Eurogamer
is reporting that Turbine has revealed their plans for a Facebook-like social networking site centered around
Lord of the Rings Online. The website would launch sometime in Q4 and basically track everything a player does across multiple characters by being
directly connected to the game. It'll also feature the kinds of things we all expect from a social networking site such as friends lists, communication tools and even the ability to upload pictures and videos. Similar websites are said to be planned for
Dungeons & Dragons Online and
Asheron's Call sometime soon as well. Turbine also seems to be planning on advertising on these websites, which is a pretty clever way to introduce advertising into their games without ruining the experience.
Facebook and other sites like it can be
a surprisingly strong tool for creating communities around just about anything. So we're admittedly excited about this announcement, because anything that can create a more tightly-knit community in an MMO is hugely important as far as we're concerned.
Oct 10th 2008 at 12:00PM
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Hardy said on 12:12PM 10-10-2008
I guess this is one of the next steps to the evolution of MMOs, communication even outside the game.
However for stuff like this, I would really like to see the option of being able to mail messages to players IN the game, and possibly their cell phones.
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Kyle Horner said on 12:25PM 10-10-2008
I'm right there with you Hardy. I'd also love to see a future MMO with this kind of functionality developed in parallel so that players can join up with the site before the title even launches. The sooner a community can blossom, the better.
Tony said on 12:51PM 10-10-2008
The game does desperately need to share stats and other information... I think it's one of the things standing in the way of it doing better. Hopefully other people will be able to do things (even Facebook-style apps if nothing else) with this data.
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Bam! said on 1:22PM 10-10-2008
I really love AC, but if it puts a pic of your character onthe site, it's going to be quite funny. Behold, my face resembles the prow of a ship!
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Jess said on 3:08PM 10-10-2008
All I can say is this is very cool!
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Mythic said on 5:30PM 10-10-2008
Hopefully this will be better implemented than the social networking in Spore...
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Side_Winder said on 5:02AM 10-11-2008
I think it is simply brilliant! it's true that MMOs need a better social tool to keep stats of characters and interact with one another, after all, what is massively multiplayer if they can only access information on their own kin and perhaps one or two pcs on the friend list?
Social trends aside, I also think that this is an excellent idea to bring extra revenue into the business project without interfering with the game itself. Much like other social websites, this one can track your likes and in game personality to advertise things in the real or virtual world (much like google or yahoo!).
I'm very happy with Turbine, I hope they keep up the good work :)
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HexDSL said on 3:23PM 11-16-2008
Any more news on this?
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