The Lord of the Rings Online: Corsairs of Umbar has finally launched, bringing the newest region of Middle-earth to players, and what makes it exciting is the fact that it’s a region unexplored really in any other Tolkien-set medium. We don’t see it in any of the movies, nor do we really see it described in detail in any of the main books.
Over this series we’ve explored how expansions are initially conceptualized, how the world itself gets created using the source material, and explored the creation of the new player class and its systems, The Mariner. Yet we’ve really not discussed how these expansions get revealed and brought into the world. Well, strap in, as this final part of the Building An Expansion series explores the conversations around expansion pricing, messaging and how the team localizes the game for fans around the world.
Setting Expectations
A few years ago, The Lord of the Rings Online team faced issues with the community that has long supported the MMO thanks to the release of a new type of expansion, the mini-expansion. War of Three Peaks was the first of its kind in The Lord of the Rings Online, but the communication from the team wasn’t necessarily the clearest. Many subscribers saw the mini-expansion as just another content update thanks to its scope and wondered why they were being asked to pay for the content above and beyond the subscription price they were already paying. The VIP benefits just didn’t feel like they were there with this attempt.
In the years since, LotRO’s devs have refined the mini-expansion offering, but it wasn’t an easy task, as getting back to a place where subscribers and VIP players felt like their subscription benefits were just that - an actual benefit.
“There was a lot of consternation around the first mini-expansion on the LotRO side,” Rob Ciccolini, executive producer on The Lord of the Rings Online, admitted in our interview. “It was a new thing for us, and we made some mistakes. The value proposition of what we offered wasn’t really as good as I would have liked.”
When War of Three Peaks was announced, much of the conversation centered on the point of being a VIP. With a release that, in terms of its scope, felt like a normal content update back in the day that would typically be included in the sub price, many fans - myself included - questioned what the point was in subscribing if I was going to have to pay for this stuff anyways.
“The VIPs had a very good point that, if this has to happen, if this is the new reality, what does it mean to be VIP? And those are questions we’re still answering, we’re revamping VIP on both games, and looking at that too. Those are excellent questions. With the next mini-expansion, we fixed those. The value proposition was much more in line with what people expected. We gave a discount to VIPs and all of a sudden, a lot of those questions went away because they were like, ‘Oh, okay, they’re listening to us. They’re fixing the perceived flaws in it.’”
Ciccolini explained that the team is ardently considering player feedback for not just VIP changes to The Lord of the Rings Online but also Standing Stone Games’ other MMO, Dungeons & Dragons Online. Part of the mini-expansion release schedule is simply down to the fact that the team just cannot release a new full-sized expansion each year, but the mini-expansion helps to offset that while still providing a large amount of content and new stuff for players to do in between major expansion drops. Ciccolini says that he appreciates the fact that the fanbase is willing to call out SSG, though, whenever there is a perceived issue, as it’s the sign of a “healthy relationship.”
“So I’m very happy that, one: they support us so well, because they’re great. I love our playerbase. But two: they call us on stuff. That’s a healthy relationship. If they see something that doesn’t feel right, they’ll call us on it. Sometimes I have to talk to them about why we’re doing things because there’s a financial reality to ot, or that work-life balance; we can’t just do an expansion every year. And then sometimes they’re right when we need to adjust what we’re doing.”
Ciccolini is right that many of VIPs' concerns with War of Three Peaks went away with Before the Shadow. One of the key perks players got for being VIP was simply a 10% discount on the actual mini-expansion. If players will need to pay for these smaller “expansion” type pieces of content, giving subscribers a small discount as a thank-you for keeping their subscription active was a bit gesture - especially when you consider how pricey LotRO expansions have become over the years.
I remember when I was first starting to play The Lord of the Rings Online - I think I bought multiple physical editions of Shadow of Angmar, as well as a standard and physical collector’s edition of Mines of Moria when it came out. I’m not sure, looking back on it now, that I spent as much on that Moria collector’s box as I have spent on some of the most recent expansion bundles since Mordor. I could be wrong, but I don't think that a physical collector's edition of Mines of Moria was as much as an Ultimate Fan Bundle.
