LotRO innovative community features announced
Still to be proved at GM or soon after, but from GamesRadar comes a very interesting story of how LotRO will have a Google-like maps for players. Along with also having a game wiki and personal blogging utilities for players.More interesting is that the game is going to support extensive and complex community functions that twine with the actual gameplay. A Google Maps version of Middle-earth will be accessible to subscribers. Each character you create will get his or her own page on the game's official website, and you'll be able to blog it. Minigames on the website will affect your real progression in (currently unspecified) ways. The site will also feature an online Wiki encyclopedia of info about the LOTR Online universe. All in all, it sounds like a very robust package of community tools.A giant duh comes to mind -- why has no other MMO provider made these obviously easy things available? If the whole Webby business is about pageviews, why would providers want people off their site to raise awareness of their product? Keeping players on the provider's pages, churning out their own content and opinions, ought to help the community. Right?
Turbine is stoking my good will and expectaction by putting forward the right signals about community and game design so far. Again, still needs to proven. But if you consider that DDO was sort of a whole trial run for LotRO -- both technically, for game design, and community management -- then we might end up with a much more polished and well executed title than I certainly thought of this time last year.
posted by Tide @ Monday, January 29, 2007
2 Comments:
SOE has been providing many of these services for over 2 years with their Station Players service.
The latest addition, Vanguard Players, has automatic screenshots uploaded from the game to your profile. An auto-generated blog of your achievements, level-ups, etc, extensive character profiles. SOE has really been setting the benchmark for community tools in the MMO world for quite a while, it's good to see others finally starting to catch on.
I don't think SOE has all these features. I thought the Station Pass was more about inventory management and stats. I have seen the auto-gen'd blog of stats, but nothing that allows players free form to write and add to a wiki. The guild features are nice. But yeah, the paid StationPass was the first step here.
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