into maps a lot and just plowing through the text and trying to figure out exactly how things are going to be shaped,” Chris said in our interview. “We essentially come up with a location and a rough size of the area that we want to make available for the players that we feel we can actually provide in the time allotted.”
It’s not just about picking a spot on the map and going from there. As mentioned, Pierson pours over the source material, whether it’s the Lord of the Rings proper, the Histories of Middle-earth, and so on, to build the framework the team will use to craft the new region. A place like Umbar presents its own unique challenges, one that the team has faced before when creating regions that aren’t prominently featured in the books, but a challenge nonetheless.
When building a place like Rivendell, Bree, or the Shire, Tolkien wrote so much, and considering the chief heroes of his story all inhabited these places at one point in their adventure, they are more fully fleshed out. A place like Umbar, though, is only spoken about as some faraway land, one whose Corsairs filled the people living near the Bay of Belfalas with dread. But what were the people who have lived there for centuries like? What is that culture like? How do they live, and so on? These are all questions that Chris, Matt, and the rest of the world-building team need to decide on early on as it will help literally shape how the new playspace looks and feels.
“Then it’s really just like mashing up maps and figuring out what the interesting stuff is for both the setting and character,” Chris said. “And people will provide ideas a lot, like I’ll do a lot of discussion with our environmental artists and our architectural artists about what might Umbar look like. We know nothing - well, we don’t know nothing, but boy is it close.”
Umbar itself has an interesting history in Middle-earth, one that the dev team seems keen to reflect in how the main city and regions look and feel. Umbar itself, while its considered part of Harad now, it was once a city of Numenoreans, then part of Gondor proper. Yet, the city is most known for it being a haven to its Corsairs, who threatened Southern Gondor all along the coast in the Bay of Belfalas, thanks partly to Sauron’s influence in the region.
Thorongil (actually Aragorn under a pseudonym) led a raid against the Corsairs in the Haven of Umbar, defeating them and lessening the threat for a time. All of this history is something that the team considers when building up the city and region players will journey within over the expansion.
“[Umbar’s] been through so many changes that there’s a lot of layers to the city that you can find when you go from one part of it to the next,” Chris explains. “Parts of them are more Numenorean, and parts are more local Umbari, or you know, the occupiers from Harad.”
Chris goes a step further, stating that we “don’t even know really exactly what Umbar is like.” From the source, Tolkien refers to Harad as a “desert,” though Chris speculates what Tolkien really thought as well when using the term, and how Tolkien’s language choices overall shaped how the team approached the region.
“When Tolkien talks about things like Harad being a desert land, it’s hard to know for sure what he means with the word ‘desert.’ Like, this is where these languages can be a real challenge because the ‘desert’ the way the US is just kind of means abandoned. It doesn’t necessarily mean rolling sand dunes forever. We want to have some of that, certainly, but Umbar in particular, needs to have enough around it so it can feel like a city that might actually exist in the world and no just something dropped on an extraordinarily barren landscape.
‘We know there is a river there with some of the maps, so we know there’s got to be some fertility. Mediterranean is exactly where, again, looking at the language that Tolkien uses, they’re not pirates, they’re Corsairs. Corsairs were Mediterranean pirates of both Muslims and Christians in the real world. So, We don’t want them to be Buccaneers. We’ve had to make sure we don’t use words like Buccaneer in the game because they’re not that; they’re Corsairs, they’re a different thing.”
Pierson mentions too that you can look at the Bay of Belfalas in the Southern climes of Middle-earth as the equivalent of the Mediterranean. As such, the world-building team looked at real-world Mediterranean cultures and empires that have shaped and influenced the real-world region, pulling from them to craft the Middle-earth version for Umbar.
“Doing a city, a new city that we get to define what it looks like, we did a lot of brainstorming and wound up pulling, ‘Okay, so maybe it’s a little by Byzantium, maybe it’s a little bit Carthage, maybe it’s a little bit Venice, maybe it’s all of these things.’ And that’s helped with the whole layered history part of the city and just generally making it into a breathing thing.”
Chris mentions too that many of the team went back and revisited things like Homer’s The Odyssey and everything from that through Harryhausen’s Sinbad movies, since they all take place in the real-world Mediterranean.
“If Tolkien’s Northern European settings drew so much from things like Beowulf, then it stands to reason that Tolkien’s Mediterranean settings would have similarities to stories that were told in that region. That’s not to say that there’s a Minotaur or anything wandering around, but we might find some things that fit more with the way Tolkien approached monsters but have more of a that feel of the area.”
Overcoming Challenges
Moving from the northern areas of Middle-earth, whose regions are dominated by the remnants of the Unified Kingdom of Arnor and Gondor, the Elvish kingdoms, and more, the team is able to leverage existing art to help build its worlds quicker.
However, The Lord of the Rings Online: Corsairs of Umbar takes us to a part of Middle-earth that we just have not seen before. Visualizing Umbar as more of a Mediterranean-influenced location - Matt said on a recent Casual Stroll Through Umbar stream that one major influence was Greece as portrayed by Assassin’s Creed Odyssey - it’s unlike anything we’ve seen in Standing Stone Games’ representation of Middle-earth. As a result, the art ask required quite a few new assets to build out the region the team was visualizing and whether or not there is enough time given to really put it all together.
