Home
Recent in Developer Diary
Rise of Isengard: Developer Diary: Dunland Region Overview

 

Dunland Region Overview

 

By: Jessie 'Vastin' King

 

Introduction

 
Where to begin? Dunland is the natural extension of our path down through Enedwaith, following the path of the Grey Company as they rush to the south to aid Aragorn in his quest to confront Sauron and rescue the city of Minas Tirith from the onslaught of the Dark Lord’s armies.
 
While Dunland may be separated from the path of the Fellowship, our exploration of the region has come from the idea of exploring the areas of Middle-earth just off the beaten paths of the books. It’s in these areas where interesting characters, environments and stories lay in the tantalizing realm of suggestion.
 
 

The Story Of Dunland

 
Telling the story of the Dunlendings within the scope of the War of the Rings was a particularly challenging proposition. In the main books, the Dunlendings are depicted as thralls of Saruman and perennial enemies of the civilized people of the West. Yet these are not Orcs and Goblins; no twisted creations of Morgoth – they are Men with civilizations and aspirations of their own.
 
As we travel amongst them, we are hoping to explore who the Dunlendings might have been and how they came to their conflict with the Horse Lords of Rohan, as it is depicted in the books.
 
Knowing what we do about Saruman -- his magical powers of persuasion and his tendency towards hierarchy, industry, and organization -- it made sense to us that he had used these strengths to effect what amounted to a political coup of Dunland. He’s played the clan leaders against each other, using human greed and promises of a grand nationalistic conquest of the Rohirrim to encourage the normally independent Dunlendings to submit to his will or essentially be enslaved by their own leaders. We saw parts of this story in distant Enedwaith, where Saruman’s rule had not fully extended, but here in Dunland we see the full results of his persuasive powers.
 
Now, out of necessity, the players would be travelling through Dunland proper and interacting extensively with the people therein. It did not seem to us that the Dunlending people should consist of a purely hostile race – indeed, that would have immediately reduced the entirety of Dunland to little more than a hostile monster camp. So, instead, we’ve decided to offer two distinct perspectives of Dunland.
 
The first was from the point of view within Dunland, where the local population has been driven by a combination of both fervor and fear to muster for war. Both of these feelings have long existed, but they have been fanned to new heights by Saruman’s ill words. The leaders plan to go to war, even though it places a hardship akin to slavery upon their own people.
 
From this viewpoint the Dunlendings are a people with their own aspirations and concerns. The player interacts with them in a mixed, but often sympathetic role where you may attempt to aid the common folk of Dunland against their cruel and self-serving chieftains. Simultaneously, however, the player will be undermining their preparations for war.
 
The second viewpoint offers the much harsher delineation between good and evil that we read of in the Lord of the Rings. As the player enters the Gap of Rohan, they will find Rohirrim forces under the leadership of Théodred fighting to prevent raids against their own villages in western Rohan. As they fight, they realize that a far greater threat is in the offing -- one for which they are ill prepared.
 
From the viewpoint of the Rohirrim, Dunland represents an implacable foe that offers up little more than a collective rage gathered beneath the banner of the White Hand, preparing to fall upon the Rohirrim and destroy them utterly. There is little time for sympathy in the hearts of the Riders, who face an existential threat quite different than the cruel and numbing hardships of the people of Dunland beneath Saruman’s rule.
 
It is an old story of war, where a people with simple wants and aspirations becomes a force for wanton destruction -- and the difference between the two can only be easily seen when one actually steps across the vague line dividing them. I’m not sure that we’ve been able to do proper justice to that tale, but it has certainly been an interesting exploration to embark upon.
 

Onwards To Isengard

 
Isengard remains one of the most iconic and recognizable places within the trilogy and a wide array of events take place there over the course of the books. Time and again the thread of the story passes through the gates of Isengard and becomes entwined in Saruman’s machinations.
 
As it turns out, this presents a number of interesting problems for us, developmentally speaking! For one thing, it is one of the few places in the books where several key events occur, widely spaced over the course of the books, each depicting the fortress of Isengard in a dramatically different state at different periods of time. Generally speaking, it is the most frequently revisited and dynamically changing set piece in the Lord of the Rings.
 
