No Remaster for Lord of the Rings Online

We thought about this and we ultimately ended up not doing it, we said “Hey, let’s go remaster Lord of the Rings.” Sounded really great.

Then we went through the numbers. When we did that we got to spend like 30 million bucks. I’m like, “Why aren’t we just making a new game?”

Because the return you could get from investing 30 million in a new game versus the return you could get from investing 30 million dollars into an existing game versus finding a good risk-adjusted opportunity in you like it’s dramatically different. So for us it’s not the right use of capital hence the reason why we’re staying away from things like that.

-Ji Ham, Transcript of EG7’s 2023 Capital Markets Day video

There is a transcript of the video.  It was auto-generated by speech to text, so has some of the usual artifacts.  But it is there for you to view and save off should you so desire.

Yes, I am still farming that video I wrote about last week for blog posts.  It is a rich vein of content.

Anyway, that bit of trivia aside, the big surprise at about the 1:50:00 mark in the video is that any plans for a remaster of Lord of the Rings Online have been effectively scrapped.

That probably also includes any plans for a console version of the title as that would absolutely require a remaster to be at all viable.  Can you even imagine trying to play the current game with a controller while sitting across the room from your TV?  It would never be a marketable option.

Lord of the Rings Online

While this statement does not specifically exclude the idea of there being some updates to the UI… and my experiments with the Lossless Scaling app indicated that the game desperately needs more than just a scaling hack to be viable on monitors approaching 4K resolution… the idea that we’re going to get anything beyond minor tweaks and improvements over time is pretty much done.

the SSG team has 4K on their vague, long term roadmap, but that apparently will never mean any more than band-aids to address the most egregious issues at high resolutions.

This probably means that I will never return to LOTRO in any serious way.  Even with the scaling hack, there are still too many things that are too small and cannot be resized to be reasonably visible for me to play the game without it giving me an eyestrain headache.

I know, “Boo hoo, Wilhelm won’t be returning to LORTO!”  Who cares?

It makes me a bit sad, but I’ll get over it.

The thing is, I don’t think EG7 is necessarily wrong in that decision.

I mean, I am skeptical that they can make a comparable title for $30 million in 2023 or beyond.  And at some point the lack of real, built in, I don’t have to use a hack to make this all fit my monitor in a useful and usable way, solution for large screens is going to become a serious road block for new players.

And, of course, as I pointed out the other day, EG7 seems fine spending an estimated $25 million to remake H1Z1: Just Survive, a title that they previously shut down because it wasn’t seen as valuable enough to maintain.  There is, at least superficially, some logic there that does not track.

But the current player base doesn’t seem to care, and can get actively huffy if you suggest that the UI is at all an issue.  There is always somebody willing to declare that your problem isn’t valid if it doesn’t affect them.  Wait until you all get old as well!  You’ll see… or won’t see… or will get headaches trying to see!

All that said, EG7’s decision still makes sense.  I cannot fault their overall logic.

At its heart, LOTRO is yesterday’s news.  MMORPG’s like LOTRO and WoW and EverQuest have a pretty standard life cycle.  There is the launch and the initial growth of the player base, which can last anywhere from two weeks (EverQuest II) to ten years (EVE Online).

After that point, while new users don’t stop showing up… and are in fact required to maintain at least some level of replacement for older players leaving… they no longer join in numbers sufficient to increase the overall population of the game.

After that point, the game is all about the installed base of player.  And by “installed base” I mean not just the current subscribers, but also all of those former players for whom the game still holds fond memories.  The long term survival of the game depends on farming that installed base, bring in things that make them happy, keep them playing, or can entice them to come back for another run at the title.

For the former, that is content.  New expansions, new updates, new classes, new races, new whatever.  For LOTRO that means delivering the next bite sized piece of Middle-earth they are contractually allowed to use… and the span of content updates have gone from Moria and all of Rohan and to some things happening off screen during the books or mentioned in the appendix and will eventually get down to things like “that one time, at the Gaffer’s hole at Bag End” in the span of context… and things like river Hobbits and whatever other flavor of dwarf or elf they can interpret from the tales.

That keeps the current active player base engaged, keeps them subscribed, and gets a little cash shop money from them.  There is a reason, for example, that EverQuest puts out an expansion every single year like clockwork.  It was, as I recall, a bit of a scary move back in the day when they decided to stop doing TWO expansions a year.  Could they maintain their player base with just ONE expansion annually?

And even then they generally do a very big mid-year content update related to the current expansion.  For the installed base, content is king.

Of course, WoW came along, got an order of magnitude more players inside of a year, and kept growing them for a bit even with an expansion every other year.  That might have eased the pressure on the EQ team… though both EQ and WoW teams still know in their bones that they can never get off the expansion treadmill lest the player numbers plummet terminally.

Meanwhile, the team, if it is wise, won’t forget the lapsed players.  This is where retro servers, special rules servers, special events, and so on come in.  Somebody who previously committed time to your game is much more likely to come back for the right enticement than a random, off the street, never heard of your game before player.

The EverQuest team has been on this for ages.  Their first progression server was in 2007, when the game was eight years old.  After long resisting the retro vibe, Blizzard finally did WoW Classic and it was a huge success.

Even EVE Online has its occasional retro moments, though it almost always player driven.  The 2020-21 World War Bee got a lot of null sec players to come back to the game based on the mere fact that there was a huge war against traditional enemies.  That CCP actively killed off the war by choosing that moment to screw up the economy and make capital ships so expensive that nobody wanted to risk them just shows what a strange place New Eden can be.

But it is sort of the exception that proves the rule, the fact that an inactive installed base is a market companies need to tap in order to keep their online title going for decades, and that they piss off  that user base at their peril.

The player forum logic, that if only game X implemented feature Z then a bazillion new players would show it is always wrong.  If Blizzard spent an expansion building player housing or if CCP went crazy and went back to the bad idea that is walking in stations, it wouldn’t bring in new players in any substantial numbers.

It might bring back old players.  In fact, player housing in WoW would be an excellent way to farm the installed base.  But new players would remain a trickle, largely friends of people who already play or random individuals who saw something about the game and decided to take a peek. (And who will likely leave, never to return, within two weeks.)

Features like 64-bit support, a not horrible launcher/patcher, and even support for higher resolutions, those don’t really tick the box for any new players.  That ship has sailed.  Almost no game gets a second chance, and those that do usually blew their first chance so drastically that a popular streamer taking a look at the title can bring a sudden influx of new players.  Think Among Us.

So $30 million for a remaster, when that isn’t going to have any realistic chance of bringing in a real surge of new players… that is sensibly seen as a bad move.  Better to produce content that keeps the install base engaged with the game.

That doesn’t mean I am happy with the decision.  I would love to see the game remastered.  Again, to some extent, I think its long term survival depends on it not being a game clearly optimized for 1080p monitors.  But that is a medium to long term problem.  In the short term, that $30 million wouldn’t move the needle enough to make a difference and would get some institutional shareholder upset about how that money could have been used for dividends or stock buy backs.

Because that is the world we live in.

How players view this… well, that is is another story.

Related:

• Massively OP – LOTRO’s Cancelled Remaster
• Massively OP – LOTRO studio pushes back against maintenance mode claims
• Contains Moderate Peril – LOTRO: What You See Is What You Get