Every time I hear that we’re getting a new game based on The Lord of The Rings, I experience a brief moment of excitement that is inevitably followed by a sense of impending doom. Despite plenty of rich lore to draw from (and a built-in fanbase who are willing to give pretty much any game a try based on their love of the franchise alone), recent games set in Tolkien’s world have fallen painfully short.
Between the poorly received adventure game Gollum, the poorly received LOTR survival game Return to Moria, and the poorly received cozy game Tales of the Shire, it’s been a rough couple of years for Lord of The Ring games.
But things weren’t always like this.
Video games based on Lord of the Rings have existed in some capacity since 1982, with the release of Beam Software’s The Hobbit, but saw a boost in popularity after the early 2000s release of Jackson’s films. Games based on licensed properties tend to be… Well, you know how they tend to be. But by and large, Lord of the Rings games were pretty solid! Action games based on The Two Towers and Return of the King films were legitimately fun (and faithful to the source material). The MMO The Lord of the Rings Online captured hearts and minds for a decade. Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, despite being both a Final Fantasy clone and a licensed game, is in the pantheon of turn-based RPGs. This string of releases — some hits, some misses — continued up through the mid-2010s, when it arguably hit a peak.
In 2014, WB Games released Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, a third-person action-adventure title developed by Behaviour Interactive and the now-defunct Monolith Productions. No game is perfect, but Shadow of Mordor was a hell of a lot of fun, and easily the best LOTR game I’ve ever played. It’s not just that it was narratively compelling and looked terrific. A huge part of what made the gameplay so interesting was WB Games’ patented Nemesis System, which completely changed the way player-enemy interactions worked.
In Shadow of Mordor (and its 2017 sequel, Middle Earth: Shadow of War), enemies weren’t just there to get beat up, looted, and disappear into the ether. The Nemesis System turned the game’s Uruk enemies into so much more than just arrow sponges. Most Uruks were unique, each with their own name, design, and personality. On top of that, they remembered the player’s actions. An Uruk who had previously killed you might taunt you the next time you bump into it. If you ran away from a combat encounter, the enemy would point out your cowardice. Some Uruks would rise from the dead after being killed and hunt the player down in search of revenge. (Uruks became stronger after rising from the dead, making these rematches quite a challenge.) Players could even convert Uruks to their cause, using them for recon or backup in battle.
But after Shadow of War, things were pretty quiet on the LOTR game front. Then, in March 2019, Daedalic Entertainment announced that The Lord of The Rings: Gollum was in production, set for a 2021 release. Sure, nobody asked for an adventure game in which players took on the role of a young Smeagol, but the premise was interesting enough, and the chance to give Gollum his precious time in the spotlight via an origin story plotline didn’t seem like the worst idea ever.
In May 2023, Gollum launched to near-universal derision. Players and critics alike complained about the game’s rage-inducing bugs, poor graphics, underwhelming story, and unpleasant traversal. The studio behind the game, Daedalic Entertainment, was shuttered that June.
Here we are two years later, and Tales of The Shire is getting pretty similar treatment. Reviews have been middling. Players (including myself) are largely put off by the game’s art style, flat environments, shallow gameplay loop, and dull storyline. (Its user reviews are currently “mixed” on Steam.) But unlike Gollum, which was created by a studio known mainly for its point-and click adventures, Tales of The Shire was created by the gaming division of Weta Workshop — the studio that worked on special effects for Peter Jackson’s wildly successful Lord of The Rings films. If anyone knows how Middle Earth should look and feel, it’s Weta Workshop. So how did the studio miss the mark so profoundly?
As detailed in a report from The Verge, who spoke to a dozen-plus people familiar with Tales of the Shire’s production, the answer to that question is similar to the answer to, “Why did Gollum turn out so bad?”
In short: studio mismanagement.
Like employees of the now-shuttered Daedalic Entertainment, current and former Weta Workshop devs say Tales of the Shire’s development was downright nightmarish. Funding issues, crunch, unreasonable deadlines, corporate interference, and frequent changes in both direction and leadership led to low morale among the developers, ultimately resulting in yet another flat, boring LOTR game that left players scratching their heads. Gollum suffered the same exact fate, for the same exact reasons.
You’d think the ingredients for a good Lord of the Rings game would be simple: A compelling concept, a fun gameplay loop, and a passionate team of developers who know the source material well. But Weta Workshop had all of those ingredients and still missed the mark. When the folks who first helped bring Tolkien’s world to life on the silver screen can’t manage to successfully bring it to life on the small screen, something is seriously wrong.
Like the developers of Gollum and Tales of the Shire, devs at Monolith Productions also had to get out of their comfort zone when they made Shadow of Mordor. It was the studio’s first-ever open-world game and its first-ever title to use a third-person perspective. It made use of the aforementioned Nemesis System, which was created specifically for Shadow of Mordor and had never been used before. The game was built in only three years, and players loved it.
So what’s stopping us from getting more good Lord of The Rings games? While it’s obviously due to a wide range of factors, personally, I think it’s in large part due to one of the things stopping us from getting more good games in general: trust, or rather a lack thereof.
Good games require a work environment that gives developers room to breathe, allows them the freedom to think outside the box, and trusts them to get the job done. That’s how you end up with awesome mechanics like the Nemesis system (which other studios will finally be able to use when its patent expires in 2036). But when your developers are exhausted, frustrated by constant last-minute changes in direction, mourning the loss of laid-off colleagues, worrying about the state of their studio or publisher, and wondering if they’ll even get paid what they were initially promised while trying to meet impossible deadlines, you get games like Gollum and Tales of the Shire.
Of course, this isn’t the end of the line for Lord of the Rings games. According to statements from Weta Workshop devs, the studio’s next game is also a Lord of The Rings title. Code-named “Groundhog,” the game is reportedly a roguelike that draws inspiration from Baldur’s Gate and Diablo. Meanwhile, Amazon is currently working on a Lord of The Rings MMO, though the streaming giant — which has recently made a concentrated push into the world of video games — admits it’s still looking for the right “hook” for the game.
Maybe it’ll be amazing. I truly hope it is. But given the current state of the industry, all I can think about when I hear “new Lord of The Rings game” is Eomer’s quote from The Two Towers film: “Do not trust to hope. It has forsaken these lands.”