Tag Archives: Lord of the Rings

Amazon Renews Plans for a Middle-earth MMO while LOTRO Abides… for Now

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News this week included the announcement that Amazon Games, which had previously scrapped a development partnership with a company later purchased by Tencent for a Lord of the Rings title, had returned to the Middle-earth well, this time with the company that purchased Tolkein Enterprises, the uncomfortably names Ebracer Group.

Here they come again

This would have been a bit of a “wake me when it actually means something” sort of story for me… after all, we have heard this tale before from Amazon… except for the fact that it showed up just as I was attempting to launch back into Lord of the Rings Online, the one title in the universe most likely to be threatened by this Amazon venture.

Of course, none of the involved parties are saying that right now.  In fact, they are saying the opposite.  The LOTRO team declared that the game isn’t going anywhere in the forums and the Amazon Games studio VP Chris Hartmann is allowing that the games can “co-exist.”

That said, he also seemed pretty sure elsewhere that LOTRO players would simply migrate to their new title.

Even the most likely scenario is… for people just to move over, because the other one is an old game.

Part of me feels the hubris that seemed to infect New World, where Amazon seemed to feel that lessons learned in the industry could be disregarded because they were smarter than that.  The saving grace for New World was that they did have something fun and a bit different, even if Amazon had to learn a lot of lessons the hard way about things like having a test server.

Among the lessons of the last 30 years or so is that people invested in one title are not likely to move on to another merely because it is new.  I think a very direct lesson in this regard was EverQuest II, which SOE seemed to assume people would migrate to from EverQuest.

And EQ players certainly tried it out, but many just went back to the old game after their initial experience, while a good many moved on to World of Warcraft.  That left EQII, the newer and, in some mechanical ways, the arguably better title forever in the shadow of its predecessor.

The combination of the world and its setting, its familiarity, the fond memories, and the sense of community conspire to hold people in place even when other newer and possibly better options appear… which is the lesson of pretty much every fantasy MMORPG launched after WoW, including LOTRO.

The general chat of every new MMORPG beta or launch since 2004 has included a litany of comparisons to WoW and how it did x, y, or z better than this new title, something supported by the gaming news, which just loves to brand things as a simple “WoW clone” so they can look insightful and move on.

That isn’t entirely without merit.  If you pull back far enough, if you aren’t interested in details, distinctions, or lore, all fantasy MMORPGs look about the same.  The same could be said for four door family sedans or mid-sized SUVs… they’re all about the same in the end if you just glance at the general spec.

For those who get deep into the games, for those for whom the details matter, for the connoisseurs of the MMORPG genre, the games are often dissimilar as to make such hand waving comparisons seem bizarre.  LOTRO is NOT like WoW, nor was Warhammer Online just like WoW, Richard Bartle comments aside.  Fans of WoW run off to try new titles and find that they still really like WoW due to the details of the game and not the general pattern of the primary game play loop of the general art style. This has been repeated enough to be a trope of the genre.

Likewise, if you are invested in the nuances of LOTRO and all that the development team has built up over the last sixteen years, then some new title that is only superficially similar… it is an MMORPG… or maybe it is… and it is set in Middle-earth… has an extremely high likelihood of not being satisfying for all of its shiny newness.

And I strongly suspect that anything Amazon produces will bear only a superficial resemblance to what LOTRO offers today.  I opined eight years ago, as we passed through a past LOTRO anniversary, half the game’s lifetime ago now, that the era of making anything as sprawling and chaotic as Turbine’s vision of Middle-earth seemed done and gone.

Who would ever fund such a thing?  Sure, LOTRO is a financial success, if a modest one.  But it never lived up to its potential or promises or reach that Turbine internally assumed it would.  So the question is who would thrown a lot of money into a similar investment?

Yahoo Headline 2007

Nobody.  I believed that eight years ago and I think that still stands.  Amazon is not going to make something that feels at all like LOTRO.  I will be genuinely surprised if they get anywhere close. (I’ll even be modestly surprised if they ship anything at all honestly, but that is another opinion piece to be written)

So good news for LOTRO then, right?  Unless Amazon and Embracer gives it the (completely predictable) SWG treatment, declaring that there can only be one Middle-earth MMORPG, things should be fine.  And, while everybody is saying LOTRO is safe, the news is still hedging a bit on the long term prospects of the title, with Game Developer throwing this line into the mix:

Standing Stone will continue to keep its Lord of the Rings MMO up and running as Amazon’s separate Lord of the Rings MMO is being developed.

Yeah, and what happens once it has been developed and is ready to launch?

That is tomorrow’s problem though.  We’ll set that aside for a few paragraphs and assume that LOTRO will carry on as before and things will be great, even when Amazon launches its new game.

Except, of course, this news comes just as I am returning to LOTRO and… oh boy… the game is a mess.  Leaving aside the playability issues at resolutions above 1920×1080 and the muddle that is (and always has been) the UI and the long encroachment of free to play into the game mechanics where nearly every alert has something you can buy with a mithril coin or five, the game needs some serious work.

And we can start with the launcher, move through into client performance… 64-bit did not give the game any help it seems… and then drive straight through into ongoing and very noticeable lag issues in game.

