“Eärendil was a mariner who tarried in Arvernien…”
Ever since the first time I read that opening stanza from the Small Lay of Eärendil in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, I was pretty much hooked on Eärendil as a character. He’s such a central figure to the overall story, even if during the Third Age, his contribution is by hanging above the night sky, providing unyielding starlight to the Fellowship (as well as warding off giant Ungoliant spawn in dark places). This seafaring Half-elf Mariner sailed to Valinor, to the Undying Lands, to beseech the aid of the Valar on behalf of Middle-earth and came back upon a flying ship in the sky, a Silmaril on his brow.
On that very ship, while riding through the sky with Thorondor and the Eagles, Eärendil fought the winged Dragons, slaying the largest dragon in fantasy history, Ancalagon the Black.
That’s pretty badass. Also, ever since then, I’ve named every ship in every game I’ve been able to Vingilot.
So when the Lord of the Rings Online team started dropping hints that a Mariner class would be coming with the next expansion, which would later be unveiled as Corsairs of Umbar, I was instantly interested. I really wondered how the team approached building this class and how it fit into the broader themes of the expansion proper.
Building the Mariner
One important distinction right away. While the expansion is called Corsairs of Umbar and The Lord of the Rings Online is taking us to Umbar itself, the home of the Corsairs…of Umbar, the Mariner class is not a Corsair of Umbar.
Did you follow that?
While the Corsairs themselves are more akin to a pirate, especially those who raided the Bay of Belfalas and sowed terror into the minds of Southern Gondor, the Mariner class is inspired by Eärendil himself.
However, the region itself and the idea of a Mariner class were basically both living hand in hand in the developers' minds as this expansion was being planned. According to Executive Producer Rob Ciccolini, the region of Umbar was an “easy choice” because the team knew it wanted to build a Mariner class.
“We envisioned this new class with kind of a sea shanty or a feel of the sea, and I think that the systems team has done a great job in giving the feel of this ‘fore and aft’ idea, where the Mariner moves in stances, and it feels like the tides.”
Lead Systems Designer Allan “Orion” Maki, who returned to the LotRO team in 2022, tells me in our interview that Eärendil himself as the inspiration for a sea-faring class made “perfect sense.”
“So the funny thing is that we kind of knew even when I came back about a year and a half ago, we knew that this was going to be what we were doing,” Maki started when talking about the initial approaches to building a new class. He continued, “And we said immediately if we’re going to Corsairs, then we have to have a class that works on the sea. So we started to really take a look at the source material and figured out exactly where that would fit, what characters could be pulled in. And, of course, there’s one that jumps out, and that’s Eärendil. And you go, ‘Right! Elrond’s father. That just makes perfect sense.’ He’s known as the Mariner.”
The Mariner class represents a melee fighter in Middle-earth who was adept at fighting on sea and land. The class itself is designated as an advanced class to play, blending two gameplay elements: Balance and Swordplay.
Figuring out where the Mariner fits in with the rest of the classes a player can choose from sounds like it was a tricky process when speaking to Allan. With the recent Brawler class taking the role of a Tank/DPS, the team had to look at the other archetypes to figure out where they could plug the new class into.
“We have one true crowd control type of class in our Burglar, and he’s really good at what they do, right? We’ve got the Lore Master, which fills some of that role, but not 100% at what the Burglar can do. And we said, ‘Well, where is the niche that we’re gonna have to be able to put the Mariner into to make the gameplay unique and interesting, and what are the main focal points of the actual class itself?’”
Maki says that the team knew quickly that this would be a lightly armored class - which makes perfect sense. Heavy armor tends to drown Mariners who fall into the sea, so like...that's to be avoided at all costs.
He also says the team envisioned the Mariner not as someone who runs around brandishing two-handed weapons, thanks to the close-quarters combat of duking it out on a ship’s fighting platform. So, the team looked at the “other aspects of sea life” to help inform the class as it started formulating with the systems team.
“So there were some pretty obvious things from the outset that we looked at, and then we said, ‘Well, what are the other aspects of sea life and actually taking time on the seas?’ You’re traveling from port to port; you’re picking up the very different fighting styles of different areas of the world, some of the different qualities that might exist in those spaces. So we said they should probably be a jack-of-all-trades. So they actually have a very unique role where they fit kind of a DPSer because that’s their main role as DPS. Their secondary role will be much closer to crowd control. And then they’ve got a little bit of musical aspect thrown in because it makes a lot of sense when you’re on the high seas, you’re singing shanties all day long. So there’s a healthy mix of all that that goes into it.”