Regarding how expansion prices are set, Ciccolini wouldn’t say whether that has been influenced by Daybreak or the parent company, EG7, but rather that the expansion pricing has the value consumers expect.
“I think that players have a good idea of how much something is worth to them, and it’s our job to fill in as much value in those as possible that we can do within our budgets, our own budgets for art and such. You know, our artists really kick-ass considering the size of the team. But there is a limit to how much we can put in there. I think the pricing has been pretty firm for a long time. We don’t revisit it because the players are used to it; there’s no point in revisiting that. And then, we want to make sure they have value for the pricing.
“I think that, with the pricing, we try to provide something that people can support our studio at a variety of levels. Buying an expansion is about supporting the game, and we want to make sure that they feel that we value them and the value is in there. We don’t want them to feel like they’re being taken advantage of when they do provide that support. So it’s all about making sure that when they do the comparison of what’s in there and they look to the past, they’re like, ‘Okay, if I support this, it’s clear that they’re putting enough goodies in here that, one; I’ll feel joy from buying this.’ That’s my mail goal. It’s my job to make sure that the players can have joyful ways of supporting the game.”
Ciccolini continued, saying that the team likely won’t revisit the pricing anytime soon, though he didn’t rule it out forever, citing a scenario where massive inflation would force them to rethink the current tiers. One key takeaway from this part of our conversation, though, is that Ciccolini wants players to understand that the studio really appreciates that support, whether it’s through subscriptions, LotRO Point purchases, or expansions.
“I want you to feel as though we appreciate that you are supporting the game and aren’t trying to get you to spend money you don’t want to.”
Getting Local(ized)
The Lord of the Rings Online is based on a story that has been capturing the minds and hearts of fans all over the world, with Tolkien’s books being translated into dozens of languages over the years. When LotRO launched back in 2007, European developer Codemasters handled the publishing across the pond, though now it seems Standing Stone Games, and Daybreak at large, handle it themselves. And this includes translating the MMO into its other languages, namely German and French.
To do this, the team looks to Marcy Brown, the Senior Localization Coordinator at Standing Stone Games. Marcy has had an interesting path to game dev, earning their MA in International Relations from the Hult International Business School in London. Marcy also spent time teaching English in Poland, as well as worked in International Development. Yet their passion for The Lord of the Rings drew them to Standing Stone Games when a job announcement was posted.
It’s a “circuitous” route to game dev, as they told me during our interview. In Marcy, I found a kindred spirit. Both of us love languages (Marcy spends some of their spare time learning French, German, Spanish), and given that The Lord of the Rings itself was primarily linguistic in its origin, it’s not hard to be drawn towards it.
“Because Tolkien is such a linguist, and that’s such a base for all his writing, I just constantly get to see, like, ‘Okay, so this is derived from this.’ I Obviously am not at the level of a Tolkien linguist as that takes a special sort of effort. But I even geek out when I play the game when you get to go to various places.”
Brown mentions a key distinction between localization and translation of the actual text. While Brown themselves doesn’t do the translations, per se, they handle the coordination of how the team localizes The Lord of the Rings Online into French and German.
“There’s a difference between localization and translation. Translation is a key component of localization, but localization is a more holistic look at how to present the material in the best sense so that the person reading the localized version gets the full experience of the game in a similar sense to the English. So my role is mostly, I don’t want to say herding cats, but making sure that the right things happen at the right time so that the great text that our content and systems people write gets to the translators; they have time to do their thing and go through all the words and then get it back and put it in the game.”
Marcy mentions that part of their gig is also ensuring that the translators can focus on the “important bits” of the text they are translating rather than just pushing everything over simultaneously.
“I want them to work on things that are not minor because I get every single edit that happens to the English - not a lot of edits, which is fine. I like going through them, actually. But there are some that aren’t going to have an impact on the translated text, and so in the interest of time, I try to isolate the essential bits.”
One of the key things Marcy told me during our interview is making sure that the localized version gives the same full experience the English version offers. One way to make sure of that is being having native speakers work on the translations to ensure that the cultural nuances and different ways of speaking come through natively.