For the latter, I’m not just talking about Bree when there are half a dozen bands lined up on a Saturday night ready to play when you walk out of the Prancing Pony and the world takes a deep breath and says it will get back to you in a few minutes leaving you stuck in place until it can figure everything out.  I am seeing some bad moments with annoying frequency while out and pretty much alone in the Midgewater Marshes and the Lone Lands.

It is not a good look.  And I know I put the UI in the category of “leaving aside,” but I feel I need to reneg on that and say that the UI, even when scaling isn’t an issue, leaves a lot to be desired.

But, as I said, that does not impact the current, dedicate base of users.  If you’re in a band that stands outside the Prancing Pony on a Saturday night waiting for your turn to perform, some new title… which probably won’t support anything like the LOTRO music system… isn’t going to interest you.  The problems of the game are already baked into your decision as to where you want to spend your time.

However, when we get to 2028 or whenever this new Amazon Middle-earth title that will completely not like New World at all arrives on the scene (and I don’t know why they insist on saying it won’t be like New World, since a lot of that title seems pretty solid, so clearly Amazon is still smarting from something on that front if they’re disavowing it in their own special way), then the option for any NEW players who want to run around in Middle-earth will be the 20+ year old LOTRO and all of its problems, or something shiny and new where they can get in on the ground floor and it probably plays well on their 20 Core i17 CPU or PS7 or XBlizzBox BS or whatever.

And that is where LOTRO‘s slow walk into oblivion gets accelerated.

Because that cuts off most of the potential new players, and while the old players remain, they eventually tire of move on, and eventually the game will fall below the level of profitability if there isn’t some replacement for those who leave.  And the threshold for profitability is higher for LOTRO than a title like EverQuest because Tolkien Enterprises… or Middle-earth Enterprises, as Embracer has renamed it… needs to get paid for the license every month.  Probably off the top.

All of which brings me back to something I wrote in Monday’s post, that being crap at higher resolutions and generally being problematic to play is an existential threat in the long term, and that threat only gets larger if there is another Middle-earth out there.

Though, honestly, I think Embracer is going to give LOTRO the SWG treatment when the time comes.  I mean, they can do the same math I can.  And they might even convince themselves that if they shut down LOTRO and force people to move on, Amazon’s title will benefit to some degree.

And if it is that obvious, then EG7 will be do those same calculations as well, which means that investing in any major upgrades will seem futile, so there will be no wide screen support and new users will taper off and it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.  They will, as a business, opt for maintaining profitability for as long as they can, which will mean only working on things that will directly bring in revenue (expansions and cash shop items) while ignoring ongoing problems and trimming back staff to keep the books balanced.

The future is, as always, grim.

So who is working on a LOTRO pirate server already?  It is never too early to start on these things because if sure feels like the writing is on the wall.

Related:

LEGO Lord of the Rings: The Video Game – It Could Happen

This is the reason I keep Kotaku in my RSS read… for every hundred Japanese trends or cos-play articles, there is a gem I never see elsewhere… like this one.

Coming Summer 2012

As foretold by prophecy… or at least by my nearly four year old blog post… there could be a LEGO Lord of the Rings Video Game.  There will at least be LEGO Lord of Rings sets, but how can they do that and not a video game?

Actually, I would bet there are going to be three games, if any video games come to pass.

Anyway, I asked for and got LEGO Harry Potter… what else from that post might happen?

Probably none… I was being kind of silly.  But of the most serious two I asked for, one came to pass and the other looks like a solid “maybe.”

So I’ll be spending the rest of the day muttering, “That’s so cool!  Oh my God really?  Could it happen? That’s so cool!”

Five LEGO Video Game Titles I Want

I have written about LEGO Star Wars, both The Original Trilogy and The Compete Saga, before. They are both games I like a quite a bit.

I really have to commend Traveller’s Tales, the studio that actually made the games, for not only creating a good first game, LEGO Star Wars – The Video Game, but also for actually learning from that game and applying it to the the next two games.

The first thing they learned seemed, to me, to be that a LEGO game is really more of a mass appeal title than a hard core gaming title. As such, it does not need hellishly hard end levels that take forever to master and complete. And with the original release, there were a couple of levels like that. I know real console gamers who still curse some levels in that game.

The second thing that TT seems to have learned is that, for adding depth and repeatability in a console game, almost nothing beats what I call “the cult of the unlock.”

So when the second game came out, LEGO Star Wars – The Original Trilogy, the levels were designed, overall, to be much easier to get through. You could… heck, *I* could… blaze through all of the basic levels in story mode in a single sitting without being in any danger of setting a record (personal or otherwise) for continuous time in front of a video game.

But when you’ve done that, the big “Percentage Complete” display (awesome game element, btw) says you have only completed 25-30% of the game. Then you want to go back through the levels with the free play option with different characters to pick up the mini-kits you missed, see the side areas you bypassed, and pick up enough studs to unlock all of the characters.

The game became an even bigger success than its predecessor and ensured that there would be more LEGO games to come. They have already announced LEGO Indiana Jones – The Video Game and LEGO Batman – The Video Game. So I started considering what else I would like to see done as a LEGO video game.

