Lord of the Rings: Heroes of the Middle-earthlaunches worldwide today, a new mobile strategy RPG where players explore ‘What If’ storylines throughout the beloved franchise. In a way, this game was molded with memories of taking two action figures as a kid and creating new stories with them, and this simple concept is tied into a true reverence forTolkien’s works and lore. Using the written works of Tolkien, his naming conventions, and more, developer Capital Games has set out to enhance the conversation aroundLord of the Rings, a conversation it simply wants to be part of.
Lord of the Ringsis one of the most easily identifiable and popular IPs today, with the franchise being deeply rooted in many fans' core identities. This is true of the developers at Capital Games, with Game Rant speaking withLotR: Heroes of Middle-earthdirector Nicolas Reinhart about creating units/characters that fit into the world, respecting but expanding on the world’s lore, asking ‘What If’ of its community and players, plans for post-launch, its live-service elements as a mobile game, and more.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Q: I was curious if you could about the strategy and tactical elements of the game. Beyond factions, what other elements contribute to this gameplay?
It almost started like aturn-based RPG similar to Final Fantasy, but then what this really molded into over time was that but with more vectors of complexity and strategic elements to it. What you’ll see in these sorts of games is that sometimes characters will reference synergies with other counterplay, buffs, and debuffs. Sometimes characters will reference other characters, and they’ll have team-ups and things like that. Then, there is the faction-level synergy where I call allIsengard orcsto attack, that sort of thing.
A lot of what we spend our time doing is trying to make sure that we have our core and are true to the fiction of who the character is to really elevate their spirit. But also making sure there’s a lot of interesting play and counterplay things. That’s both short-term tactical, making sure it fulfills the fantasy, but we also really want to make sure we’ve got long-term play as well. As we introduce future characters into the meta and as we bring new characters into the game, there are opportunities for us to readjust old strategies and reinvigorate them to take something and flip it on its head.
For instance, and this is not me telegraphing something, but when you’ve got Frodo, he’s a ring bearer. What happens when we have other ring bearers, will there be a ring bearer faction one day? And if so, what does that mean? A lot of our design philosophy is about how do we stay true to that, but also how do we mortgage some space in the future so we can continue to do interesting things? It’s just as much as playing with the players as the player is playing the game as well.
Q: Would you describe all the individual units as unique, or are there some that are just basically re-flavored?
Oh, you mean like is there like an Orc with abilities that are basically the same for an Elf? No, all the characters are unique. One of the things that I don’t think we touched on in the presentation, but with our partnership with Middle-earth, one of the things that they’ve given us an opportunity to do is name everyone.
Rather than like with Star Wars, I worked onStar Wars Galaxy of Heroespreviously, and there is the iconic nameless, faceless Stormtrooper. That’s a cool thing, very fitting there, but one of the things that we were looking at is incorporating all of these people. In The Lord of the Rings, everyone is named, everyone has a history, and everyone has a family tree.
Rather than just have generic units, we were like could we name them? As a result, Middle-earth said, ‘Yeah, let’s try it.’ So all of our characters are named, even if they don’t necessarily show up in the literature. What we’re trying to do with that then is to follow Tolkien’s guidance on how he named factions, tried to stay in line with that, and really tried to pick up the aesthetic.
As a result, all characters are unique, and they all have interesting play, counterplay, and interactions with one another.
Q: Could you expand more on the process of looking at Tolkien’s naming conventions and choosing those names?
I was on the panel where we were talking about being like, ‘Yeah, we should do this,’ and I helped guide that. But as far as how we actually made that decision, we have some really incredible folks on staff that are deep in the lore and narrative design, working through it with notes and other guiding documents. I have not personally been inside of them.
But what I can say is that we are deeply affected by looking at what he’s written, looking at his notes about how he was able to derive some of these names and what his inspiration was. Not only did we pick those names, but we’ve gone back and forth withMiddle-earthto make sure that they also believe that they are appropriate as well. We’ve done our best to look deeply, to look reverently at what Tolkien has done, and tried our best to be in line with that as well.