“The really important thing with translation localization is context,” Marcy tells me. “Sometimes there’s a challenge when English has a tendency to have some words that will have multiple meanings, and they’ll do a lot of heavy lifting. Like light. Light could mean ‘not heavy.’ It could be part of a verb, it can be an adjective, or it could be an adverb. And in like, French and German, for instance, there are different words for each of those things.”
However, thanks to Tolkien being a linguist himself, some of the challenges you might face when translating in-world terminology like Rivendell and Bag End aren’t all that challenging. Brown mentions a document known colloquially as the “nomenclature,” where Tolkien set out to explain how he envisioned words be translated based on his original meaning.
While words from the Elvish languages of Quenya and Sindarin might stay as they appear in the translated texts, Westron (the common speech that English represents in the books) typically will be translated using this nomenclature document as a guide.
“So there are specific rules already in place. He made a point to point out how Rivendell got translated. Some of the translators thought it meant ‘River’, but ‘Riven’ came from, like, you read something in half, it’s split. And Dale is like a valley, so it’s Broken Valley.”
There are also some well-established French and German translations of The Lord of the Rings that Marcy’s team can pull from, making the job of figuring out how something should be translated or sound much easier.
Rolling Out
Jerry “Cordovan” Snook is the face of The Lord of the Rings Online in many ways. As the Senior Community Specialist for both DDO and LotRO, Cordovan has the opportunity to be one of the first on the team to showcase the newest updates and content across all the various social channels for Standing Stone Games. He also acts as a conduit for the community itself, taking feedback, filtering it and taking it to the team when it’s warranted.
In many ways, Snook is a liaison for both the company and its supporters.
“It’s really a two-way street, and I’m, in many ways, one of the people who keeps an eye on both lanes of traffic and makes sure it gets where it needs to go,” Snook tells me in our interview.
Snook is a constant force for the company, whether he’s presenting his show, Cord of the Rings, to viewers every Friday or making an announcement on the official forums - the community listens when Cordovan has something to say.
“I’m a channeler. I see it as making sure that the voice of the studio is out in the community, and the voice of the community is heard as broadly and as effectively as it can be within the studio itself.”
However, as anyone who runs a community can tell you, it’s no easy task wading through the mountain of feedback, suggestions, ideas, and more that the community offers up and presenting it to the studio itself. Snook says that while it’s a “constant battle,” you do start to really recognize the good feedback when it’s there.
“Good feedback is often recognizable to whoever happens to read it as exceptionally good feedback,” Snook tells me. He continued, “Maybe there’s been a time where you’ve been in the comment section of one of your articles or perhaps on a forum itself for a game you play, and you’re like, ‘Oh wow, that is a fantastic idea.’ Well, you know, game developers think the same way, right? [...] It’s often recognizable. It doesn’t take some secret knowledge to know good feedback when you see it.”
Part of Jerry’s job is to present what the Standing Stone Games team is working on directly to players, whether it’s through a forum post or one of his weekly streams on Twitch and YouTube. Oftentimes players are seeing and hearing about updates for the first time under the spell of Snook’s dulcet baritone voice, and that’s a big deal. For Jerry, it’s a “dream job.”
“This is a dream job for me; I really do love it. And so, in many ways, that’s the best part of my job, that is some of the most fun I will have at my job is debuting a new trailer or conducting a Q&A that we have something exciting we want to tell the community about - or the community is really about excited about that we get to share with them.”
It’s not just simply presenting the information but also being prepared to answer player questions he might get in the process. So, while it might seem like all the team is doing is prepping a trailer or streaming a new feature on the test server, Snook and the guests who join him on the shows are more prepared than that.
“You want to make sure that, to the extent possible, you’ve got the best answers you can for those questions. So it’s not just debuting a trailer, but it’s like, ‘Hey, I saw on the trailer that this is happening or that there’s this creature. What does that mean?’ And you need to be able to think about the afterward even while you’re doing if you know what I mean.’