The Wants – I think they have potential to be good

1) LEGO Die Hard – The Full Series

When I get done playing LEGO Star Wars and go off to a different game, it takes a while for me to not want to blow up the scenery and try to collect studs. You just shoot up everything in LEGO Star Wars. So when my wife and I were watching the latest “Die Hard” movie, “Live Free, Die Hard, and Leave a Trail of Corpses” or whatever, I immediately connected the John McClane character leaving a swathe of destruction behind him with my own behavior in LEGO Star Wars. It is an excellent fit! Yes, work would have to done on the unlocks, but Bruce Willis is just begging to be made into a LEGO minifig. He has the head for it, and that scowl/smirk would translate perfectly into LEGO form.

2) LEGO Star Trek – The Original Series

Okay, this one is on my list for a series of selfish reasons. I want there to be a GOOD Star Trek game that has popular appeal, that will break the curse, and that will revive what I can only think of these days as a dying IP. Plus I want to be able to own Star Trek characters in LEGO minifigure form. It has to be TOS because they blow things up, transport into hot LZs, and visit the most interesting planets. There are enough characters to play and unlock. Yes, TNG does have Picard, who, like Bruce Willis, is ready-made for LEGO minifig form, and you could charge a billion studs to unlock Q, but Shatner’s hair was made for LEGO form. Picard can wait for the sequel.

3) LEGO Harry Potter – The Video Game

This one is a gimme. I mean, LEGO already has the franchise and already makes Harry Potter based minifigures and kits. There are movies out to help drive the visual requirements. It is popular. It is compelling. It could be done. And it would make J.K. Rowling just that much more wealthy than the Queen. I am surprised it hasn’t been announced already.

4) LEGO Lord of the Rings – The Video Game

It is episodic, it is popular, it would be great. It is probably a very tough IP to license… I am sure the Tolkien heirs would be skeptical… but it is totally viable. You have a group of main characters to play, a host of minor characters to unlock, and more than enough bad guys to chop up to make it interesting. Plus, TT could legitimately stretch it out into three releases. And, on top of that, LEGO has a couple of decades of work in its Castle line of kits as a starting place for models. (Frankly, though, the Castle line could use the sort of creative infusion such a project would bring. It has been languishing some for the last few years.)

5) LEGO Norrath – The Video Game

Okay, I am still enchanted by Tipa’s idea of turning EverQuest into a single player game to preserve the lore and let people who played it “way back when…” explore their old haunts. So why not take it a step further and reduce it all to LEGO bricks? There would have to be an overlying story created to drive the game, and the character unlocks might be a bit obscure, but I bet people who played it would come out knowing the lore of Norrath, which might, in turn, make some of them interested in other games based in Norrath. Plus I have always suspected that those trees in the Commonlands would break into a bunch of little pieces if you hit them just right.

Honorable Mentions – Things that came to mind with potential, but probably not enough for a game.

LEGO Discworld – Part of me thinks that LEGO is a perfect medium for expressing the humor and irony of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. The big problem is that nobody speaks in the LEGO games and much of the Discworld humor is in dialog or exposition. So any LEGO game relies on imagery and gesture to convey much of a story, and there is not enough such imagery available that we all share to make the game viable. I know what Ahnk-Morpork looks like in my mind, but it probably doesn’t look like that in your mind.

LEGO World of Shannara – I was trying to come up with an alternate fantasy epic to Lord of the Rings, and Shannara has plenty to work with. It just suffers from the lack of agreed upon visuals the way Discworld does, along with not being as popular as LotR.

LEGO Dune – I think this could be done. You use the imagery from the David Lynch version of the movie and just run with it. But as much as I want a LEGO Sardaukar minifig, I don’t think this would be a winner in the end.

LEGO Battlestar Glactica – I was looking around for another science fiction title, and this one came to mind. I am not sure if I would want to model the original series or the new one. I think then main problem is that most of the conflict takes place in space, and I found the space segements of LEGO Star Wars to be the least fulfilling.

Probably Bad Ideas – Things I briefly considered

LEGO The Simpsons – Hey, they’re yellow already, right? They’re popular. They destroy stuff regularly. The problem is, they can never profit from their bad behavior in the end, so having them pick up studs for whacking Flanders probably won’t fly.

LEGO Known Space – I was more thinking of LEGO Ringworld and felt that LEGO Man-Kzin Wars might have some potential… and I really want a Kzinti minifig… but Larry Niven’s Known Space universe moves at a pretty slow pace, so it would be hard for it to sustain an action oriented game. Plus, as above, there is not a set of agreed upon imagery for Known Space.

LEGO Blade Runner – It has the imagery. It has the violence. It is just probably too dark for LEGO. Still, it is probably more viable than my first thought, LEGO – The Man in the High Castle.

LEGO Forgotten Realms – I can dream, can’t I?

LEGO Wizard of Oz – I guess you cannot have Dorothy leaving a path of destruction behind her.

What Else?

That is my list… or my lists.

What did I overlook? What IP is really prime for conversion into a LEGO video game?