Q: Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth introduces a new Ring of Power into the universe, and that’s a pretty big deal. What was it like approaching that idea and figuring out how to make it work?
Yeah, so that’s emblematic early on because, you know, this is the same studio that made Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes and we have an incredible partnership with Lucasfilm. One of the things we were able to do with that game is basically build out this “multiverse” of characters, so we wanted to do this approach with Middle-earth as well. While there is certainly room to tell avery specific Lord of the Rings story, which would be totally awesome, part of our core DNA is being late ’80s, early ’90s kids. And we would be in the backyard with our toys, asking who would win in a fight Superman versus The Hulk, those sorts of things.
We also look at how these people would interact with one another as well, so we think of the game as a platform, not to make too much of it, but it’s like that theater of when we were all sitting around and playing with our action figures. So, we had to develop a conceit that was wide enough that felt lore authentic and appropriate to that. Again, we wanted to really ensure that the source of power comes from the Ring, we really wanted the player to be a ring bearer since that is iconic about Lord of the Rings. We wanted to be lore appropriate to that, but also ask what if Frodo had hung out with Earendil orwhat if Glorfindel and Aragorn had met, which are important questions to us.
We think that we’ve created a platform by which people can play and tell that story without us having to be ultra overt. They get to be a part of that and tell their own stories to themselves as well.
The idea of playing with action figures as a kid is such a simple, good idea to translate into a video game.
100%. I grew up reading The Hobbit under the covers at night, and I grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons. A lot of deep fantasy, a lot of internal storytelling, group storytelling, that inspires all of us. It’s those very simple ideas, taking a thing that we understand as a truth, a narrative, a literary truth, and then how we interpret it, how we onboard it, and making sure that’s a big part of the experience for players as well. True experiences, but flexible. I think there’s a lot to it.
Q: So how do you go about creating that same theater of the mind, especially for Lord of the Rings and an older audience?
I think a lot of it is the structure of the game itself that creates those opportunities. So the first thing we have to do is verify that the characters feel and play like the character. A lot of times that will end up on a vision board, likewhat makes Frodo ‘Frodo’ and what makes Samwise ‘Samwise.‘We then look into the core things, like which Frodo are we talking about? Is this him early in his adventure or later in his adventure? We pull out another layer and ask who does Frodo play well with, what are peoples’ expectations around that, and how do we translate this creative abstraction into mechanics. How do we do that? What is the play experience we want people to have around it, how will this play in the meta, and what are our hopes and targets?
I will always come back to one of the things we’re very particular on: even if we make something strong, how do we leave room for it to be changed, unseated, or permutated in the future? Then we go through these steps again and again, and in the background of this, there are multiple rounds of balancing and rewriters. It’s the creative rock tumbler, so to speak.
Q: I know you kind of touched on it, but it’s very obvious from the presentation that a lot of folks were taken by that ‘What If’ approach to Lord of the Rings. That obviously lets you explore alternate storylines and whatnot, but how do you make that appeal to a mass audience?
That’s a great question, one I think with many opinions. I’ll give a personal opinion of it. It’s really that notion of ‘What If’ in two flavors. What if Glorfindel and Aragorn met, that’s one flavor, but another flavor is what if things changed? Maybe fundamentally, it’s the bet of these alternate approaches, like in comic books, or any of these types of things that have like these big collections.
But it’s the notion again that if we can tell that underlying fundamental truth that gives it a little bit of a twist, it will still resonate with people. We’re making the fodder of creativity. My hope is that we present “what if,” and that that turns into, ‘oh, yeah, what about this thing too?’ A lot of times, that’s what we’re trying to set up for, so fans can ask their own’what if’ questions. Do I think it will appeal to a mass-market audience? I think so. I think that we’ve hit the appropriate aesthetic.
