Lord of the Rings needs to be 'one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world,' Embracer interim COO Matthew Karch said in a recent speech to investors that also dealt with restructuring the company itself.
Lord of the Rings is a story which everyone knows and has been done many times across movies and games.
Other stories set in Middle Earth though has huge potential as it's a great fantasy world to play in.
It's similar to Star Wars in that we don't need more stories about the Skywalker family, it's a huge universe to explore other stories.
LotrR doesn't feel like it has a story for a game in it. It's kind of a closed story if that makes sense. That's the great thing with things like D&D worlds, Warhammer, or just any generally built for gaming world. You can be a hero, but you are not the hero nor the only hero. Books in general don't make great games imho.
We own Lord of the Rings, and we know we need to be exploiting Lord of the Rings in a very significant fashion and turning that into one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world.
(emphasis added)
The word choice here says it all. I have doubts they will make anything other than cash grabs with the LOTR IP.
Yeah, only because you just spent all of your money purchasing it, and then it failed and "made" you then cancel games and potentially close down studios, huh?
LOTR was a great franchise for games, back when the movies came out. If you want it to be a franchise again, you better at least match those games in quality. And I've been missing Battle for Middle Earth for a long time now.
I'd disagree, it doesn't need to be a gaming franchise at all. It didn't need to be films either, as much as I enjoyed them, not everything has to be franchised out and milked for all it's worth.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could admire works of art and appreciate them for what they are instead of having vultures circle above looking to extract the very marrow of what makes it special.
I also recall an author (can’t remember the name) saying that Tolkien in fantasy was like mt Fuji in pictures of Japan. So iconic that it’s either in everything, or not having it be part of the picture seems intentional.
My point is that there could be effort made to develop new IP, new stories - and that if the effort was to be made to put a great game behind those stories, then even better!
LOTR just takes the air out of other fantasy IP, and there is always the risk that they just phone in the game dev bc they think being LOTR will be enough to sell it.
I would dislike corporate LotR a lot less if the IP were in the public domain.
As it is right now, corporate ownership of Tolkien’s work just puts a bad taste in my mouth because the people selling it really want you to believe that their product is a “real” addition to the work of someone dead for decades. Meanwhile everything else is fan fiction and illegitimate.
When a story belongs to everyone though, then anyone can tell it however they please and choose to ignore or disregard the additions of other people.
LotR: Gollum was a bad step towards this, but we'll see how the new Magic: the Gathering set coming out in the next week does to push this along. One thing that they're lacking in the world of tabletop is a strong RPG presence. There's a new one that JUST came out last month, but I've not heard much demand (if any at all) for it, and I run a decent sized FLGS in SoCal.
Return to Moria does look interesting. I'll be watching to see how it shapes up.
Agree on stealthy Gollum gameplay possibly being interesting in another game. It just doesn't feel like a strong enough premise to shoulder an entire game. Let alone one with a $50 price tag.
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