Lord of the Rings’ 10-year streak of terrible games might finally come to an end

When was the last time you played an excellent Lord of the Rings game?

The landmark fantasy series is known for its epic scale, rich lore, cinematic battles, and classic good-versus-evil storyline. The same elements that define Lord of the Rings as a series, incidentally, are broadly the same things fans expect from a good RPG or action game. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single modern fantasy story that hasn’t been influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien somewhere down the line. You might even have a hard time finding many games at all, in any genre, that can’t be traced back to Middle-earth.

So if The Lord of the Rings series is a fundamental part of the medium’s DNA, why are decent Lord of the Rings games such a rarity?

It’s not for a lack of trying. Last year, cozy game Tales of the Shire and its surface-level homesteading landed with a thud. Survival game The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria reportedly sold at least 1 million copies — but like most trend-chasing games, there was little longevity. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum has gone down as one of the worst video game adaptation disasters of all time.

Each of these games faltered for slightly different reasons, like troubled development cycles or a lack of understanding of its own source material. But aside from the sickos and streamers, I’d expect most people to say the last good game in the series happened a decade ago, with Middle-earth: Shadow of War. And even there, it’s arguable. I reviewed the game back in 2017 and liked it, but I also distinctly recall that the game was lambasted for its grindiness, microtransactions, and sponsored content. What people remember now, a decade later, is just that the series’ Nemesis System is awesome. (To its credit, Shadow of War did produce a strong expansion and was eventually updated to remove its controversial monetization. But depending on when you played Monolith’s RPG, your wait time for a strong Lord of the Rings game might be more than a decade by now.)

With that kind of history, a new Lord of the Rings game announcement was primed to be met with skepticism or indifference. Despite a lack of any concrete details, news of Warhorse Studios’ open-world RPG has instead drummed up widespread hype. We already know that an RPG game set in Middle-earth can and has worked. And while Shadow of War is commonly thought of as an open-world RPG, technically speaking, it wasn’t one. The game did a tremendous job of making its universe feel enormous, but it was still split up into multiple regions. We’re splitting hairs here, but the point is that a decade’s worth of advancements means that a new Lord of the Rings RPG can come closer to capturing Tolkien’s grand scale.

The biggest reason people have hope that this mysterious Lord of the Rings game will be the one that delivers is the studio behind it. Warhorse Studios is primarily known for the hyperrealistic, mechanically dense Kingdom Come: Deliverance series. These are games that eschew the typical RPG power fantasy in favor of more brutal consequences. Fans, who consider the second game to be one of the best RPGs of all time, readily call the series hardcore. Like, you have to manually forge your own swords and worry about where you fall asleep type hardcore.

The games aren’t for everyone, but if you stick with them, progression and exploration feel all the more rewarding. The world is also an extremely reactive one, where the particulars of your attire can change how characters interact with you. None of this would work without a strong quest system or memorable characters. Not only do many of the quests interact with one another, the writing is strong enough that it almost feels wrong to call anyone an NPC.

Aside from Kingdom Come fans, I doubt that many people want a Lord of the Rings game where every little thing is a fight for your life. But if anyone is able to pull off a genuinely great Lord of the Rings game after a decade of misfires, it’s probably a studio with extensive fantasy experience who will go to great lengths to commit to the bit — whatever it might be.