Orion: Day 1 - A Tale of a Design

[Gammer Took]

Today I started the revision to Garth Agarwen. Honestly, the pre-production work that goes on in my head is very hard to quantify because I ahave been thinking about these changes for a very long time. Now, that is not to say that I have been thinking about in any concrete manner, because until you lay a design onto paper there is little chance that it will see the light of day. Once it is on paper, then chance that it will make it to implementation is a little highger - maybe 25 %, and the chance that it arrives in the state it was originally propsed is nil.

Still, we go through this process with nearly every quest, instance, or design that we put into the game. Why? Because we need to make certain that people are kept abreast of what we are working upon. We need to inform the different departments tied to the game so that they can make the appropriate preparations on their end and we need to ensure that we are providing visibility into our work for review and sanity checking.

Today was an interesting one as I also put forward a small tweak to a piece of tech that we recently received to really give the tech some more oomph and allow the content team to really start using the tech efficiently and prolificly. Aside from the initial draft of that document and getting through about one half of the Garth Agarwen revision document it was a full day. I am winding down now and getting ready to head home and set about writing the blog, as promised, to give you all a little insight into what goes into a design.

Garth Agarwen was the very first instance in The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar that is a little known piece of trivia. It was designed, initially, by yours truly, DangerDan and one of world builders, who has since moved on, Ken Brown. The space was originally part of a psuedo contest that was run amongst the original designers of The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar to determine what style of instance would prove the most beneficial to the overall game. In early reviews the stepped nature of the instance was a big success. By the time that I ceased working on the design, I was already beginning to see a lot of the cracks in the foundation of this system.

First, Garth Agarwen is huge! It covers over 230 thousand square meters and contains nearly as many creatures as the whole of the southern bog of the Lone-lands. This makes this prototype one sizable beast.

Now, let’s look at the design decisions we had surrounding this behemoth at its inception. Create three to distinct wings with four capstone fighs fitting within a three to five level spread. Ambitious and built around a flawed thought. That thought? Players will play through this instance the few times it would take to reach level 35 and face down the Red Maid. On paper, this looked like a good idea, in execution we found otherwise.

It can be argued that the loot was not good enough to inspire people to visit the space or that the very nature of Agamaur being a full fellowship hunting area hurt the space or any number of other issues that arose as we began to see things play out on live servers. Ultimately, I must look at this, my initial design, and say that it was/is flawed but not ruined or unsalvagable. Before launch some of the more egregious issued were worked on and smoothed over by Amlug while I forged ahead with other instances before moving to Monster Island.

Now the wheel turns 360 and I am back where it all began - Garth Agarwen.

Since I began the process of revamping the content of the world I have been looking forward to a few opportunities, fixing Garth Agarwen is one such opportunity. I start by sorting out my thoughts over a nice cup of coffee - we’re big fans of Keurig here - mmm Our Blend K-cup you make my day happy. I stare at the template for our specs and begin writing. First the intent of the document ‘ Provide details on Garth Agarwen changes.’ Next, the Overview; ‘Bring Garth Agarwen into line with our instance structure and introduce new concepts that will soon make their way into general use throughout instance spaces.’* Suddenly, I am away and rolling.

I now have the following headers in my document: Garth Agarwen - Outer Sanctum, Garth Agarwen - Arboretum, Garth Agarwen - Barrows, Garth Agarwen - Fortress laid out before me and I am ready to really dig into the meat of this revision.

Starting with the outer sanctum I focus on the first section of the instance which will now become a public lobby geared toward players in three-man fellowships. Quests that point into Garth Agarwen will still be completed in this space, though obviously not all. I describe the new npcs that will make their way to the mustering horn at the previous entrance to Garth Agarwen and realize that I worked on the document through lunch. After a short break where I share a completely unhealthy but oh so tasty burrito with a friend, I am back at it.

I describe the new quests that will be set upon the NPCs in the new camp and the old ones that will be moved to the new location and then I get set to work on Garth Agarwen - Arboretum when I am sidetracked by the document that I opened my day with appearing in my inbox with some comments. After addressing the comments and making some significant edits to the spec I return to Garth Agarwen.

The Arboretum is detailed to provide information to our QA department so they know what monsters to expect within the space, including the look, level and skills that the monsters should possess. I enter the space and begin to look through it to find out the important locales that I can use in new quests within the space and then I work my way to the fight against Grimbark. I reason that there are some serious tweaks that need to be made to the fight to make it a solid 3-man encounter for our players.

The result is as follows:

Garth Agarwen - Arboretum

Level: 32

Fellowship Size: 3

Encounters(Fancy name for boss fights): 1

Quests: 5

Grimbark will now have a Challenge objective in the fight. The challenge? Kill Grimbark without killing any of the beehives that fall at the outset of the fight. Of course, his skills will need to be reworked to ensure that the quest can be completed by a fellowship of three and the reward for completing the Challenge objective? More on that later, likely tomorrow - Monday at the latest.

I identify 4 new skills that I need to make for grimbark - fortunately none will require new art or animations. I do find the need to create a dialogue set for Grimbark as he will need to announce that he is using some of these skills. I also discover some small tweaks that I can make to existing skills to ease the workload I am taking on. I go about naming the quests and look up and realize that it is time to write the blog and then go home for the evening.

It may not sound like much, but that is Day 1.

Day 2 starts in about 14-15 hours.