One key aspect that makes the Mariner feel distinct is also how the class looks and feels while playing The Lord of the Rings Online. Maki says that the systems team actually went to the art team and requested new animations for the class to make them look visually distinct from the other class fighting styles. The idea behind this is to show the fact that the Mariner has picked up forms and styles from all over Arda, not simply from one point of origin.
“For the first time in a very long time, we went to our art team and asked if they could change up a little bit of the way the combat works inside of the game, specifically with some of the animation sets. So, the animation steps of the Mariner [are] going to be different than you’ve actually seen. And it’s really to show [how] the Mariner has probably learned to fight over that time.”
It’s all about Balance
Think about the last time you were on a small boat, one without a motor. If you’ve never been in one, I guess pretend. One key aspect to ensuring you don’t tip to one side or the other is balance. When I was in Boy Scouts growing up, we used to kayak and canoe down the Colorado River nearby, and the first time I ever did, I was terrified if I stood up in the boat, I would tip it over to the left and right.
I didn’t have to be scared it could happen - I saw it happen to the boat in front of me at one point.
Now imagine learning how to fight on a boat powered by a sail that requires you to be able to do so without rocking the boat, so to speak. This is where the idea of Balance comes into play with the Mariner class - learning how to keep Balance even in the trickiest situations.
The fighting style is based on a duelist - a fencer, with the Mariner using one-handed blades like a Cutlass or Shortsword to fight in close-quarters combat aboard a ship.
“We based a lot of the initial concepts around a fencer using a single blade, whether it be a Cutlass or Shortsword, or Rapier or something thinner - traditional basket longsword - as the initial draft of how we were going to do this,” Maki explains. “Then we gave them a unique mechanic to give them the ability to use a lot of their different skills. So that is going to come through in something we are calling Balance because it again makes sense when you’re pushing yourself ‘fore’ in the battle and then moving ‘aft’ in the battle to increase either your offense or defense as you’re going through these different portions of the fight.”
Ciccolini described it as feeling the “ebb and flow” of the tides themselves, this constant push-pull of moving fore and aft to give it that feel. This is represented by an attunement meter on screen for the player, showing pips each way as you use your skills. It reminds me a bit of the Rune Keepers meter, which is constantly pushing from DPS and Healing, though that is a bit more one-sided as typically you’re specializing in one or the other. Here, it’s all about maintaining that balance each way - pushing fore until you’re right at that breaking point and then moving back aft to balance things out. As Alan explains, it is very much intended to feel like a Mariner might when on a ship.
“As strange as this may sound, the way we looked at it is, when I initially proposed the whole system, it was when you are sailing in a ship, you really need to make sure that the sails are where they need to be. You never want to be too far forward - you want to cut the wind, right? You don’t want to actually be pushing too hard to have the sheet pulling the wind too hard to actually break the mast or whatever.”
The problem facing the team is the sheer fact that in The Lord of the Rings Online, there isn’t really any sea-faring content. Sure, there are boats lying around - look at Dol Amroth, my favorite city in-game, for example - but there really isn’t any instance where you’ve fought on the sea during the storyline. So, translating that feel to a land battler was something Maki and his team had to work out.
“You have to figure out what the balance points are. The way that I looked at Balance was I am a class that is more capable when I’m on the sea. But we’re not going to be spending a lot of time on the sea because, you know, most of the game is really on land. So we had to look at it and say, ‘Well, how would their sea legs transfer over to their land legs?’ And it was through this motion of ‘I’m going to be using my momentum to move forward, and then push myself back when I need to to ensure that I’m keeping myself on an even keel - yes, silly puns.
“But that is the way the ship would actually be moving over the waves is the way you are fighting in your fighting style. So it should feel very much like a flow as you’re playing the character. It has a very distinct methodology to the way that you’re using the skills and tying them all together, back and forth, through the overall gameplay to get the most benefit.
Pushing fore or aft unlocks different skills as well throughout the fight, making each encounter, moment to moment, feel like a progression of sorts. However, it’s all about maintaining that balance in the end - if you push too far one way, your Mariner will actually stun themselves, making it easier to be killed by a strong enemy if you’re not careful.