Aside from our needing to create a fair number of different versions of the place, this challenges our normal approach to time and place in LotRO – which is that each place in our game world represents (roughly speaking) a particular time in the course of the books. For a given player, time within the game does not align the passage of years in our development calendar, but it remains fixed to your place in the game. For the most part the events in LOTR lend themselves rather well to this approach…
 
Isengard? Not so much.
 
Too much happens in this locale, and those events are too widely spread apart for our usual approach to function quite right here. Curse Saruman and his foul schemes!
 
This confounding progression of time in a single place also leads to a bit of a story problem -- this particular chapter of Lord of the Rings Online doesn’t quite have a proper ending within the walls of Isengard! It builds towards the climax which those of you who have read the books are quite familiar with, but which we developers and you players will not actually see for a while yet.
 
We knew this going in, tried to find clever ways around it, yet found ourselves tied firmly in place no matter how we tried to wriggle through. Suffice to say, even with the upcoming release of The Rise of Isengard we are not yet done with this locale… Saruman will remain a thorn in your sides for some time to come, brave adventurers.
 
You didn’t think we were just going to let you shoot him off the walls of Orthanc, did you?
 

The Ever-changing World of LotRO

 
So, in addition to the usual story-telling and monster bashing meat and potatoes we try to keep your larders stocked with, Dunland marks some new experiments in how we present our characters and world.
 
In this case, we’ve been working on creating more dynamic environments where characters and objects can appear, disappear, change location and so on depending on where you are in a storyline or quest arc. We’re still learning the best ways to go about using some of these new techniques and trying to find good ways to smooth out their implementation, but we do hope to employ them full bore as we move ahead.
 
The truth of the matter is that technology alone is hardly the only barrier to bringing this sort of content to fruition – it requires quite a bit more planning and polish time to create the sequences of quests and events that take advantage of the tech, especially in a massively multi-player environment. It also tends to demand a somewhat more linear approach to how we structure sections of the storyline, so that presentation is gradually changing as well.
 
The end result should be that as we settle into the use of some of these new tools, you should discover yourself in the midst of more dramatically changing towns, actively engaged NPC’s, and roiling conflicts as you explore the world of Middle-earth.
 
Speaking of which, that brings me to:
 

The Map of Middle-earth

 
Now for those astute cartographers of Middle-earth, you may already be aware of the fact that Dunland is really a subsection of the broader region of Enedwaith - the ‘Middle Region’, which for a long time fell under the rule of neither Gondor nor the Northern Kingdoms of old. After the rule of the Dunedain began to wane, this large area became the domain of wild hill-men who gave their allegiance only to local chieftains and lords.
 
In our version of Middle-earth, of course, we’ve created somewhat more distinct versions of these regions, mostly for ease of navigation and to distinguish them from each other while travelling and questing.
 
Alas, unlike real mapmakers, we don’t have the luxury of creating many different levels of maps, each nesting within the others in an arbitrary manner – we have to stick to a rough set of scales that will display well within the interface we have. Because of this, we generally break up our regions into much more discrete divisions than the map of Middle-earth would otherwise suggest. This is just one of the many cases where we often need to take rather amorphous concepts and turn them into much more discrete ones for the purpose of implementation.
 

The View From Atop Orthanc

 
And so from this lofty vantage point, marking a key milestone upon the grand road we walk upon, we can now look out across the world of Middle-earth and see glimpses of what lies yet before us:
 
The rolling pastures of Rohan stretch out far to the east until they encounter the mighty Anduin, the armies of Gondor are gathering in the south to defend the walls of Minas Tirith, and vast regiments of Hobbit minstrels gird their lutes for their final song-and-dance routine atop the Black Gates of Mordor!
 
Err… that last bit may deviate slightly from the canon, but there you have it. Also some grumpy old fellow is shaking a staff and me and telling me to get the hell off his tower, so I’d best be going now.
 
May your feet never stray from interesting paths!