Over the course of an MMO’s life, expansions are oftentimes the lifeblood that fuels them. They expand stories, worlds, characters and more in ways that have a lasting effect on the minds of those who play the MMO. Some expansions have been considered the peak of a specific game, such as Wrath of the Lich King for World of Warcraft, or the recent Endwalker expansion bringing to a close a story a decade in the telling with Final Fantasy XIV.
Expansions present an interesting way to look at MMOs as well. Oftentimes, we look at an expansion through the lens of how it changes the base game. How much content is enough to justify the cost? Is the expansion adding anything meaningful to the MMO overall? How does it change the course of the game moving forward?
I’ve been incredibly curious about the team's process when creating a new expansion, especially on an MMO that has been around the block for a while. My first experience with an MMO expansion was when The Lord of the Rings Online launched Mines of Moria in 2009. As the first true major MMO I played, it was exciting to see the world of Middle-earth, which I’ve adored throughout my adult life, expand in meaningful ways with the inclusion of Khazad-dum, Lorien, and more.
Since then, though, I’ve played - and reviewed - many expansions across multiple MMOs, from World of Warcraft, The Lord of the Rings Online, The Elder Scrolls Online and many more. And despite this, the reviews or pieces have always looked at things through the lens of the end result - how they change and add onto the game they are expanding.
My curiosity as to how they are created has never really gone away, though.
To that end, as The Lord of the Rings Online prepares to launch its 11th overall expansion in 15 years, the upcoming Corsairs of Umbar, I sat down with multiple members of the Standing Stone Games team to talk about their process of building an MMO expansion. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be telling that story, from the start of the journey through to revealing it to the world.
A Long Expected Journey
Every expansion has to start somewhere; they just don’t pop out of the ground like daisies, fully developed and ready to be released into the wild. For a game like The Lord of the Rings Online, which has fifteen years of live operations behind them, the development of the MMO is more like a journey, much like the story they are pulling from. It all starts with where the players are now and where they will go next on that journey.
“Because of the type of content they do, and because of the wonderful works we work with, it’s kind of interesting watching the team because they think of the game development and direction very much like a journey,” Standing Stone Games Executive Producer Rob Ciccolini told me in our interview. “Which is not surprising when you look at the source material.”
As a result of this mindset, the team looks at where the players will go next, which areas of Middle-earth to explore, and how they will move the player down there. In this instance, the storytelling theater in LotRO has shifted over the last year from up in the North near the reclaimed Dwarven stronghold of Gundabad back down towards Gondor itself. And it makes sense as the next location players will be exploring is just south of what we consider Gondor now, Umbar.
This way of looking at development, as a journey rather than a simple sprint of content, has “powerful effects” according to Ciccolini, but also has its own shortcomings, especially now as LotRO has shifted its focus from the core story of the War of the Ring and squarely focused on the player character now.
Rob tells me that as Executive Producer, his role in the planning process nowadays is more advisory, and one of the ways he advises during this initial planning process is to help keep the focus on the player, not just the area.
“So when they think of things, they think of where the journey of the players will go and where they will go in the future. And this is very much how they plan. And that has some incredibly powerful effects. But also, it's my job to look for holes in that and maybe lead them into areas where thinking of it as a journey might have consequences. For instance, they may be thinking through an area, and I will try to focus them more on characters, specific characters that the players can latch on to.”
One quote that has stuck with me through the years was the LotRO team’s assertion back in 2019 that they have “a good 20 years” worth of content they can pull from.. As Ciccolini put it to me in our interview, the development team has the “next decade” at least of the player journey, where they might go “firmly in their minds.” It’s all about that journey the players and the developers are on, with the developers thinking of places that the game might go years down the road.
Almost as if backing up Rob’s words here, Lead Worldbuilder and Loremaster Chris Pierson tells me in our interview that he was thinking of an Umbar expansion two or three years ago. However, the plans for what would become Corsairs of Umbar started, according to Pierson, a little over a calendar year ago now.
