Recent in Developer Diary

Developer Diary: Legendary Item Quest Instances

 

(re)Introduction

Hey folks! For those of you who may not know me, my moniker is Vastin, and I have had the honour of serving as one of the content designers on The Lord of the Rings Online™ since its launch last year. I've been in the game development industry for many years – some of you may have played some of my older projects, such as WarCraft 2: Beyond the Black Portal, or Heroes of Might & Magic 2: The Price of Loyalty, but for the last few years I've been quietly and happily toiling away here in the world of LOTRO.

My usual role is in the design of most of the Deeds and supporting the system of Landmarks that helps you find camps and points of interest throughout the world, with a secondary role in quest design within each of our releases – my more significant quest contributions in the past have been the quests in the eastern Misty Mountains and in the western forests of Evendim.

For our first expansion, I have once again done many of the core Deeds and Landmarks for Moria, but got a hand from some of our other designers to fill out others, such as the Instance-based Deeds. This left me a decent chunk of time to try my hand again at the art of quest design, particularly the content that was needed to help support the Legendary Item system introduced in Mines of Moria™.