Slashdot Mirror
EA Locks Up Lord of the Rings IP
Gamasutra has the word that EA has the Lord of the Rings IP locked up through the end of next year. With the additional license for the books under their wing and no competition from Vivendi, they have big plans set for their next game inside the franchise world. "The announcement follows EA's previously announced The Lord of the Rings: The White Council, an open world RPG for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. However, with EA making plans for a new The Lord Of The Rings title, the fate of this project, once referred to as the cryptic Project Gray Company, remains uncertain. EA confirmed in early February that the game, while not canceled, had been put on hold." Relatedly, Game|Life notes that one million players will soon be traveling through Middle Earth as the open beta for Lord of the Rings Online gets underway. If you signed up to get in, you probably will. Update: 03/30 04:00 GMT by Z : The text referring to the White Council game was edited on the Gamasutra story, and here as well to reflect that.
When did the first of the trilogy movies come out? EA has been pushing out the video game tie-ins since then.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
This sounds awesome, I wonder if it will be set before or after the rings destruction. If it is before will destroying the ring be the ultimate quest?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
In a related story, the use of 'relatedly' in the summary caused English teachers worldwide to bleed from the eyes and randomly kill kittens.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
The Silmarillion? I can't wait for that game to come out! WOOO! Hehehe.
My humor is probably your flamebait
Strictly speaking, "open beta" usually means all 6+ billion of us are "invited".
'Course, it is LotR, so that expectation might not be out of line.
I liked this, too: "the most complete and authentic massively multiplayer online (MMO) world based upon the famous Books of J.R.R. Tolkien."
Uhm... ok!
Jeff Freeman
...i liked the LOTR books much, because it was just fantastic to see the world evolve just in my head, with all that incredible creatures, races and so on. to me, tho whole spirit of LOTR is based upon "living it" inside my mind. so - the movies came out and i wasn't all too overhappy, even though they were indeed watchable - without killing the fantasies, that i made up when i first read the book.
;)
but now, with all these games, merchandise, etc: i truly believe that this is not doing any good to the spirit of the whole story, even more to the books. it totally changes the reception of the book if you were to play with a little gimli or another comrade as a child. all this process of making up the characters, their looks is totally gone.
now reading something like "Sims 2" (even if it's only the engine) in an article to a LOTR game sends chills down my spine.
okay, not a very geeky opinion, you're allowed to mod me down
That is, of course, with the exception of the LotR MMORPG mentioned in the article, which is being developed by Turbine, published in the US by Midway, and published in the UK by Codemasters.
Jeff Freeman
What doesn't EA have the rights to? They should do something really absurd with this power, like create a LOTR/NFL style Sims game. There, that about covers every demographic!
3A 4E 22 05 C1 83 0B 7A
It's random, but my posting it here is probably considered illegal to someone.
Now with swing by swing teleprompter markup!
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
What about Turbine's Middle Earth Online?
p review_6028194.html
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/middleearthonline/
I think it makes perfect sense for them to use the Sims AI for a Middle Earth environment, especially around the behaviors of the Istari (wizards). For example, Gandalf can change his raiment whenever he wants to, in remote wilderness and underground situations, without a closet or seamstress in sight. Saruman can gab on and on and on about the same megolomanic topic, blindly ignoring how his friends are all getting annoyed with little red -- signs over their heads. Also, it takes several months for Radagast to walk *anywhere*, even when there's significant time pressure to deliver important news.
[
...it should probably be clarified here:
The license for the movies and the license for the books are two separate licenses.
In addition, the license for MMOs and the license for non-MMOs are two separate licenses.
So that's four licenses total. Vivendi had the licenses for the books, EA had the non-MMO license for the movies.
Additional detail, based on articles I've read on the topic:
EA has been churning out tons of games based on the movies since Fellowship hit theaters, and in 2005 they got the non-MMO license for the books as well. I'm not sure whether or not EA ever had the MMO license for the movies, but that license is not particularly valuable without the MMO license for the books as well. (You'd only be able to show things depicted in the films, NOTHING else.)
Turbine started developing the LOTRO MMO for Vivendi, this was when it was called Middle-Earth Online. Turbine eventually bought the license from Vivendi and re-branded the game as Lord of the Rings Online, they're self-publishing but Midway and Codemasters are handling distribution.
I imagine that Turbine must have investigated getting the MMO license for the movies as well, but I do not know if that ever happened. My understanding of these things is that if they went with that, they might have to rework all of their art assets to match the films, which would likely be a nightmarish PITA.
So now we've got EA with the non-MMO license for both the movies and the books. Turbine has the MMO license for the books. I have no clue who has the MMO license for the movies, not that it'd be valuable to anyone other than Turbine at this point.
Also please note that this is JUST the Lord of the Rings trilogy I'm talking about here. Silmarillion and The Hobbit are their own messy subjects.
http://www.ipdb.org/search.pl?any=lotr&search=Sear ch+Database&searchtype=quickm l
http://www.sternpinball.com/Lord-of-the-Rings.sht
and it is a good game you can play it on your pc with vp + vpinmame.
