On Monday, Standing Stone Games announced their formation as the new indie company taking on the development of Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online, partnering with Daybreak Games to publish the two MMOs instead of Turbine and WB Games. What follows is an editorial on how I view this whole deal as someone who has played LotRO since day one of open beta in 2007 and has been a 9-year veteran of Daybreak Games’ EverQuest 2 in the most filthy casual way possible. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I am good friends with former LotRO community manager Rick ‘Sapience’ Heaton, so I’m understandably less inclined the shoot the messenger when it comes to some of the stuff CMs have to post in an official capacity.
That being said, I took the announcement a lot better than many have done, and that’s without relying on any off the record comments I’ve heard in the past from various people. Personally, I’d been concerned about the fate of the MMOs ever since Turbine announced their shift to focus on mobile games some months ago and the departure of the well-liked Executive Producer Athena ‘Vyvyanne’ Peters to WB’s Batman: Arkham Underworld. The subsequent announcement of the end of Asheron’s Call after 17 years came as no surprise to me. In fact, if I’m being painfully honest here, I was more expecting to see the sunset announcement include all three games. For the rest of this, I’ll focus mostly on LotRO, as I don’t play DDO and never played AC, so your mileage may vary if you want more insight into those.
There have been two huge worries amongst the people I tend to interact with in the LotRO community in the past few years: 1) what about the license with Middle Earth Enterprises? 2) what happens now that Turbine is a mobile studio? The first was generated due to Sapience answering someone on the forums a couple of years ago asking about the license, and he said that it was renewed until 2017. Now, at my day job, we handle service outages differently than other companies. We tend not to publish estimated times of repair because if we tell a customer that their service is estimated to be restored at 8pm, you can be damned sure they’re back on our phones at 8.01pm if it’s not. We also have to deal with license agreements and renewals, and if a negotiation conflict gets into public view, then it’s years of damage control on social media and PR channels.
With the end of the primary Lord of the Rings story looming in the near future in-game, it makes a kind of sense to tell the story to the main end, and if you get a few months to play with side questing, do that, but eventually you have to consider that an MMO gets sunsetted after some time in maintenance mode. The only difference here is that we were coming up on a reasonably natural end to the story, one with good closure and could be readily tied into a bow and proclaimed done, other than years of players being awfully sad and nostalgic for the original Moria and the days when you couldn’t solo the epic questline. The 2017 date for the story’s end and the license’s end were dovetailing neatly, so it was reasonable for many of us to be cautious about the future of the game. Quite frankly, pretty much every gamer has gotten snowballed by a community manager or PR release that proclaimed a bright future for a game that never came to pass for reasons outside of that CM or PR person’s control (remember: don’t shoot the messenger). As long as we got to experience the end of the Ring and if we’re lucky the Scouring of the Shire, I was emotionally prepared for an announcement that the game would sunset in 2017 if the license didn’t get renewed. However, on Wednesday on the forums and reiterated on his Thursday livestream, current LotRO community manager Jerry ‘Cordovan’ Snook pointed out that the license has been renewed and that they wouldn’t be getting more specific about negotiations and dates going forward because it would be a non-issue for the rest of the game’s life, citing ‘many, many years to come’. The caveat of ‘with your support’ is a given. They’re not gonna keep the doors open if no one’s playing.
So, the next question that immediately arose, who’s on the team? Who’s in control of what, did anyone get laid off? So far, it seems as if all they’re doing is changing the name on the building. Cordovan answered a lot of questions on his Thursday livestream from the same old space as last week. I do wonder if Turbine moved out, but that’s just an idle thought. Cordovan also made it clear that the entire dev teams who had been working on LotRO and DDO came as a unit to found the new company. He also revealed that Rob ‘Severlin’ Ciccolini is the guy in charge of Standing Stone and that the lady named Michelle better known as CS_Alkaid is now heading up their Customer Service department. Some folks have wondered if there would be layoffs due to the change, much like the hatchet job done at Daybreak when it regenerated out of the ashes of Sony Online Entertainment when John Smedley sold SOE to Columbus Nova. However, they had already gone through layoffs some months ago when Turbine did the big mobile studio announcement, but old-school DDO dev Torc has returned to the team, and Cordovan also reiterated Alkaid’s post on the DDO forums that they’re in the process of adding more customer support folks who are being trained right now (new in-game GMs, etc.). Cordovan further implied that with the big Mordor expansion coming next year, it was very likely they’d need to do some more hiring.