“So, you kind of start with that high-level concept of what role do we want this to fill, and then you start to filter it down to a point where you say, ‘What’s the moment-to-moment gameplay going to be like?’ That’s where you end up now with a class that is constantly managing where they are in the course of a fight, to be able to assist their Fellowship at the same time that they’re trying to gain their own advantages. And we think that it’s actually going to have a lot of really interesting dynamics inside of Fellowships and raids.”
Crafting Better Crafting
One of the other major additions coming with Corsairs of Umbar besides…you know, Umbar…is a change to the crafting system. While the ideas the systems team have are ambitious, and we already know now that one of the major ideas - breaking the crafting tiers apart to have them set by the expansion rather than straightforward progression - is already off the tables thanks to a systems issue, the idea to make crafting relevant again in Middle-earth is still alive and well.
“So when I first got back, one of the things that I said is we haven’t really touched the crafting system in a long time. There was a point in the development of LotRO, right around level 105, where everything pushed you; this is the long-haul end game. And when you get there as a crafter, you feel it.”
The initial idea was to enable players to jump right into the crafting tier added by the expansion, regardless of their progress with the previous crafting tiers. This would enable people like myself, who had fallen off the crafting grind over the years because it just had not felt relevant to progression anymore, to get back into it without any real friction. Unfortunately, as Maki explained in a forum post about two weeks ago, this was no longer going to be a possibility for Umbar.
The same day the team had to bring the recent Forester Crafting event in Combe down due to bugs for the third time, Orion made the announcement that separating the crafting tiers just would not be possible thanks to the legacy code in The Lord of the Rings Online.
“Second and more important, we have some unwanted news about Umbar crafting. As I have stated, we intended to uncouple and grant Umbar recipes at the outset of the expansion, making the Umbar crafting tier independent from all previous craft tiers. While diligently working to bring this to fruition behind the scenes, we've hit an unfortunate wall of ancient code that firmly stated, "You shall not pass!"
It is unfortunate and unavoidable we cannot separate the tiers in this manner. Crafters must complete the previous proficiency tier to access the Umbar craft tier. This revelation is a big disappointment for me and the capper on a not-so-great crafting weekend.”
This doesn’t mean that Maki and his team at Standing Stone Games are forsaking crafting altogether in this expansion, though. While you’ll still need to progress through the previous crafting tiers like normal to access Umbar crafting, if you’re already there, you’re golden. The idea is to make crafted gear more meaningful, something that all the players in the MMO feel.
“We’re introducing new concepts around the gear that you can actually make, the way that all the players can interact with that system. And when I say all the players, I mean all the players. One of the things that I looked at when I came back was, ‘What did the crafters do that actually influences anything inside of the game?’ And it was mostly they influenced things for themselves, not necessarily for their Kinships or for other players. And because of that, I think it became a slower system; it wasn’t something that was as involved. So, that was one of the first systems I looked at and said, ‘I really want to make some changes here.’”
Maki describes a scenario where every system ties into each other. While touching on the Forester event (this interview was conducted before the first time SSG tried to launch it), he talks about a revamp to where every crafting profession has its own event, as well as ensuring that crafting feels more important in the world at large. And this means crafting crossing into other systems in The Lord of the Rings Online.
“And if I haven’t said systems enough, I’m going to keep saying it,” Maki said with a laugh.
He continued, “[These events] will help contribute to the way the crafters can not only earn their experience and learn new things that they’re doing but give them some prime cosmetics and give them some new tools and lots of other fun stuff. But it’s all in an effort to make it so that crafting feels like it’s a more important part of the world.”
While the main focal point, removing the requirement that you’ve completed the previous tiers, is no longer possible, in a follow-up email, Maki confirmed that the team is still planning the other major crafting changes with Corsairs of Umbar, namely separating vocations to allow players to be the vocation they want directly. Another change will come in the form of tracking more than one resource at a time, making the grind of harvesting resources a bit easier.
In the end, these changes are meant to help the team look ahead to the health of The Lord of the Rings Online in the next fifteen years, figuring out how the team can improve and balance things to make future updates and expansions easier to develop and maintain moving forward.
“We don’t have any plans of going anywhere,” Maki says.
Looking Ahead
In our last installment (we think) of our Building An Expansion series, we’re looking at the localization of an MMO, as well as how the expansion is revealed to the world. We’ll also look at some of the team's considerations regarding how it prices an expansion, especially one where there are multiple editions for players to look at, and the overall messaging when marketing it to players.
