00:13I'm Todd DeMell, and I'm the art director for Lord of the Rings Online.
00:17Behind me is the Turbine Creative Studio, where the Turbine artists work together to create the art assets for all
00:22Turbine's franchises.
00:23Over the past year, we've been working together to create the assets for Dunland.
00:27So Chris and the world team sets the tone for what the art team then takes and builds into assets.
00:33The art team will build the characters, the architecture, the deco that the world team then uses to build out
00:39the landscape and the hubs and environments.
00:42We've been working really closely with the world team as we've developed Dunland.
00:47And Chris is an expert in Tolkien and Tolkien geography and culture.
00:52Hi, I'm Chris. I'm a senior world builder on Lord of the Rings Online, and I'm working on Dunland right
00:58now.
00:59We decided to do Dunland because it gives us an opportunity to go behind enemy lines.
01:04When Saruman decides to attack Rohan, a lot of his allies come from Dunland.
01:09So by developing Dunland, it gives us a chance to see where these hill men come from and what drives
01:15them to hate the Rohirrim so much.
01:17In the books, they're a large and fairly cohesive slavering horde of barbarians, so we decided to develop them a
01:25bit more and have some clans of them that are friendlier, some clans that are hostile, and some clans that
01:31you don't really know what they're up to.
01:33The Dunlanding NPC set is one of the largest sets of NPCs that we've built for Lord of the Rings
01:39Online.
01:39It's got six different tribes, and each one of those tribes is made up of four unique models.
01:46And each one of those models has a bunch of smaller variations, hair and hair color and clothing color.
01:52So when you walk through a Dunlanding camp, you're going to see a lot of very unique looking individual NPCs.
02:01This is a part of the world that gets mentioned a lot in the books, but we never really get
02:04to see it up close.
02:06So when it came time to make Dunland, the big challenge was making it varied and interesting based on very
02:14scant descriptions in the books.
02:16That gives us still a lot of leeway in the kinds of terrains that we could explore.
02:22So in addition to the craggy hills and woods, we have a large unpleasant bog, a haunted forest that's a
02:32remnant of what used to be the much larger woodland that covered most of Middle Earth.
02:37And we have a land that's dominated by barrows.
02:41All the cultural assets, the characters, the monsters, the architecture, the points of interest.
02:47We've had a lot of fun developing all these bit parts of the content, and there's so much in there
02:53to discover.
02:54I hope you have as much fun exploring Dunland as we've had building it.
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