LotRO's Mounted Combat Developed In Years

When you hear about Lord of the Rings Online's Riders of Rohan expansion, I am sure "Mounted Combat" is the most popular feature you can think of. As easy it may look from the outside, Mounted Combat has taken the developers of the game a great deal of years of development. Latest developer diary revealed when Turbine's developers started to work on Mounted Combat. Continue reading for the history of Mounted Combat's development.

LotRO's Mounted Combat Has Been Developed In Years

When you think of mounted combat, it may not sound all the complex to you but having read the latest LotRO developer diary, I can understand how complicated it has been for the developers at Turbine. Did you know the developers had started working on the concept of Mounted Combat back in 2009 for the first time? Following the launch of Mounts and Mounts 2.0 in Lord of the Rings Online, the MMORPG's developers had experimented with fighting on horseback. According to the developers, the first experiment was fun but it was far from something achievable back then. 

And in almost three years after the first attempt in 2009, developers did not really work on Mounted Combat again, not until they started working on Riders of Rohan expansion last year. Thoughts on paper, were followed by prototypes... Champion and a Goblin Rider was the first prototype. The first system called the Choreography System was later abandoned as the devs thought it was impossible to have multiple AI units involved in mounted combat. The system was basically not scalable. 

Do you think developers ignore message boards? You are wrong. This diary post proves once again how valuable message boards are to game developers. Turbine developers used the forum and forum posts as their main resource as they designed Mounted Combat. 3 War Steed Types; Light, Medium, Heavy; War Steed Stats, Mounted Combat Skills, Advancements, Customization, Synchronization, AI behaviours and Momentum Mechanic were the core features of Mounted Combat from the first day developers started designing this feature.

Fortunately for us players, developers decided -at an early stage- to drop the idea of generic skills and they created class specific skills. From momentum to war steed stats such as Endurance and Agility, developers have considered all sorts of design details that comes to mind.

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Finally, the post reveals another detail. Mounted Combat is going to be available only in Rohan and even in Rohan, there will be areas that mounted combat is going to be blocked. (such as towns and special places; it only makes sense.)

If you want to read more of the History of Mounted Combat's development, you can read all about it here, and understand how hard LOTRO's developers worked on the Mounted Combat. I guess that's why they have been and we have been talking about Mounted Combat for months whenever someone mentions Lord of the Rings Online. It's a very sophisticated feature that is going to change LotRO drastically.

Source: LotRO dev diary

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