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The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth Preview for PC
Posted on Saturday, January 31, 2004 @ 05:31:46 pm E.S.TAt its heart, the Lord of the Rings is about the acts of great valor and importance that even the smallest of all beings can achieve—made evident by the brave quest undertaken by hobbits Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee to destroy the One Ring. Anyone who has seen the films, however, would admit that the truly epic battles, involving armies of a simply staggering number, steal the spotlight more often than not. Those battles are also much more translatable to video game form, which is precisely what Electronic Arts means to do with The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth.
Unlike Electronic Arts’ past two games based on the LotR film trilogy, which were hack-and-slash action games that focused on the individual characters of the story, The Battle for Middle-earth is a real-time strategy game that puts you in control of the massive armies seen in the films’ grand battles. If you’re worried about the license overwhelming the gameplay, don’t expect a half-assed, simplified RTS that settles for recycling the same gameplay mechanics that the genre has been using since Warcfraft II, let alone III (too bad you can’t say the same for Liquid Entertainment’s War of the Rings). The developer of Battle for Middle-earth, EALA (formerly EA Pacific, formerly a division of Westwood Studios) knows their way around an RTS—their past work includes Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 and last year’s Command & Conquer: Generals, both (deservingly) critically acclaimed. While it is true that Battle for Middle-earth will have standard RTS mechanics, such as base-building, resource management and hero units, EALA seems to be taking full advantage of the rich LotR license to make a fully realized game with new and innovative features.
Probably the most exciting feature is the sheer scope of the game. EALA is utilizing a modified version of the C&C Generals engine, aiming to get around 500 units on-screen at any time. That’s five hundred, folks. If simply the thought of having to micromanage 500 units actually inflicts upon you physical pain, fret not, because EALA is well aware of the possibility for mentally-induced suffering. Rather than forcing you to control all those units individually, Battle for Middle-earth will feature a fairly elaborate system of formations and battalions. A battalion of men (or orc) will essentially behave as a single unit, allowing you to keep some order during the chaos without having to do a whole lot of mouse-clicking.
The game will feature two single player campaigns—one for good, one for evil—and four playable sides: Rohan, Gondor, Isengard and Mordor. The units in the game will all be instantly recognizable to LotR fans. Suffice it to say, if you saw it in the movies, you’ll probably see it in the game, which includes the human horse-riders of Rohan, Orcs, Uruk Hai, Nazguls, Oliphants, Elvish archers, Ents, Trolls, and many more. In all, EALA is planning to include around 15-18 units for each side. There will also be extra-powerful Hero Units that will gain experience and level up, becoming more powerful as you play. Just about every major character from the films will be a Hero in the game, and the selection ranges from the more popular choices of Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas and of course Gandalf, to more obscure characters like Eomer, the prince of Rohan. Surprisingly, Battle for Middle-earth isn’t entirely about the gigantic clashes between hundreds of soldiers, since the campaigns will also feature much smaller encounters that focus in on the Heroes and limits the player to a minor number of units. For example, one of these smaller skirmishes will be based on the Fellowship’s encounter with a Troll in the Mines of Moria, as seen in the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring.
What’s immensely intriguing about Battle for Middle-earth is the inventive ways EALA are balancing the sides while keeping them true to their film representations. For instance, Mordor, much like in the films and J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction, will have a virtually inexhaustible supply of units. This is possible because Mordor doesn’t actually train (build) units in the conventional RTS way; rather, they will automatically receive new groups of units in set intervals. In effect, this lets Mordor amass the huge armies seen in the films without having to worry about limited resources. While it might seem as if Mordor has an unfair advantage, their strength in numbers is kept in check by the fact that Rohan and Gondor, for instance, will play much more defensively (and of course, they’ll have the White Wizard, which has to count for something).
By saying “plays defensively,” that isn’t to suggest they simply get a bonus to their structures’ hit points—much like in the films, many of the huge-scale encounters in the campaigns will be emphasized on siege battles, with Rohan or Gondor entrenched as Mordor or Isengard launches an offensive. An obvious example would be the Battle of Helms Deep, the epic confrontation between Rohan and Isengard depicted in the second film, The Two Towers. Players on the side of Rohan will actually be able to utilize the massive keep to defend themselves against the otherwise impossible number of enemy units.
But rather than simply letting you garrison your units in one structure that has a set number of hit points, as in other RTS games, Battle for Middle-earth is taking siege battles a step further by implementing the concept of traps. Even after the enemy crashes through your gates, you can still defend yourself with archers garrisoned in various towers, or drop pots filled with boiling oil on the encroaching adversaries. It’s all part of a gameplay concept that’s been dubbed “weapons in the battlefield,” and the battlefields will, indeed, be highly interactive. A Troll, for instance, could uproot a tree and use it as a club, or an Ent (the living tree creatures seen primarily in The Two Towers) could pick up a stone, throw it at an enemy, then pick up the same stone and throw it again.
Graphically, EALA is making good use of their partnership with New Line Cinemas—who provided them with actual sketches, models and textures used in the films—to make Battle for Middle-earth look as much as the films as possible. So far, they appear to be doing a fine job. Even with having to get 500 units on-screen without sacrificing stability, the units are still fairly large and well detailed. The only gripe one might have, at this point, is the lack of any diversity in units of the same type; each human soldier will look exactly the same, as will orcs, trolls, etc. While that sort of comes with the territory (imagine having to make 500 unique human soldier models, not to mention unique models for all unit types), and while most other RTS games usually suffer from the same problem, it simply stands out a bit more considering the realistic aesthetics of the game and how many units are on-screen at any given moment.
But perhaps EALA will actually address that issue, because they certainly seem to have the time to do so if they had the inclination. Battle for Middle-earth has already been in development for about ten months, and there are still seven more months before the game’s released in August—which definitely bodes well for a game that already looks to be so full of potential. Although they could simply rest on the LotR license as a crutch and churn out a quick and decent RTS that would probably still sell by the boat-loads, EALA isn’t settling for run-of-the-mill; they’re implementing intriguing new features into a genre that far too often witnesses the release of stagnant, cookie-cutter games, and seem to be ending up with an RTS that would be just as promising if it went by any other name.
Of course, we must reserve our final judgment until the game is released. But so long as they’re able to properly balance the four sides, and so long as there’s enough depth in the Heroes and individual units to make playing the smaller skirmishes as worthwhile as playing the huge battles, then Battle for Middle-earth could well become one of the rarest phenomena that ever occurs in the video game industry: a movie-licensed game that also happens to be great.
Preview By: Kris Pigna - 17287 Reads
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