“For Umbar, I personally have been thinking about doing Umbar for two or three years. We talked that long ago about how it’d be cool do something with the Corsairs, so my brain started going with that in the background back then. But we really started pushing toward coming up with a plan about two years ago, and then last year, it was probably a little over a calendar year ago that the senior people on the team were like, ‘Okay, let’s figured out what we’re going to do with Umbar.’”
Senior World Designer Matt Elliot backs this up as well, saying that pre-production on Umbar started in “early summer” last year, with work beginning in earnest at the start of this year.
Pierson mentions that the conversations with the team start very “broad strokes” and build from there.
“The conversations early on are definitely much more broad strokes of like, ‘Where do we want to go next?’ And I have made sever different plans that are in our files for going to different parts of the world, if and when we decided to go there, and Umbar was one of them. The conversation tends to be more, ‘Okay, I like Corsairs, why don’t we do Umbar next? We can do lots of maritime stuff that sounds like a fun difference from tromping around with Dwarves for a few years in the previous stuff.’”
Managing Resources
As far as how the team comes up with exactly what they want to do among the myriad ideas they have, some of it just comes down to the budget of team at any given time. Rob equates it a whiteboard in his mind with a “whole bunch of plaques,” each with something different the team wants to do. He describes it as the team having “decades” worth of work they want to do, but things just sometimes hit a back burner due to the budget and development constraints at the time.
Umbar was an easy choice of where to go next as both it’s just easy to see that progression naturally on the map of Middle-earth that LotRO has uncovered so far. But also, the team really wanted to do a Mariner class, which fits well with the theme of Corsairs of Umbar.
“We envisioned this new class with kind of a sea shanty or feel of the sea,” Rob mentions about the Mariner class. He continued, “And I think the systems team has done a great job giving the feel of this fore and aft idea where the Mariner moves in the stances, and it feels like tides. So once we had in our mind what a new class would be, going to Umbar just synergized very well, and that also defined where we want it to go.”
However, as the team decides what to do next, things slide in and out based on what they can feasibly do now, versus what’s coming up in the future. Some things might not be feasible now because, as an example given by Rob, they don’t have the “art budget yet, but we will in the year after,” or maybe the engineering team is tied up with something like the 4K update, which shifts plans and features.
One feature Rob did point directly to as an example of this shifting scale of projects is the release of the River Hobbits. This is something that he mentioned a few years back and players never let him forget it over the years since. But it’s an example of one of those plaques being moved off a few times until they were finally able to tackle the update.
Sometimes, too, updates like the River Hobbits make more sense as a standalone release versus shoehorning it into an expansion, like Corsairs of Umbar.
“I think that River Hobbits was always a plaque,” Rob mentioned going back to that whiteboard analogy. “Maybe it fit into an expansion But the problem was, we were so excited about the new class, and we were so excited about Umbar and how they fit together, along with the other systems changes like crafting, the River Hobbits didn’t fit in that, either resource-wise or theme-wise. So moving into its own thing, having the players have an exciting beat while they were waiting for the expansion made sense.”
It also helped to give players something to do while waiting for Umbar to drop, as many players rolled River Hobbit alts and played through the content, especially the new starting zone that came with Before the Shadow, ahead of Corsairs of Umbar dropping.
Despite the battle with the ever-shifting plaques and planning around what resources the team has at their disposal, Rob admits that the team will sometimes take on too much, which makes his role as a manager a bit difficult when trying to “scope” the team down. Thankfully, though, Rob mentions that at this point, with his experienced team, they have a good idea as to “how big any particular update’s going to be.”
At this point, he describes it as a team that works in waves, where it’s okay to be “hyper-focused” and push through work, so long as they take time off they need after.
“So one of the things that happens is if we’re trying to hit a date, it’s okay for someone to get excited and be ultra-focused and concentrate on work more if they that the time off later. So you can have a sine wave if they have the time to rest from that increased focus attention.”
Rob does caution, though, that there is a problem afoot if you cannot maintain a schedule as a team after that period of rest.
Standing Stone Games is a small studio as well, especially compared to other studios who are building and maintaining MMOs. While Rob didn’t directly answer when I asked how many people are working on The Lord of the Rings Online, he did mention that because of the small nature of the team, the “loss of an asset” during the development process is more impactful for SSG than it would be elsewhere.
