LoTR: Battle for Middle Earth 2 Community Day Writeup

Day 3

I woke up around the same time as I had yesterday, 7:30. We were going to leave to Hotel around 30 minutes later than we had the other day, but I now needed to get all my stuff together as we wouldn't be returning to the hotel. I had also planned to surf the forums and check my email; unfortunately I was unable to do that as the Ritz had taken away our internet overnight. After showering and all that, I hung out until about 8:40 when I headed downstairs to meet up with everybody. We got into taxis and headed over to EALA (guess who was a little late and I might give you the complementary cookie I bagged).

We headed into the cafeteria and I, considering my options, decided on a breakfast burrito, again. This morning I sat with Ray, and two guys whose name I can no longer remember. I can however, tell you that one was from France and the other Toronto (yes, yes, that's Canada). My mind works oddly if you hadn't already guessed. We talked about BFME2, and generally it seemed as though we were all pretty interested in the game. Our expectations had been exceeded to say the least.

After breakfast we headed over to the conference room where we discussed thoughts and ideas on BFME2. The overall opinion seemed to be fairly high for the game. Quite a few interesting topics and points were brought up, and a marketing guy for EALA suggested an integrated voice chat system, that was met with quite a bit of approval. In all, the feedback was generally quite good, and I think a lot of it will be extremely useful for the developers.

Around 11:00 we headed back to the press room to begin what was fairly aptly described as the creative day, in which we'd go over modding, the world builder, and the story used in BFME2. The first presentation was more like a series of presentations dealing with modding, the editor and community tools for modding. The first guy who came up to talk was a modeler and he gave a presentation on how he went about getting units and buildings from 3DS MAX to the game and what tools he used with the model editor. A lot of what he said may have been useful to the modders present, but I assume that they already knew quite a bit of what he talked about.

Next up was three editor guys to talk about the world builder. They introduced us to the editor, and detailed new features such as the ability for anything on the map to catch on fire. They also gave us some tips on how to improve maps, and pointed out of the flaws they'd noticed in community maps. According to them quite a few of the bugs from the BFME editor had been fixed. The editor looked good overall, but I'm hesitant to pass a final judgment because we didn't have a chance to fool ed in maps for BFME. In all I enjoyed the presentation, but would certainly have enjoyed a bit of hands on. They didn't quite have the chance to finish up due to time constraints, but later in the day they would finish.

After that, community support for modding was discussed. The developers were interested in giving the community some of their tools to facilitate modding, and the service modders do for the community. A pack of various tools seems to be a probable release as an extra download after the game's on shelves.

We now headed back to the cafeteria again. I ordered a double bacon cheeseburger and fries; it was quite good. I sat with some of the modders and listened to their discussion about the previous presentations. They seemed pleased that a pack of tools was extremely probable for eventual release. After finishing my food I headed over to the EA store hoping that Battlefield 2 had been replenished. Unfortunately I was out of luck yet again. I headed over to the gaming room and played some games and relaxed in some awesome massaging chairs until the time came for us to head back to the press room.

While I had eaten Ray and Sergio had done their interviews, which apparently went quite well. I chatted with Ray while waiting for everyone to return. A presentation on the story behind the game, and lots of concept art were coming up. The presenter talked about how, that now EA had the license to Tolkien's books as well as the movie, they would be able to much expand the scope of the game. The North would be a focus point for much of the game's campaign. Many of the events that took place during the timescape of the movie, but where not talked about in the movie were going to be used in BFME2. A long slideshow containing a lot of concept art was presented and explained. A lot of it was fairly interesting, and the concept art was beautiful. At the end of the presentation we all got three pieces of concept art; the artists who had drawn them lined up to sign the prints. The prints will be scanned and put up a little later (along with the rest of the images for this wrapup).

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