The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth Designer Diary #8 - Interface and Final Thoughts

Thanks to games like The Battle for Middle-earth, real-time strategy games seem to be pulling away from the traditional model of "gather resources, construct base, churn out armies of military units, pummel opponent first." The upcoming game will draw inspiration from the smash hit motion pictures that were based on author J.R.R. Tolkien's classic fantasy fiction. And now the game's development is basically done. Executive producer and EA LA vice president Mark Skaggs takes a look back at the game's development.

Polishing the Battle

By Mark Skaggs
Executive Producer / VP, EA LA

The Battle for Middle-earth is about to begin. (Because the game is done.)

By the time you read this, we will have sent The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth off to manufacturing and we will have already started our time off. It's an odd experience to think of that while writing this, but it's good to know that while the game is being manufactured, players will be able to learn more about some of the things we did toward the end of the development cycle. On all games, the last 45 to 60 days of time is spent squashing bugs and adding polish to the game. Rather than spending time talking about the great bug-killing effort from the team, I thought it would be interesting to talk about some of the polish work the team did to make the game even better.

When you come down to the final days of development on a game, sometimes it is difficult for a team to look at the game in an objective and fair manner. It is possible, for instance, for a team to accidentally make the game too hard simply because after playing it for six months, they themselves find it too easy. Additionally, it's not unheard of for a team to be so focused on fixing bugs that they miss out on some obvious polish issues that need to be addressed.

To avoid these types of mistakes, one of the development processes we follow is to try to get as much feedback as possible about the game from people who are not on the dev team. For this game, we collected this feedback through a series of focus groups, by having senior people across EA play the game and by listening to what our testing department had to say. After collecting comments and listening to the feedback, a couple of themes surfaced that we wanted to address.

First, we found that the process for earning and using Evenstar/Ring points (for the game's "special powers") was not as clear as we would have liked. We also found that there were some key features of the game that many players weren't aware of as they played through solo play. Finally, we had feedback that our tutorial mission wasn't working well either as a tutorial or a mission. Looking at the details of these comments, we realized that most of them could be addressed with presentation and using the interface to surface features already in the game. So this is where we focused our efforts.

With the Evenstar and Ring points, the main issue was that players were unclear on how to earn the points and then how to spend them to purchase the special powers. After looking closely at the system, we realized that we had some hidden rules that confused people on how many points could be earned in a mission. The confusion that resulted had the side effect that people were not as excited about earning the power points and then purchasing special powers with them. To resolve this, we set about eliminating the confusion by removing the constraints on how many points could be earned in a mission and instead make earning points solely dependant on fighting battles. Given that this was pretty much just like earning experience points in a role-playing game, we knew players would understand it.

Special powers can turn the tide of battle in an instant.

Next we wanted to make sure that players understood how their power points could be used to purchase increasingly strong powers to use in battle. This is where we came up with the idea to change the powers menu to be more like a "powers tree" that players are familiar with from other games. With the "powers tree," we could easily communicate to players the number of power points each power cost, plus the increasingly stronger powers they could purchase as they played through the game. We were fortunate to have a strong interface team that jumped on these changes and made them happen very quickly. The result was that over a period of a few days, the confusion surrounding power points was cleared up and we received some great feedback not only on the functionality of the powers menu, but also on how well the team did in making it look good.