Lord of the Rings games are a dime a dozen these days, and it seems like Embracer Group, which owns the rights to video game adaptations from the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Lord of the Rings trilogy, is handing out licences left, right, and centre. From the ill-fated Gollum to the recently announced 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tales of the Shire, Tolkie𝓀n-obsessed gamers have a weal𓆏th of options.
Does that make it more difficult to stand out though? And how do you stay true to Tolkien when the premise of your game is based on a few sentences in the appendices? How do you do Moria without a Balrog? I pose all these questions and more to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Return to Moria game director Jon-Paul Dumont, who tells me about the game’s “lore-first” approach to worldbuilding, how Free Range Games married the survival craftin🔯g genre to Tolkien’s, the influences hᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚe took from the Tolkien zeitgeist, and their spitball ideas for implementing a Balrog into the Fourth Age.
Fallout Developer Ne🗹arly Made A Lord Of The Rings Game
Check out this demo for a cancelled Lordᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ of the Rings game from the devs who ▨made Fallout
“We wanted to make sure it felt authentic and that's where we went a bit overboard with lore experts,” Dumont tells me via video call. “We brought on three different ones to help us. One [T. S. Luikart] was a fellow that worked on tabletop roleplaying games and he helped us construct the story. So we almost approached the world building like we were creating an RPG setting for a tabletop game.
“Then one [linguist and author of Tolkien grammar treatise A Gateway to Sindarin, David Salo] helped us create the language. The third one is a fellow named Corey Olsen, the Tolkien Professor. We actually kept him till the end when we had our story written and we knew where everything wanted to go, then we bro💮ught it to him.”
Olsen gave feedback on how authentic Free Range’s story was and how it fitted, thematically speaking, with the messages♛ that Tolkien wrote. Dumont notes that obvi🌊ously anyone creating a licensed work is creating “some degree of fan fiction”, but wanted an expert’s opinion on whether their plot and setting crossed the lines of authenticity.
The developers made adjustments based on Olsen’s feedback, toning down some elements and increasing others, and Dumont is happy with where the game ended up. From my limited experience, it seems that the team did🎃 its due diligence, basing the Morian biomes on throwaway lines from Gandalf, and the weapon improvement system is inspired by Gloín’s mention of lost smith-lore at the Council of Elrond. The main gameplay loop revolves around bringing light to the dark, goblin-infested caverns, something that in itself feels incredibly true to Tolkien’s work.
While the exploration phases of the game are going to be very dark, and Dumont reckons that players will be adjusting their gamma to see into the deepest corners, Free Range tries to find a balance. The home phase, where you set up camp with your co-op teammates, is “cosy”, and you can cook meals and sing rowdy songs to improve your dwarves’ moods. In fact, Dumont worked with the San Francisco opera on an album’s worth of songs to evoke the Dwarven spirit, including Gimli’s Song of Dur🌸in from The Fellowshi♌p of the Ring.
Dumont wonders whether the team held back a little too much in some places, but developers toe a tricky line when basing an entire game off some scribble🐎d notes in an appendix.
“We all have an experience with [The Lord of the Rings] that's true to ourselves,” he explains. “Some people, their experience is the movies, some are memes on Tiktok, and some are reading the book seven plus times. And so we all have our own metre of how far is too far when it's a derivative work. You could kind of go through all of the different original works around and adjacent to The Lord of the Rings, and everyone will have an opinion of how far something went, or did it go too far? If anything, we might have gone a little conservative, we probably could have gone a little crazier. For instance, we get a lot of questions about the Balrog.”
Balrogs are divisive creatures in Rings adaptations. From the early interloper in The Rings of Power, presumably Durin’s Bane arrived centuries before its tim💜e, to Gothmog 🦋of the First Age who is yet to be adapted on screen, they’re an iconic Tolkien villain. Arguably more recognisable in popular culture than Morgoth himself, Durin’s Bane in particular is synonymous with Moria, which makes for awkward conversations when it doesn’t appear in a game set in the fallen Dwarven kingdom.
“We always said we have these like seven guiding values for our game as we've been building it, and one of the values was [being] lore forward,” Dumont continues. “When we have two choices, what's the choice that feels like it's about the lore more than it’s about anything else? That hit us hard when we realised we can't have a Balrog in the game.
“That means marketing is not gonna have a Balrog on it, that means people who love the movies and maybe are more casual Lord of the Rings fans that hear Moria, they're gonna be like, ‘oh my God, Balrog!’ and then I have to kind of sheepishly explain Gandalf killed him.”
However, that doesn’t mean the team hasn’t brainstormed ways to get a lore-forward Balrog into Return to Moria in future. Dumont shoots down my joke suggestion that the long-lost brother of Durin’s Bane could appear to avenge its sibling, saying that so many people have mentioned the same idea that the develop𝔉ers now call it the “bro-rog” theory. He jokes back that he wanted to include a “bride of Balrog&rdquoꦫ;, but doesn’t rule out flashbacks in a future update.
Return to Moria’s connection to the Jackson films is pronounced, not least by the addition of John Rhys-Davies reprising his role of Gimli for the game (“it’s not Gimli if it’s not him”). Dumont doesn’t see these as references so much, but wants to make sure Return to Moria’s vision of Khazad-dûm doesn’t directly contradict any player preconceptions. “We couldn't ship with a little asterisk on the screen,” he says.
He notes similarities between Free Range’s Moria and The Rings of Power’s Khazad-dûm, and acknowledges that because modern adaptations take so much from the Jackson films, which in turn were massively influenced by the books (especially aesthetica🌄lly) and existing artwork, every adaptor is drawing from the same pool of resources. This inadvertently creates a cohesive aesthetic across countless developers, filmmakers, and artists, which helps players recognise characters and locations in the game.
That’s not to say he’s shying away from pre-Jackson influences, though. I spot a large Ba🌳kshi poster above D𝔍umont’s desk, and ask how the ‘70s animation inspired Return to Moria.
“The seventies interpretation felt more of an adventure,” he tells me. “You'll see some of that influence in the designs of the orcs and the goblins, [and] in the way the characters talk to each other.”
From designing the biomes to limiting the procedural generation so that the Dimrill Gate is always in the east, Return to Moria feels lore-focused in a way that few adaptations are. The developers have thought of everything, from the fact that dwarves generally fight upwards due to their stature, to the nature of exploring dangerous caverns filled with rare items. It’s still filling in gaps in Tolkien’s Legendarium, but we do know that Gimli returned home after the War of the Ring. We know that Gandalf described some areas as flooded and wet. We know that goblins and foul beasts r𒅌oam among the veins of Mithril that made the Dwarves so rich.
A survival adventure in the Fourth Age may not have Balrogs (yet), but Dumont promises a strong story that fits thematically into Tolkien’s ideals to ease in those unfamiliar with the genre. Free Range’s commitment to Tolkien, whether that be the author’sꦯ own words or the cultural zeitgeist that has surrounded his seminal work, makes Return to Moria one of the most hotly anticipated Tolkien adaptations in years.