The Lord of the Rings Online Free-to-Play Interviews

If you were curious about how the free-to-play component will work in The Lord of the Rings Online, there are a couple of Q&As for you to check out this morning.  First up is Voodoo Extreme, where you’ll find a standard interview with Turbine’s Kate Paiz and Adam Mersky:

VE: Realistically, how far would you say, will players be able to go in LOTRO’s Middle Earth without purchasing anything from the LOTRO Store?

Kate Paiz: That’s a good question that we’ll see players take different approaches to. I think that for the most part, somebody who really wants to could definitely make it all the way to the Moria gates without purchasing anything. It’s certainly not the easiest path in the sense that there are some moments where you’re going to need a little bit more XP between the epic story lines but there is plenty of XP available by killing monsters in the landscape so that is a viable path. They will also be earning Turbine points for the deeds and for a couple of the epic quests.

But I think realistically, we’ll see players around level 30 – 35 starting to see that it makes sense for them to purchase content packs from the LOTRO Store. Obviously, for people who see cosmetic items that they want, that could be as early as level 5 – 10. But my guess is that for people who are really trying to play it for free, they will be wanting to be a little bit more on that side of things by their mid-30s.

Adam Mersky: We think of it two ways from the player’s perspective. The real fundamental choice that all players have for all games is whether to invest time or money. There’s a whole thread on the forums where our “forum economists” have figured this out. If you run your main and a couple of alts, with all the deeds you will be able to earn enough Turbine points to buy all the content in the game. So just as we’ve seen in DDO in its first year, players have gotten all the way to level cap without paying a dime, there will certainly be a segment of players that will be able to do that in our game. They just have to be willing to spend enough time on it. When I was younger I had more time and less money but now that time is a precious resource, then I’m willing to spend more money on my entertainment.

Kate Paiz: And we really do try to structure it for people to be able to make those choices. When you get the quest or see the deeds, the rewards are laid out for you right up front. We want players to feel like it’s all very easy, all very understandable. We don’t want them to be confused about the business model. That’s one of the things that we really focused on so whichever path players choose to take, I think that they will fully understand that they have the power to make that choice between time or wallet investment.

And then WarCry has a transcript of a recent IRC chat they hosted with several members of the development team:

WarCry Honvik: Question: Any plans to add challenge modes to exisiting raid instances i.e Watcher, DN, Turtle with some enhanced loot for completing them?

jwbarry The plan is to ultimately convert all of our instances over to scale, raids included. Part of this conversion includes daily quests, random quests, and challenge quests to upgrade the spaces to our new standards.

WarCry Honvik: Question: Is turbine intending to release regular updates once F2P goes live much like they did once DDO went Free2Play and what can we expect from them?

katepaiz yes, lotro plans to follow a similar release cycle as DDO has had in the last year. we’ve got a lot of amazing content and systems in development and will be getting them out to players as often and as soon as we can. each of you can let us know through chats like this and forums, etc, what you are yearning for, and we will be happy to consider it!