Hail and Well Met!
Today we want to talk about the evolution of The Lord of the Rings™: Adventure Card Game, how it came to be and how we got to where we are now, but before we do, we have some news to share...
Full Release Now Set for August 29th
A few weeks ago we had announced that we were going to come out of Full Release on August 8th. That's this Thursday. We decided to delay that date as the console release has been slated for August 29th and we feel that it's important for us to coordinate between all platforms and to share the optimizations we've incorporated into the console versions of the game into full PC release, making the game more stable, smaller in size and with an increased frame rate.
We understand this will be frustrating to some, but we would prefer to delay the release slightly to ensure a more enjoyable experience for players at launch and to coordinate our marketing efforts so that they have the greatest impact across all platforms. Prepare for a grand journey through Middle-earth where you can forge the new legend that will go down in the annals of history!
We'll have more to say about Full Access just prior to that date, so keep your eyes peeled for more in a future news update.
The Road To Release
On August 28th, we released a game then known as The Lord of the Rings™: Living Card Game from development onto Steam as an Early Access Game. We called it a Living Card Game and released it into Early Access as our plan was not just release the game and then move on, but rather to treat it as a living entity that we would continue to develop, support and change over time with the help of you, the gaming audience.
Upon release, we had just the five quests of the first campaign, The Shadow's Reach, 31 initial player cards, and four hero pack expansions with another 16 player cards to unlock. We hoped that from this humble beginning an audience would emerge and give us feedback to help us improve. We got great feedback, some positive, some negative and some requesting new features or quality of life improvements. We thank you all as you have been so great in your feedback. You've had a huge impact on the game, and on our development team.
Since the time of that first Early Access release, we changed our sales model from a more complex free to play hybrid to a more traditional one that is closer in style to the table top FFG games you know and love. We've also added a lot of new content including:
- Our first premium expansion, The Shadow's Fall, with four new heroes, 16 new player cards and a whole host of new locations, encounters, hazards and enemies.
- Three Free Encounters, The King of Carrion, A Feast For Trolls and Gundabad Awoken, which are new quests balanced to be a bit harder than the standard quests. Each of these new quests featured new locations, behaviors, enemies, hazards and objectives.
- Two Vault Expansions with 17 new player cards each.
- A Brand New Free Tutorial Campaign with an all new Free Quest Flight Through Darkness. This tutorial walks you through various aspects of the game and gives you access to pre-constructed decks for you to use on your own adventures.
- A Revamp of the UX and First Time User Experience that adds new hero, quest and campaign rewards as well as new avatars, alt art for hero cards and quest challenges to achieve every time you play the game as well as save games for both single and multiplayer games.
- Co-Operative Play, allowing you to play against Sauron with a friend and overcome his challenges and the ability to communicate through emotes. {We even added the ability to 'Ping' a player; just use Ctrl Left Click (Cmd Left Click on a Mac) to ping anywhere on the game surface.}
There are now several hundred cards in the game with many more to come.
On top of all that, we've added a variety of other enhancements—large and small—based on your feedback, as well as things we wanted to improve. Though we intended to be just 3-5 months in Early Access initially, we feel that the changes and additions have been worth the time and made the game more robust, deeper to play and offered a variety of different quests for you to try and we don't intend to stop there!
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If you haven't played in a while, we urge you to check out the game again. It's very different (and we believe greatly improved) from the game we released just twelve short months ago. We've evolved a great deal and will continue to improve the game, even after Full Release.
A Hobbit's Journey
Just like Bilbo took stock of his journey and wrote down his stories upon returning from his adventures to The Lonely Mountain, we've been on a long journey with this game and wanted to share some of its development with you.
While the game was first announced back on December 9th, 2017, and not released into Early Access until August 28th, 2018, the project existed long before either of those dates as various people and teams worked to come up with a way to bring a new Middle-earth card game adventure to the digital screen.
First Concepts
Christian T. Petersen, company founder of Fantasy Flight Games and former CEO always had a strong passion for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Growing up, it was his favorite series of books, and Fantasy Flight Games has put out a number of games over the years taking place in Middle-earth.
(Early Work In Progress Prototype)
Nathan French, famed LCG designer at Fantasy Flight Games designed the original table top experience based on Christian's vision, which released in 2011. Caleb Grace picked up the reigns and led the game through a fantastic run of expansions, nightmare decks, convention decks and scenarios and the full Saga mode.
