This past Friday (Oct. 28th), Middle-earth Network Founders Dave Kale and Tyler Michael Jonsson were invited to come to Warner Brother’s Interactive Entertainment’s headquarters in Burbank, CA for a private demo of Lord of the Rings: War in the North. The following is their account of this visit.
Walking into the offices of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment on the eighth floor of the Business Arts Plaza building, we were met with exhilarating shock: a red-bearded dwarf in full battle regalia hefting an axe over his head and ready to strike. It was a life-sized statue in the likeness of Farin, one of the three heroes of WBI’s latest game set in Middle-earth, The Lord of the Rings: War in the North. Due to hit shelves in the US tomorrow, November 1, it is pretty clear that the game is an important one to WBI – amongst all the posters and paraphernalia from myriad games covering the offices, the only other full-sized statue was of Batman from Batman: Arkham City, a game that sold 2 million units worldwide in just its first week. WBI appears to be betting that the appetite for dwarves and elves is as large as it is for the Dark Knight.
We were met at reception by Rebecca, who not only indulged our geekiness (we loved the statues!) but even shared her own, waxing philosophic about playing Centipede at the arcades while growing up. Indeed, that really set the tone for the rest of the visit: passion and authenticity. It is tempting to believe that companies like WBI are cold, monolithic machines that exist to squeeze money out of our favorite stories, characters, and franchises, but that is a difficult stereotype to maintain when you meet the people who work there. Rebecca has children of her own who play the games WBI makes, and she and her colleagues are invested not just in making fun games but telling good stories. We do not know how many WBI employees have read Tolkien’s “Mythopoeia,” but much of their work exudes the Sub-creative spirit described by the Professor in his famous essay to his friend Jack [C. S.] Lewis. Of course, WBI would not make these games if it did not expect a profit, but it was reassuring to meet the people behind them and to see that they truly care.
Next we met Megan, who manages public relations for Lord of the Rings: War in the North and who so kindly arranged for our visit. Megan proudly sported a St. Louis Cardinals shirt, showing that even amidst the craziness leading up to the launch of the game, she had her priorities straight. Megan has been a joy to work with, and we were quite pleased to put a name to the face. We have gotten the impression that she and her colleagues view the worldwide online Tolkien fandom as a bit of an enigma. Fans on sites such as MyMiddle-earth and A Casual Stroll to Mordor are not quite like any other group of fans, be it mainstream gamers or Harry Potter fans or even the come-and-go fans of the LOTR films, who came out of the woodwork a decade ago and then disappeared just as quickly. Most of us are lifetime fans (some of us for many decades) of Tolkien and other good fantasy literature, as well as gamers, combining a love of truly deep story-telling and world-building with a fixation on minutiae that can be found only in people who have spent years developing a character in an MMORPG. The works we love, be they book or film or game, must meet the exacting standards set by the Professor himself, and we especially do not take well to haphazard tinkering with Middle-earth. Thus, a game such as LOTR: WITN is a bold and risky proposition: telling new stories set in and expanding upon Tolkien’s world. In much of their marketing for LOTR: WITN, such as the recent documentary on Machinima, they have endeavored to convince us hardcore Tolkien fans that this has been a labor of love and not shameless profiteering. Working with WBI folks like Megan certainly helped reassure us.
Megan led us down to a conference room on the fifth floor (past posters of Batman: Arkham Asylum, Mortal Kombat, and The Matrix Online), where they had set up a demo of the game for us: three Xbox 360s each with its own display, networked together in a veritable LAN party. Each of us took one, along with David, a producer, who was to be our guide (and often rescuer) in-game. LOTR: WITN is meant to be played collaboratively in teams of three, and that is no accident. WBI had the word “fellowship” on the brain as they developed the game, and this was emphasized repeatedly by executive producer Andy. You always play in a three-person party, even if you don’t have two friends sitting next to you (the other characters will be played by online players or controlled by the computer), and group tactics are the key to success in many scenarios. While this is hardly unique, it is nonetheless one of the ways in which WBI has tried to stay true to the spirit of Tolkien’s works. Many, if not all, great deeds in Tolkien are accomplished through collaboration and teamwork, and fellowship is virtuous, while solitude is often problematic or even a sign of evil at work (Melkor and Sauron, Aule’s “dwarf” incident, Feanor, Gollum).
After David gave us a detailed rundown on controls and gameplay mechanics and Andy explained much of the design philosophy underlying the game, we dived in.
Joining us in the conference room was Megan, Che’von (who had graciously assisted us with our interview of Jason Olander last week) and three members of the War in the North team, Andy, Adam and David.
After reading dozens of articles and watching dozens more game-play videos for War in the North, it was exciting to finally be getting hands on the game itself. One of the first things we remarked was just how beautiful the game looks. Andy and David informed us that we were not playing a final build of the game, meaning that there were surely additional game-play and graphical tweaks added into the final version that will go onto disc, but even in this pre-release state the game looked gorgeous and played like a very polished game.