“I think the biggest challenge is knowing what amount of lead time is the appropriate amount of lead time for something of this scope,” Matt explains. “And something that we have to work hard to account for is like, ‘Okay, we’re doing this new expansion, it’s got a lot of landscape, how much is there going to be for new assets versus not new assets?’
“I think look at Gundabad and Before the Shadow in comparison to what we’re doing with Umbar, the development needs are very, very different, because with Gundabad and Before the Shadow, what we were making, by and large, we were able to leverage a lot of the existing stuff that we had, put a little bit of a spin on it and then we’re good to go. The Shield Isles and Umbar, the Cape of Umbar, like all of those are places that are geographically distinct. Flora and fauna distinct, culturally distinct places that we’ve never been before. We’re in territories that are no longer strictly Gondorian.”
As a result, the approach to building these more culturally distinct and visually distinct regions is very different than what they normally do, so the lead time needs to be bigger. But through that extended lead time, the SSG team can sort of “front-load” the things they need to build to make the next part a little bit easier when staying in the same region. As a result, using Umbar as an example, putting in that extra effort as a team now saves them time when building out the other areas around the Cape of Umbar moving forward should the team move in that direction with future updates.
Even though the lead time is longer than with other updates, the actual development time is shorter than you might expect for an expansion. As we talked about in our first part of this series, the first rumblings of Corsairs of Umbar began in the summer of last year, but development didn’t really start in earnest till the beginning of this year. Elliot mentions that part of that is down to the nature of SSG’s development process, which Chris echoes as well.
“The way we generally tend to work is if we are working in a way where updates were siloed, but also working concurrently, I think that would stretch the time out a little bit,” Matt says. “But the way we work right now is we build an update, and then we move onto the next thing; we build an update, we move onto the next thing. So, it’s really very much an ‘all hands on deck to build this,’ as opposed to a smaller subset of the team working on it over a longer period of time.”
Swapping Pine Trees For Palm Trees
Once the foundations are laid, the team starts to build the map that will eventually become the play area thousands of adventurers will tread over the coming years. The team will start building the narrative structure, and the expansion will follow. For things that they don’t have the rights to, say, for example, the Valar themselves, they will figure out ways to allude to it or, in the case of Annatar, the Lord of Gifts, a pivotal character from the Second Age who is instrumental in the creation of the Rings of Power, the team will come up with a new name for their version of Middle-earth, Antheron.
Building Umbar, though, starts with a high-level map built by either Chris or Matt at the outset of the process. From there, the world team divvies up the work as they can, from laying the foundation of the more technical work to breaking up parts of the world for each to work on themselves.
“Usually, Chris and I switch off back and forth between that, and he’ll start out some high-level map planning,” Elliot explains. “Then I’ll bring in what he’s made for a map into some of the tools that I use to create initial height maps and export that out, so we can have a good first pass of the height map that we want with the mountains and hills and flat areas and whatnot all mapped out. And then after that, we just break it up, we decide who wants what sections, and then we start building.”
Elliot mentions the team is “pretty fortunate” that they can build the map and game world without the final assets locked into place, instead using placeholder items to build out a space.
“Later on, when we do get what we want, we can swap in the new things, which is where we are at with some stuff in Umbar right now.”
One placeholder both developers seem keen on finally replacing when we interviewed them was swapping the pine trees for Umbar’s palm trees.
“I’m no longer using pine trees as placeholders as I build stuff out,” Chris said with a chuckle. “So that’s fun.”
Building the maps in The Lord of the Rings Online is a multilayered affair with regard to the technology they are using. Part of the process is literally hand placing those pine palm trees, while some of it does involve using tools to help generate the map itself.
“I think it’s a pretty strong marriage of both,” Matt says. He mentions that he uses a complex scene file system that be used to generate the landscape.
“We have the scene file system, which are basically very complex config files that we can use to tell a given portion of the landscape what tres should go here, what bushes should go here, what grass and flowers and all of that should go into this area. And we can paste that down at a high level. And then the scene file system will randomize the usage and placement based off the criteria within our scene file configs.”
Elliot says he’s also been exploring a tool called World Machine, which is a height map generation tool that can help to create different styles of terrain, which he uses to create a sample terrain that he uses as a brush set in a 2D heightmap.
“I’ll paint down what I want, and then it’s a matter of, ‘Okay, I’ve got what I want painted down in 2D form, I’ll export it out into a format that our tools understands, import that into our tools, take a look at it and then repeat that loop for the terrain. And then after that we go into hand painting the terrain itself.
“But that’s the high level where we have some automation, we have a lot of handwork, and it all just comes together with both to form what we make.”
Looking Ahead
Next time, we’ll take a look at the creation of the Mariner itself, the player class that draws its influence from the sea faring Eärendil and feels at home in the Mediterranean climes of the Cape of Umbar. From there, we’ll explore how the team approaches all of this while maintaining the voice of Tolkien across the breadth of the languages The Lord of the Rings Online is localized in, from its creation in English and so on. Stay tuned!