(Early Work In Progress Prototype)
Way back in 2016, Christian asked the team at FFG, including Caleb, famed designer Corey Konieczka, current head of FFG Andrew Navaro, and VP of Interactive Keith Hurley to create a digital game inspired by The Lord of the Rings™ Card Game, and capturing the feel of it, but not a direct translation of the table top experience. His vision was not to simply replicate the table top experience, or to compete or replace it, but to create a game unique in its own right but reminiscent of the table top experience and drawing up on the amazing art that game had accumulated over the years.
(Early Work In Progress Prototype)
They came up with a number of iterations on paper, exploring different concepts, but without a dedicated team, trying to come up with something they felt would meet their vision. They went through a number of designs and proofs of concepts over about 18 months while also working on their regular projects.
(Early Work In Progress Prototype)
These early designs featured a number of approaches and layouts, and they created bare bones interactive prototypes of each, finding flaws and issues with them all. After much trial and error, they came across the layout currently within the game, with one player at the bottom of the screen, another at the top, and Sauron in the middle, each laid out horizontally. At this stage, the prototype looked like a very rough prototype of what we have today, but without a lot of the fine nuances that were to come.
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Fantasy Flight Interactive Is Born
By early 2017, the team at FFG decided they needed to take a different approach. Though they had a working prototype, they realized that bringing that game to fruition and meet their vision would require a dedicated team who could devote themselves to it. Christian reached out to an old friend, who had more than twenty years in the games industry making games of all sizes from massive AAA console games to the smallest games for the web and mobile phones, your humble writer.
(Early Production Screenshot)
Christian is a great persuader, and the team at FFG are second to none. I couldn't say no, and Fantasy Flight Interactive was born. FFG brought us on board to shepherd the design that FFG had begun as well as to evolve it into a final project. They also brought on the great development team at Virtuos Shanghai, and Caleb and I flew out to China to meet with them and kick off the project. Friendships were born, teams drew together, and the project took shape.
(Early Production Screenshot)
With a small team in Madison, the support of the interactive team under Keith Hurley in Roseville, and the development team in Shanghai, we embarked on bringing The Lord of the Rings™: Adventure Card Game to life. Asmodee Digital, already part of the Asmodee Games global group become the publisher, but also a partner as we worked to evolve the game.
(Early Production Screenshot)
As a testament to this new influx of energy and focus, by November of that year we had a playable early draft of the game that covered the aspects of the original FFG design. We set the announcement for December 9th and planned to release the game to the world in Early Access in late January.
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But wait...there's more!
We got to mid-January 2018 and had our initial Early Access Candidate nearly ready for launch. We sat down with Christian and the FFG team one more time to evaluate the game and authorize for launch.
At that time, there were was no Threat meter, no Fate bar, and the game played very differently. The game played in a more truncated version of the cycle from the table top game. You had a Planning Phase, an Adventure Phase, an End Phase, and an UpKeep Phase. In Planning, you played all the cards you had resources for from your hand, and in Adventure Phase you played all of your cards you had played out to the table. At that time, you played all your cards, and then Sauron played all his cards.
It was fast, but didn't feel like a game of reason and tactics. You slammed Sauron, he slammed you back, and often it felt like back and forth punishment with your best laid plans thrown into disarray because you couldn't react, only play cards and hope. All damage was reciprocal, so it hurt to attack just as much as it hurt to be attacked.
The game was designed to be much more random, with the story serving only as a starting point and the card play being much more systems based and resulting in a very random experience from there. If you are curious to see the game as it was played then, you might still find some of these early sessions from our Twitch streams on the internet.
(Early Production Screenshot)
Christian liked the game the game at that point, but felt it could be so much more. Being such a fan of the books, he really wanted the narrative to be front and center, and wanted to refine the look of the cards further. As much as it made the team groan at the thought of delaying, we agreed with the changes and collectively decided to delay the game to explore these features further and make these changes. We sat down with Corey and Caleb and Keith and rethought the game from top to bottom.
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Once More Unto the Breach
Over the next couple of months, the team went and made a host of changes. First up, we went to an igo-ugo system. There was no more planning stage—you either played a card from your hand, or you played one of your cards already. This instantly fit better with our AI Sauron and made the game feel much more tactical. Sauron could now react to you, and you could react to him.
Since you couldn't play all of your cards at once, we had to tweak the numeric values of all cards, as they no longer made sense in a reactive play system.
We refined this play for a couple of months and redesigned Guard about a dozen times, and added and removed universal reciprocal damage as well as changed a bunch of other parameters. Each time we made a change, we'd have to sit down and play through the game painstakingly to review the effects as even small changes could have huge impacts on play.
