The 2011 Yule Festival

By: Ryan "Pinion" Penk

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Yule Festival! I'm Pinion, the newest content designer on The Lord of the Rings Online.  I was previously a part of Turbine's QA team, and some of you may know me from our test servers.  For my first design task, I was charged with improving and polishing the Yule Festival, specifically the Winter-home area.

Before I jump into the changes that are coming with this year's Yule Festival, I'd like to take a moment to talk about festivals and where they fit in with this update. As Budgeford will explain further in a future dev diary, we had a surprise opportunity during the Update 5 schedule to do a lot of work on LOTRO's festivals. Needless to say, I won't spoil any of that now, but other dev diaries were written during this update and you will see them once they're ready for the spotlight.

Revisiting Winter-home

Before I began working on the Yule Festival, I was already very familiar with the Winter-home arc. It was a piece of content that I personally enjoyed, so it was exciting to be able to tinker and expand on it. There were several challenges in meaningfully adding onto a contained piece of content such as Winter-home. In order to focus my efforts, I condensed my goals down into three key points:

• Fully utilize the space of Winter-home
• Create new daily quests that work with the theme of the area
• Tweak existing quests to make them more player-friendly

In my own experience playing through Winter-home, I felt that even though there was an abundance of content, the area seemed very spread out for quests and there were a few areas in the region that were not utilized as well as they could be. This led into my goal of creating new content to fill these gaps, but of course, this new content had to fit within the fully formed theme that shapes the area. Finally, I knew of various criticisms of Winter-home, especially those revolving around the moral choices in the storyline, and made a point to tweak existing quests to make the Yule Festival a better experience for everyone.

The New

There are several exciting new quests at the Yule Festival, and while I won't spoil everything, I'll give you a preview of what sorts of fun you can expect in Winter-home this year. Winter-home is livelier than ever, and there are a few new faces in Frostbluff.

Virgil Greenfield works tirelessly outside of Winter-home trying to build as many snowmen as possible to appease the Mayor's demands. However, he's having a lot of difficulty keeping up, especially with the harsh weather and troublesome creatures that have undone his labor. He's going to need some help, so seek him out in Frostbluff!

Meanwhile, Mayor Goodnough has a problem that he'd like to keep quiet, which shouldn't be too difficult since the "problem" is sleeping. At the Mayor's request, Guard Kember has been ordered to drive off a family of snow-beasts that dwell within the outer reaches of Frostbluff. Unfortunately for him, the beasts only seem interested in hibernating, so perhaps some unconventional methods will need to be employed…

That's not all, though, so be sure to visit Winter-home during the Yule Festival to experience all of the new quests!

Every Little Thing

As I mentioned above, I read a ton of feedback on the festival last year, and I made an effort to make this year's festival more fun in a few ways by analyzing that feedback as well as my own observations when playing through Winter-home.

The quest "Empty Keg Emergency" had some odd behavior in it where you could fail by being spotted after simply going near the kegs, which you often could do while working on other quests in Winter-home. This has been corrected, so the quest should now feel better overall. In addition, the moral choice of "Moving Them Off" and "A Charitable Spirit" has been made clearer and more logical for players doing these quests for the first time. This change will not have an effect on players who have already done these quests in the past.

We've also made some tweaks to the Snowball Fight for the Yule Festival this year. The debuff you receive from being hit by a snowball is now more potent, but shorter in duration - we wanted you to really notice when you got hit, but also maintain the pace of the event. Also, we've implemented some new tech that you'll see in both difficulties of the snowball fight. Instead of having to manually slot the snowballs you've picked up during the fight, they will now be usable directly from a clickable item mounted on the quest tracker.

Final Thoughts

My work on the Yule Festival was fun and exciting, and I hope you enjoy all of the new changes this coming winter. There are some new rewards as well, including a new Yule Festival mount, so be sure to give Winter-home a visit!

There was a lot of time and effort put into revitalizing this year's Yule Festival, and I had a lot of help along the way! I'd like to extend a huge thank you to Budgeford, Maurath, JWBarry, Aubergine, Tovva, and everyone else for their help. Once again, I hope you enjoy our updates to the Yule Festival, and we'll see you in Winter-home!