We first found ourselves in the ruins of Fornost. Tyler took up the role of Farin the Dwarf Champion, while Dave (Kale) played Eradan the Dunedain Ranger. The third member of our game-play fellowship, David (A producer on the game) played as Andriel the Elven Loremaster.
After getting a brief primer on the game-play controls, the fellowship set out to explore the ancient ruins before us. We quickly realized that War in the North is not a mindless hack and slash game where any player with the ability to mash buttons can easily walk through the game unscathed. Goblins attacked from all angles, and our fellowship relied on each other to perform specific functions as a team in order to vanquish our foes.
Farin ran headlong into battle (As Dwarves are indeed VERY dangerous over short distances!) to head off the attacking enemies, while Eradan expertly released volleys of arrows into their ranks before stealthily sneaking in behind them to flank their position. Meanwhile, Andriel offered her support by casting magical spells at the goblins while shielding Farin and Eradan with her shield spell, ensuring we were impervious to ranged counter-attacks.
And so it went on like this… The three members of the fellowship working in conjunction with each other to overcome a variety of enemies. The nastiest enemy we encountered during our playthrough of Fornost was easily the Goblin Sapper. Armed with pots of gunpowder rigged to explode on impact, these guys could nearly defeat even the hardy Farin in mere fractions of a second if his guard was let down. Whenever one of the fellowship was defeated in battle, the other two members would have to quickly come to their aid to revive them, or the game was lost and we would have to reload. This really reinforced the message being delivered by Andy and Adam which was that this game was all about the fellowship.
After our foray into Fornost we also had the chance to play through much of the Barrow Downs level (including a fight against a particularly nasty wight boss), and a brief snippet of the Mirkwood level, which was littered with Uruk-hai and spiders aplenty.
We didn’t encounter too much of the main storyline during our brief time with the game, as it was custom built to showcase the game-play mechanics, but we did get a couple opportunities to interact with NPC’s. The game uses a dialogue wheel similar to Mass Effect or Dragon Age. It will be exciting to see what sort of possibilities this opens up in the full story mode!
Another awesome game system we got to briefly play around with was the loot system. Each and every weapon and equip-able item in the game is reflected on your character, meaning that if you find a brand new axe to replace your old one, it will truly look like a new axe and not just a rehashed texture / model. This is true of every item in the game, and it really makes you feel as though the loot you find carries its own unique story and adds to your character. We were told that the game has over a THOUSAND items to discover and equip in this manner! We also learned about the Elf-stone system, which allows you to imbue certain weapons and armor with customizable properties for even further customization.
Our hour with the game went by very quickly, mainly because we were having so much fun blasting wave after wave of goblin with our crossbow turrets and severing spider limbs in Mirkwood. We reluctantly set down our controllers, thanked our gracious team of demoers, and headed back up to the 8th floor to re-convene with the good folks of Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment.
Aside from the sheer fun and frenetic page of the combat, the other thing we took away from our play test was just how different the “Brutal Combat” system of War in the North is than any other Lord of the Rings based game to date. Being an “M” rated game, War in the North pulls no punches when it comes to gritty, visceral combat. Arms, legs and heads roll. Blood splatters out of freshly severed limbs. As we were told by our hosts, this game is trying to capture the true horrors of war, and it certainly seems to have achieved that goal from our initial impressions!
Afterward we returned to the eighth floor and talked with Megan for a while, thanking her for her hard work and wishing her good luck for her Cardinals later that night. We then met up with WBI Director of Marketing, Tracy Williams, who is always a pleasure to speak with. She is quite a formidable woman who possesses seemingly boundless energy and a very shrewd mind. We enjoyed her stories of working with professional wrestling and other high-powered, temperamental franchises. It is clear that she really wants to understand the online Tolkien and fantasy communities and to connect with them better, not just as a potential market but also to involve them in earlier stages of WBI projects. We explained to her that Tolkien did not invent the concept of “Middle-earth” but rather inherited it from Norse mythology, where it is called “Midgard” and refers to the world in which we live. Middle-earth Network strives to be a big tent that includes all fantasy and even fiction, a community for telling and hearing stories, in stoking our sub-creative energies and encountering secondary worlds. Tracy and the folks at WBI seem to have quite similar goals with the games they develop, including Lord of the Rings: War in the North. It is not a perfect game or perfect Tolkien-inspired storytelling, but it is certainly better than many past attempts and was made with both care and respect and is a worthy entrant into the Tolkien legendarium. Most of all, the game and the people we met at WBI — Rebecca, Megan, Che’von, David, Andy, Adam, and Tracy — fill us with hope and enthusiasm for the future of storytelling in video games.
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