“One of the hard things about doing a small studio is the loss of an asset is a much bigger deal. Let’s say a dev becomes sick, I lose 1/10th of my resources, whereas in a larger company, they may lose 1% of their resources.And managing that can also cause these waves of problems. [...]So that’s another issue that sometimes you get into trouble [with] is that the small, normal happenings have a much bigger impact on the studio.”
Rob mentions that it’s all about managing that, and one way is by his team’s versatility.
“The fact that I now have systems people that can actually create content and content people that can help do systems becomes more and more valuable in order to help this Tetris of how the schedule works.”
As part of managing resources, for a place like Umbar, it’s a very different ask than building an expansion like Before the Shadow. As Senior World Designer Matt Elliott told me, the amount of lead time needed to build an expansion and hit the deadline can vary based on the scope, as well as work that is hard to account for upfront. In Corsairs of Umbar’s case, that seems to be the art budget to build out an area that is unlike anything else The Lord of the Rings Online team has made so far.
“The biggest challenge is knowing what amount of lead time is the appropriate amount of lead time for something of this scope,” Elliot says. “Something that we have to work hard to account of 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?
“And I think looking 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. Umbar, the Shield Isles, and the Cape of Umbar, all of those places are geographically distinct, flora and fauna distinct, culturally distinct from places that we’ve never been before.”
As such, during that pre-planning and pre-production period in early summer 2022, the team started planning what the need would be built out for Corsairs of Umbar. Chris Pierson, on the other hand, started to research, spending the Winter of 2022 into 2023 building up the design documents that the team would use to flesh out the regions that would become the focal point of the Corsairs of Umbar.
It’s not just building up the lore, the culture, and more, but the systems team got to work designing the new Mariner class and planning a revamp of crafting that was years overdue in many players’ minds (myself included).
The way the story is being told is also different, thanks to one major change that has slowly taken shape over the course of the MMO’s life, something that will also influence expansions in the future: the player as the chief hero.
Heroic Shift
One of the defining moments of The Lord of the Rings Online came when the Mordor expansion was released back in 2017. This was a pivotal moment for the players, the story, and the team, as the journey for ten years had followed the main plotline: the War of the Ring.
Now, with the Ring destroyed, and Sauron seemingly defeated, the page started to turn on the main heroes of the tale: the Fellowship and those who came into contact with them over their journey. Instead, the focus shifted squarely onto the player character for the first time in the MMO’s history.
This proverbial passing of the torch from the characters Tolkien created to those that we, the players, have created is a “very different creative process” for the team now that we are no longer just following the story Tolkien wrote. Taking the “gravitas” that Tolkien wove into every aspect of his world, from the setting itself to the characters whose deeds are recounted in the Red Book. Maintaining that gravitas with the players, maintaining that consistent voice, is an exciting challenge the team is having to overcome, according to Rob.
“Our game, I think, one of the advantages of it is over the years it has had a consistent voice. How we talk about Tolkien is very different than how even other games might talk about the same world. Maintaining that voice now that the Eye of Sauron, so to speak, has shifted to the player characters is a very interesting thing to do. And also how you define the adversaries, it’s daunting. You want the gravitas to stay and you want that story to be told. And shifting that focus to other adversaries that might not be Sauron is a wonderful and exciting process, but also it’s very easy for the players to feel. You need to make them a pair, and that creative process is actually different.
“It’s a very different creative process than following the story. And so as I’m watching the team go through this almost like a transformation, and I’m trying to be there to advise where we go, how we tell the stories - they just bring the world to life.”
Looking Ahead
As we look ahead to Corsairs of Umbar, which launches in November, the focus is shifting from the well-trod areas of Middle-earth to one of the most intriguing but lesser-explored regions in Tolkien’s legendarium. Researching, building the framework, and ultimately building the world that the players will inhabit is a daunting task, both visually and narratively, which is the task of the world-building team. The next chapter of our interview series with Standing Stone Games will cover that task and dip into how the marquee feature of Corsairs of Umbar, the Mariner, was made.
