Plan A – EPIC FAIL!

This process turned out to be a bit more tumultuous than I had first planned. My original design for the system that would allow you to improve your weapons revolved around a large number of quests that would send you wandering to-and-fro across the whole of Middle-earth, seeking out and summoning special uniquely-named quest monsters that you would slay in order to imbue your weapons with mystical properties.

This implementation seemed to be going well for close to three months, and I was nearing completion, when two minor nagging worries began to grow into serious concerns . . . and it finally dawned on me that I was in trouble:

First off, I found myself in possession of a very large number of Legendary Item quests (nearly 60), each of which had a singular specialized reward -- each of which would only be particularly attractive to a small sub-set of classes. That means that most classes might not want to do most of my quests. I had always known this in the back of my head, but the closer I came to completing the content, the more it bothered me, especially as the scope of the issue became clearer. I hate making content that most players won't see. It makes me sad.

The second problem was a Lore issue; I had unconsciously designed most of my Legendary Item quest structure around the idea of sympathetic magic -- which is to say, magic that draws its power from similarities between an object or being's fundamental traits, and the effect to be produced.

Now, I'm not one of those who holds to the ideal of a mundane Middle-earth – I'm a particular fan of The Silmarillion, which is about as high-magic as you get, with Elven lords and Human heroes facing off against demi-gods and ancient dragons in solo combat – but when I looked back over my work in its near-complete state, it really sank in that while sympathetic magic is a very common fantasy trope, it is not strongly present in Tolkien's works, in which magic is much more about intricate knowledge of the world, skills of craft, and deific influence.

So now I had a serious gameplay issue and a serious lore issue as well! While I might have been able to repair one or the other, the scope and nature of the quests I had already crafted made it very unlikely that I would be able to fix both to my own satisfaction.

This precipitated one of the most dramatic career decisions I have ever had to make – as with just three weeks of pre-beta development time remaining, I took the entire Legendary Item quest system – nearly 60 quests and about three months of development time:

…and threw it out. o_0;

I was displeased with my work to the point that I was determined to start over from scratch. Needless to say, I wasn't going to get a whole lot of sleep for the next three weeks, as I entered not the longest, but certainly the most intense crunch period of my career.