Corey, Caleb, Keith and Christian spent many a day at our offices and theirs walking through these changes and making suggestions and playing through the differences. Somewhere in there we added threat events and then the full threat meter and expanded the scope of those events.
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Economic Impact-
Each of these changes created an impact on our business model for the game, and what had started as a fairly standard free to play model became a very complex hybrid free to play model. This was something that we didn't account for fully at the time as we were more focused on the game mechanics, sowing the seeds of our eventual switch to a more traditional sales model post launch.
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Not Quite...
By now it was late June and we all felt we finally had the mechanics down, announcing an August 28th Early Access launch. However, in early July Christian called me one last time with a thought. He felt that the game just wasn't quite there yet. He loved the mechanics and the balance was getting there (though he wanted it to be even harder to appeal to the hardest core table top gamers, and still does!).
He still felt we had room for more narrative elements. Our initial campaign 'Wilderlands Adventure' we'd played to death on our Twitch stream, and despite the new mechanics, we still had room to bring the story to life in a richer way. We had already delayed the game more than once, and I was adamant that we not do so again. I had been through Early Access before, and wanted to get the game into the hands of the players to give us feedback as soon as possible, since we knew the game would evolve anyway. However, Christian was right, and it was clear that there was more we could do.
We had one last design session in mid July 2018 at our offices where Tim Cable, myself, and Christian dove into the game to craft the narrative focus you see today. It was a testament to the editor and tools we had that we were able to add these elements quickly, and to the development team who were able to adapt so quickly to get these new features in before launch.
Several new features were introduced in that final month of development. There was previously no way to do multiple narrative slides before and after a location scene, and we had no post game narrative screen, or any way to show narrative elements within a game location. Just prior to these changes, we had finally added the fate meter and fate events, but there was no way to make location specific threat or fate events. We added all of these features in short order, and Christian brought out all of his reference books, maps and resources to personally draft a new story that was worthy of a Middle-earth adventure.
There were some changes to characters, too. We wanted Bilbo to be part of the story in a more active way, and to bring in some other notable characters from the books for players to related to. We wanted our starting heroes in the core set to be more appropriate to the time period. Out were Frodo and Sam (though they will be back later), and in came Tom Took and Dwalin.
We had a lot of fun putting together the final campaign elements. Christian wrote the narrative for The Shadow's Reach (and had so much fun he also wrote the narrative for The King of Carrion), acting out all of the parts for us and taking our feedback (he does a killer Gollum by the way).
Keith and Corey gave us further feedback as we went, and Keith pulled together all of the voice actors in short order to deliver amazing performances (to this day I don't know how he does it so quickly with such great reads by the actors).
(Almost There!)
The net result was a more evocative, more exciting and much more narrative game for release. The game had fully transformed from a more systems driven random game to a more immersive story driven game but with the ability to replay that story with new heroes, new cards and retaining the deck building aspects that we wanted to be a centerpiece of the challenge. The rest, as they say, was history- which we will cover a future news update...
(The Game Today)
Answers to Frequently Asked Questions
We get a number of questions here and on the discord channel, and we wanted to answer a few that come up frequently:
What else are you working on?
Once we are in Full Release and have been able to sync up releases on all platforms, we will be making a comprehensive review of our content and deciding what is next. People have asked for a number of features, and we have to weigh what is easy to make and what is not, and what we can delivery quickly vs what will take a longer period of time.
Additionally, we want to provide other ways to expand the game content as well as more ways for you to spend that hard earned Fellowship. We have a number of concepts in the works, but we have to evaluate their feasibility before we make any announcements.
When will you add more languages to the game?
We have a number of languages we want to add to the game, but it comes down to expense and time. We're evaluating these now and will make an announcement in the near future.
Will you be able to cross play between platforms?
That's the plan, each console platform willing.
Reminder: Obtaining Technical Assistance
If you happen to experience any issues or need technical assistance for the game, please remember that if you don't see the answer within the forums or on discord, you can always file a Helpshift here:
https://asmodee.helpshift.com/a/lord-of-the-rings-acg/
Discord
There's a fan set up and run discord channel where you can reach out and talk to fellow players and look for multiplayer friends to play with.
You can check it out here.
Twitch Stream
Don't forget that you can check out our Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/ffigames every two weeks at 1pm Central US time / 6:00pm UTC.
Our next stream will be tomorrow, Wednesday, August 14th.
Next Update
That's all we have this week. Until we meet again, may the stars shine ever on your adventures!