Yes, let’s back up to that point. In the past few months since those layoffs which cost us previous CM Andy ‘Frelorn’ Cataldo and some behind-the-scenes devs across the whole studio, LotRO has been all about going to Mordor in a full-scale expansion! Not simply an update with a new splash screen, but an honest-to-goodness proper expansion for the first time since November 2013! Now I can certainly understand skepticism about this. Let’s face it, Turbine has burned us in the past with announcing things and then pulling the football away like Lucy does to Charlie Brown. Remember the housing update that never happened a few years back? You can thank previous Executive Producer Kate Paiz for that disaster, that happened on her watch. We as players understand this because every studio has had to change plans, which is why most of them are super hesitant to announce stuff until it’s reasonably in the can and ready to go these days.
Enter Daybreak Games as publisher. Those of us who also play their games seem to fall into two camps from what I’m seeing in my social media circles: 1) They’re still putting out content for EQ1 and EQ2 and those games are old, so we should be okay if they stick to just forking over money and leave the SSG devs to their work. 2) Oh god no, did you see what they did to EverQuest Next and Landmark? Myself, I fall into the first category, because the SSG shift isn’t the same as being bought by an investment firm whose job is to cut costs. Also, the failure of EQN has less to do with Daybreak as a publisher and more to do with internal project management, external communication (major overpromising), and the simple fact you cannot accomplish goals that were beyond a full-sized team’s grasp when you lay off half your studio to meet a budget. The SSG folks have already survived layoffs under Turbine’s aegis months ago, so they should be lean mean development teams.
So where does that leave us? Same boat, different name on the stern, only with a better idea of our future. I really do feel that as long as the cash flow is there, the Dawnless Day that was the shadow of WB possibly shutting the games down when they changed Turbine to a mobile studio has ended, and the sun is once more shining upon the fair lands of Gondor. I had been very cautious in previous comments about the future of the game because the writing was on the wall and some of it was indeed in the Black Speech of Mordor. For me, LotRO is that one game I’d be tempted to play on a nostalgic server or emulator despite the rules against it if the legit servers sunset because I’ve been a Tolkien fan since I was in single digits *mumblemumble* years ago. This would be my Star Wars Galaxies, as it were.
Now? Now I can set aside my gaming press skepticism and caution and let my inner fan out to feel happy that there is actual hope here. I don’t feel like we’re being wound up with news of an expansion and avatar updates. Did you see that? Severlin let that one drop in on the forums, they’re actually looking into doing the game’s first-ever proper avatar updates! They’ve only done one adjustment to certain races’ stances in the past, so this is as big as when World of Warcraft announced their character model updates. The fact that they seem to have dev time to pour into this on top of or as part of an expansion is pretty big. Cordovan has been trying not to overhype the Mordor expansion on his recent livestreams and been spending time reassuring players that they have plans in the works for other things after that, which means exploring other regions near Mordor and maybe we might get to finally properly visit Erebor? Previous licensing kind of limited that as an option, but the door is open now, so we’ll see how that goes. Personally, I’m very interested to see if they can apply the same tech they use to let players traverse Minas Tirith both before and after the Battle of Pelennor to allow us to experience the Scouring of the Shire properly, rather than kick it to the curb like Peter Jackson did in the movies because he didn’t like it.
At the end of the day, I’m seeing a game that has been long in the tooth get a bit of a new lease on life. Again, while I can’t speak to how DDO is faring and whether their licensing from Wizards of the Coast was an issue, I remain cautious about the limits of this new partnership, because it didn’t include the soon-to-sunset Asheron’s Call. Still, with a new expansion, hints of goodies to come for the 10th anniversary party, and character revamps that hadn’t even been suggested as being in the works in the past, I think LotRO has a good future ahead of it at least for a couple more years. The fan community is still pretty rock solid with the game’s official Twitch channel frequently on with streams from selected players including the game’s first Twitch partner StinePlays, Cordovan as CM, and even an errant academic with an overweening fondness for pausing to discuss architecture during a 6-person instance. As for the game itself, I for one will remain heartily glad I bought the lifetime subscription back in 2007. It’s the best investment I’ve ever made in a video game. While the song doesn’t really apply to the overall situation, I can’t help hearing the refrain of Elton John’s song ‘I’m Still Standing’ going through my head when I think about Lord of the Rings Online.
‘Don’t you know I’m still standing better than I ever did
Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid
I’m still standing after all this time
Picking up the pieces of my life without you on my mind
I’m still standing, yeah yeah yeah…’
Now it’s time to level up some toons in the Yule Fest, because there’s a global 25% XP boost on until December 26th, and honestly, who wouldn’t want a kite with the Valacirya (our Big Dipper) on it?
See you in Middle Earth!
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