Whether this is from pre-sale keys remains to be seen. They will be pushing nearly 1 million MORE keys for open beta which starts Friday. The game releases at the end of April.
:) Combined with instancing needed to enter buidlings, going to some zones from others, and a trait system which is nothing more than a grind, it will probably only appeal in the short term relying on name alone.
... So... how will the true LOTR fans react? Outside of awe at seeing some of their favorite areas rendered I doubt it will entirely be favorable.
As you stated, nothing really catches the interest of most players. Summed up, its the setting without the story. Its got most of the areas expected, the features look right, but the story really isn't there. The NPCs look like zombies with no real animations to speak of. think Night of the Living dead with even less talking
It does have some of best landscapes seen in a MMORPG with full reflections and shadows. Character equipment is really amazing at the highest detail levels. The problem is character animations are barely better than the NPCs. AI seems dead even with the acqusition of a product that specifically targets that. Combat was boring, seemed very slow and not-connected. Last time I played they didn't even animate blocks, parries, and dodges, like many other games do.
Right now related forums are stocked full of fanbois as Turbine was quick to boot negative testers during beta. The fanboi brigade is already armed and ready with many posts already waiting the "unwashed masses".
Turbine has yet to prove themselves capable of running a good long term MMORPG outside of AC. AC was unique at its time with selectable skills (no classes), unique mobs, and incredible lore. The last two games since AC2 relied on other people's IP to sell the game. As seen with DDO their execution suffers. It will be interesting too see how tolerant the LOTR fans are of Turbines implementation. They have mages and mana but disquise them by changing the name of the mechanics involved. I believe they turned mana into "morale" or such nonsense. The Loremaster is a mage for all intents and purposes, the have a priest/cleric complete with "mana/morale" based healing in their bard class. There are some melee types to top it off but too much still comes across as "magic"
Hey, try for yourself, its open beta and i am sure keys will be easy to come by
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I can just see it now: Frodo Street 2008. Improved by modeling each individual toe hair.
I had a two-day look at the beta, and it has numerous problems. One is bad aestetics. Too detailed graphics, that fracture and look unreal. With a game trying realistic graphics, that is a major problem. The animations are bad. They break of movement, and generally look like a series of vieo-snippeds played after each other. Very bad. The water is just awful and the waterfalls anbd rapids are a bad joke. MOBs are standing around lifelessly. The whole worls feels kind of empty. All in all the graphics and animations constantly breaks the mood.
The quests system is repetitive, with only occasionally something more interesting. They make the same mistake that WoW initially did, namely letting people travel long ways for some quests, without any real benefit. Many quests are of the grinding type. The questlog is confusing. The scripted sequences in some quast, while a good idea, are too repetitive to work. Instead they end up breaking the mood.
Crafting seems to be badly broken. The system is interesting, but there are far too many ingredients. I don't want to browse through 40 different ingredients to find the 5 I need for a specific reciepe.
All in all a disappointment. Give it another two years and it might be on par with WoW, with regard to immersion and usability. But that is of course not enough. It would need to be better than WoW, and I see no place were it is.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm hoping its better than the horrible fiasco turbine made with D&D online.
:-(
if not, I'm gonna have to go back to COH, WOW or EQ2 again. . .
I don't know that this is actually a good idea any more
Ok, I understand wanting to make the best out of a license, the lord of the rings has been a very lucrative IP for electronic arts in the past, The Lord of the Rings: The White Council has been in development for quite some time now so they want to get that out the door, and the generally comfort of using proven IP, but really I hope this brings an end to this IP. This is quite literally the 10th(27th if you consider each sku separately) lord of the rings title that EA has put out. I even enjoyed a few of them (bfme was actually pretty good) but at this point they must be reaching the point where the market saturation has exceeded the consumers demands and the law of diminishing returns must be wreaking havoc by now.
Not only that but the hype generated for lord of the rings content spawned by the movies has died out. The people who are gona end up buying these games are the same people who would have bought'n them without the movies, with a slight increase from the people who have become general lord of the rings fans dues to the movies introducing them to a new generation.
It just seems like an unnecessary move now.
This franchise is JUNK. I really mean junk boys and girls. My grandson spent fifty bucks of his hard earned money on LOTR-Battle for Middle Earth. The game said on the box that it would work on Win2K. It did not. Talkin to EA was an extreme excercize in futility. EA had oursourced all its tech support to countries that spoke English with a middle east accent. These people were more interested in getting the telephone numbers and names of the kids than in ever helping them. They not only had no information to give, but could barely be understood with difficulty. Have no idea why all those middle easterners wanted names and addresses and phone numbers of American children. They did not get any info from my grandson, but probably got it anyway from their caller IDs and graphical loacator systems that they probably bought and installed and got from US states selling their 911 data to get money for their 'unbalanced budgets'. EA also gave the impression that it was more interested in its 'IP' than any customer satisfaction with its products. They wanted extra downloads of questionable DRM ware that was not mooted on the box tha game came in as necessary to play the game. Actually DID go through the hoops with a DMZ machine just to see what would happen inasmuch as I could later wipe the drive and trash raped PROMs on video cards and BIOSes. Tha game STILL would not work. Make it short. U buy EA and U will be screwed!