How has nobody made a good LotR game? They literally have the perfect setting. Do people just hate money?
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How has nobody made a good LotR game? They literally have the perfect setting. Do people just hate money?
Frick you I liked it.
Played the demon a lot but never bothered actually getting the game.
Picrel and sequel.
>buy some slop ip like witcher for 5 bucks, everyone praises your game because it's much better than the books
vs
>buy lotr ip for quadrillions, everyone hates it because it doesn't measure up to the books and the super autistic fanbase will keep creating support tickets because some trees texture doesn't match the lore
Making a lotr game is just a bad idea
>Do people just hate money?
Reminder that in the 90's, Lorainne Williams (the infamous b***h who stole control of the Dungeons & Dragons company) had a deal on the table to make a TTRPG based on LOTR setting from the Tolkien estate, but turned it down because it's "not worth our time" if they didn't also get the rights to publish their very own canonical sequels.
Never underestimate how INCREDIBLY fricking dumb Suits are.
to be fair it was before the jackson movies launched LOTR's popularity into the atmosphere, a lot of "fans" are actually just fans of those movies, you're viewing their declination of the offer in hindsight after they were made
Even so I think it's really silly to say an officially licensed LOTR ttrpg wouldn't have been a huge deal among nerds of the time, the very same people reading the books for inspiration for the games they were running.
Also don't forget that LOTR got huge popularity spike in the 70's with hippy crowd. It's a bit like how Dune is in right now, but games based on the property even before the big new movie have been extremely popular and even influential.
>if they didn't also get the rights to publish their very own canonical sequels.
Thank God. There's nothing in existence that would be worth turning LotR into fricking Star Wars.
There was that JRPG style LOTR game for the Gamecube
That ended at helmsman deep cause it wad released being like 70% done. Still a great game.
>Helmsman
Phone posting ladies and gentlegoy
>They literally have the perfect setting
Is it? Let's consider the strengths of LotR and Tolkien's legendarium in general
>Attention to worldbuilding detail with several constructed languages, genealogies, detailed artificial history, etc
Doesn't translate well
>Status as WW1 war literature, with themes such as comradery and being unable to come home whole, etc
Peter Jackson's trilogy kinda managed, but but that's really really surprising! A game, especially an action-y title, would struggle even more
>Tolkien's immersion in historical sources giving his world a high degree of verisimilitude in "past is a foreign country" sort of way
In the movie trilogy Théoden doesn't recite poetry before going to battle and Aragorn is unsure about his right to rule as a king while in the books he takes his right to rule as granted, but some of that does manage to filter across: for instance, Tolkien is immersed enough in historical battle narratives and the tropes of good generalship, etc, that I think it can be e.g. pointed out as deliberate that Saruman is a disastrous military leader (the sort of arrogant mathy academic type who thinks his wunderwaffe will solve warfare and he obviously knows better than people with actual military experience and tradition to fall back on because he's enlightened by his own intelligence and deep knowledge of ancient lore besides), and the films follow the books closely enough that they accidentally capture this even though Jackson has no fricking clue about historical warfare. But again, this would be really difficult to adapt!
And what is LotR without these elements? Basically a world with elves and dwarves and stuff, might as well use Forgotten Realms or something
That being said, I think there are good LotR games: ToME 2x, The Last Days of Third Age mod for Mount and Blade, Third Age: Total War, etc. But I think they are good because e.g. Third Age is a really well-made mod for a really good game Medieval 2, and most of what it gains from the setting isn't about LotR per se, but the amazing artistic direction of the movie trilogy that it adopts in its designs.
You also forgot the religious and philosophical elements. Taking the Christianity out of LOTR's themes and you - once again - basically just have Forgotten Realms.
Right, well, here I'm inclined for an interpretation along Calvinist/Stoic lines rather than Tolkien's Catholicism, but yes, that's important to his work also, and that too would be difficult to adapt
Theoden recites poetry in two towers the movie
>Hobbit
>Return of the King
>Conquest
>The Battle for Middle Earth
>The Battle for Middle Earth 2
>War of the Rings
>The Third Age
frick off zoomer there are plenty of good LOTR games
>he didn't play the masterpiece that is the fellowship GBA game
>Two Towers
>Return of the King
>LotR: Online
>Battle For Middle Earth 1 & 2
>LotR: War In The North
>LotR: The Third Age
>Lego LOTR
>LotR: Conquest
>Shadow of Mordor
there have been plenty of good ones, but there hasn't been a good one since arguably shadow of mordor, and that was only mechanically good. the lore rape was too much even for me. if they would remake the Return of the King game, zoomies would understand
The only people who can make a LotR game love money way too much and can't make a good game
Rereading the book there's a lot of cool bits they could use to make a game
>Play as a young Aragorn undercover in Rohan and Gondor, learning the arts of war and leadership, befriending Gandalf and getting Denethor jelly
>LotR SNES game
>one of the worst games I had the displeasure of owning as a child
>Fricking bomb ass music still lives in my head
>There will never be a Elden Ring esque game in Middle Earth
Why even live.
>But LotR
Is a fricking MMO.
I'd rather play mmo than open world shit
Elden Ring is an offline MMO
The sad but unironic truth is that LotR setting is just a little bit too boring for most normies.
Sure there's magic and elves and dragons, but gandalf never does a superhero landing and then wombocombos a whole army of orcs on his own.
Gandalf doesn’t, but Fingolfin goes 1 on 1 with literally the devil
Sadly no dev would ever make a game based on any part of the Silmarillion. As cool as it would be to get a cuhrazy action game where you slaughter Morgoth's armies.
make a warriors themed game about it
Every western fantasy game ever is a LotR clone anyways. So they don't want to spend money on licensing costs.
Battle for Middle-Earth II exists
I disagree that it's a perfect game setting, but I also hate prequels and generally stories where you can't make meaningful change.
Because LotR is a complete trilogy of books that has a definitive end I'd dislike knowing that whatever I do in the game it has to happen to set up the trilogy.
I really like LotR so I've though of this before, but the "perfect" LotR game for me would be actually a seemingly shameless knockoff setting with a similar premise and characters that would let me play it out on my own without intersecting with actual Lord of the Rings.
So I'd prefer to play as Slodo travelling with his loyal buddy Hamwise.