As to when in the process of building an expansion, will the community start to see stuff? Well, it turns out pretty close to when it releases. There is often this expectation from a community that teams will start to feed info over time, creating this surge of info for players to consume while waiting for new content. However, as Snook describes, the LotRO team doesn’t actually hold much back; rather, it starts to feed into the community close to when the feature is set to release.
That doesn’t mean that the content and such is made hours before the announcement - Snook uses the recent trailers as an example here of something that still has to go through its normal processes - but rather, as soon as something is ready to highlight, “it’s out the door.”
It also doesn’t mean that when the studio says something about the game’s upcoming features, it was formulated that morning. Rather, the work starts pretty early in determining the big beats they want to hit with the community, and then it rolls out organically as the team gets close to pushing the content out the door.
“A lot of it is like, as soon as it's ready, it’s out the door or pretty close to it if we can make that happen. And the work to start that process happens pretty early in the process. Not long after we knew about the Corsairs of Umbar as this is what we’re going to be doing, we started looking at that story - what are some of the big beats, features, areas, places, things, you know - stuff we can talk about and get people excited about—you know, Mariner, etc. We’re going to have an article about the Mariner, for example. We know that because when we decided on the expansion, some of that early prep work, identifying what the beats are and what it is we want to say, and what we think will be the most exciting happens really early in the process.
“And then it just sort of happens organically as it’s being put together. But typically, pretty soon after it’s ready to go, we try to get it out the door.”
Snook admits, though, that it’s a balancing act regarding just how much he can say and when he can say it.
“You’ll often have more questions than you have answers. And the best advice i have tried to follow myself is to answer as much as you can. You may not be able to answer everything that someone asks about a thing that you just announced but focus on what you can announce and really do as much of that as you can.”
The Lord of the Rings Online has been around for a long time - 16 years now - and so the approach to communicating with fans has also changed, but also the way LotRO’s team has cultivated its amazing community has seen some changes too. One example Snook gives is the studio’s drive to build its Twitch channel and really cultivate a community of LotRO fans there.
There was a concern by some, myself included when Twitch broke onto the scene, of whether anyone would actually watch these streams. Would they be compelling enough to draw viewers? How do I find the streamers I want to follow? Those were all questions I grappled with as I launched my own Twitch stream years ago. It seems Snook faced those same challenges when creating the Lord of the Rings Twitch page.
It wasn’t simply a matter of pointing out streamers when they would play LotRO, but actually giving those streamers a chance to stream to the official game channel and be exposed to a wider audience that would follow and support them on their own respective channels. Not many game studios would give the reigns to their official channel to a streamer and say, “have fun,” yet Standing Stone Games has done that with great success. Not only does it boost the community, but it also puts LotRO player into the habit of checking the official LotROStream channel when the studio itself is live with their own show, such as “A Casual Stroll” or “Cord of the Rings.”
“That’s been one of the things that I found particularly interesting in terms of how things have changed over time, because it wasn’t, ‘We need to be on Twitch so I’m going to do a Twitch show.’ It’s more, ‘We need to be on Twitch. I’ll be doing a Twitch show. but we really need to foster everyone else.’ And that kind of mindset in trying to change with the - adapt to the world around us has been one of the more interesting parts of the job.”
The Road Goes Ever On And On
It’s been really illuminating talking with the Standing Stone Games team about how they approach building expansions for The Lord of the Rings Online. From the inception of the next expansion to actively building the world, crafting the systems that will play a role in exciting new and returning players, to finally getting the word out there, it’s quite the journey.
As The Lord of the Rings Online: Corsairs of Umbar hits digital shelves today and players start to filter in Umbar, it represents the culmination of years of work from multiple different facets of game development: world building, art, systems creation, quest designers, audio techs, composers, localization experts, and a community team.
It’s a journey that is well worth going on, and I can’t think of a better place to journey than in Middle-earth. Thanks to everyone who spoke to us over the course of this series and provided their insight, passion and talent to help highlight just how much of an endeavor building an expansion for a live game like The Lord of the Rings Online can be.
On to the next one, yeah? The Road Goes Ever On And On, after all.