Pixel Army: The Magic Behind LOTRO’s 30,000 Orcs

Warning: If you are concerned about Epic Battle immersion, do not read this post. The following contains potential spoilers that you will not be able to scrub from your memory. Not even with a men-in-black flashy thingy. Not even with a timelord pocket watch. Not even if Superman spins the Earth backwards to a time prior to you reading the article. Well, actually, I’ve never tested that last one, but I’m assuming that it’s true.

Here you are, a hero of Middle-Earth, standing at the wall of the Hornburg as waves of orcs make their way towards the fortress. They break through the gate! As they pour through it, it occurs to you that if only you could flank them on the battlefield…lead a small band of Rohirrim into the fray, you might be able to draw them away from the families hidden inside. Until now, all who have ventured too far from the wall have suffered a quick and inexplicable demise. But this may be your one and only chance…forward!

By some luck you pass the point where others have failed, but the hoards beyond are not what you expect. They do not attack, and save a few they do not move, except to face you as you roam their ranks. But most peculiar, they barely appear to be orcs at all, but some sort of rejects from the Minecraft nether!

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to ride out into the field of orcs during one of LOTRO’s new epic battles? If you did, you might be surprised by what you found. Though there are probably many new technologies in play to bring you the ‘epicness’ of the Battle of the Hornburg, one of the most unlikely, but in hindsight obvious, is not really a technology at all, but an optical illusion. A source has sent me some very interesting beta screenshots of the orcs that lie beyond the Epic Battle ‘wall of death* (a point on the map where you die instantly) that many of us have discovered by accident. The orcs in the battlefield are of various resolutions, many pixelated past the point of recognition. The end result is much like using cardboard cutouts on a movie set to make a crowd seem bigger than it actually is. Your computer doesn’t have to render 30,000 orcs, just 30,000 dark blobs that, from the wall, look like an army of orcs due to its distance from your character’s point-of-view camera.  Thus, it doesn’t matter to your eyes that the orcs aren’t at full resolution, but it does matter to the performance of your game session.

The following is a collection of shots from “behind the lines”. I’ve brightened them up only so they could be more easily viewed, otherwise, they have not been altered:

Fear me! I am blobulous!

…and I bring my friends!

Everybody, single file. We’ll all get to see the black powder explosion if we take turns…

You and what army?

This is what you see from the wall, this picture has not been enhanced, as the darkness helps to conceal some of the graphics tricks

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