I think we’ve had the appropriate play mechanics that we think will resonate. We think, again as I said in the presentation, ‘What If’ is the daddy, maybe even the granddaddy of modern fantasy. We all have the thumbprints, the underlying structure, the core DNA. Lord of the Rings is universal in so many ways that I think it should appeal to a lot of people, whether they know Lord of the Rings or not.
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Q: After the presentation, I was thinking about the ‘What if’ approach. Well, Marvel’s done it. Now Lord of the Rings. So I’m thinking what if Obi-Wan didn’t beat Anakin, and there are so many things where you could apply this. Do you think this is something that will manifest in the community, via fan-fic or something?
Well, I hope that the community is inspired by it is what I would say. I believe that there will be rampant speculation. I very much hope so because it’s exciting for us. I would say like one of the trickiest parts is that theOne Ring is a gravity well. There are so many big discussion points around it. A lot of times we end up doing something like ‘what if this person took the ring,’ but we’re also trying to step back and ask questions that aren’t One Ring-centered—ask questions about changes in the timeline.
When we talk about it internally, it turns into these questions about like we can’t tell that whole story. We would spend all of our lives trying to tell that alternate history, so how do we tell that story through two to three characters? Like how do we have a key decision or a key branch, and what are the two or three things that are most emblematic of that branch?
Then how do we show it and, again, not tell the whole story but create that really interesting fodder of where ideas come from? That way, players will say like, well, of course, this happened, and here’s what I think would have happened next. Let them get excited about that and tell those stories to each other as well.
Q: Yeah, I think the stories fans tell themselves via fan fiction or other means is one of the most creative ways for someone to engage with something they love. Do you think this is almost that sort of community engagement appeal funneled into a game?
I think so. I think it’s 100% that. For instance, I love group fiction and I’m inspired by the SCP Foundation. I don’t have like a broad opinion on fan fiction other than to say fans find fans, and fandom finds many ways to talk about the things they love. More than anything, we want to be part of people’s love for the Lord of the Rings, how they think about it, and how it expands from there.
As a longtimedungeon masterwho has spent a long time thinking about this, anything that’s going to spark other creativity and other ideas, even if people reject the idea and say here’s what really would have happened, that’s a good moment for us. For people to be talking about and thinking about it, just being part of that conversation makes us excited.
Q: The post-launch plans sound pretty ambitious, and I know you can’t be incredibly detailed, but about how far out are these post-launch plans mapped? What’s the plan for the longevity of the game?
This one is always a tricky thing because part of this is I’ll say this and because it’s somewhat secret, people will be like, ‘Oh my god, it means X." Take this at face value. We have a broad structure where we want to deploy some very high affinity, true core characters and ‘What if’ characters over, like, a three-to-five-year period. That doesn’t mean we have it mapped three-to-five years out, but we do have a structure for how we think we want to set that up.
I would say we have a very strong character and event roadmap over the course of this next year, and we have a very strong feature roadmap. I would say that we even have the beginnings of like a 30%-to-50% view of what things we think we can get done in year two as well. A lot of how we think about these big ideas, big characters, big what-if scenarios is as scaffolding to work backward on, like what do we need to do to build up to it. Even if we don’t have three years fully mapped out or anything, we know what we’re trying to get to, and this gives us the opportunity to respond to what players are liking.
I think that there’s always an interesting conversation around live services, but one of the reasons why I stay inlive service gamemaking and design is it is the conversation with the player and the ability for the devs to react to them. I always refer to it as us playing the game together.
We make things, players play with the things, we see what they like and what they don’t like, and then we try to take another pass at it. In many ways, it is communal design. It is a communal way for us all to continue, to keep something going that we all believe in and love. That’s a very rambling roundabout way of answering your question to say, we have a strong year very much mapped out, and we have very clear ideas for year two. And I would say that we’ve even got ideas out even further from that.
Q: The “What If” Characters are going to be playable eventually, as mentioned during the presentation, but what was the driving force behind this decision? Not to just limit these characters to enemies or bosses, but to actually put them into the hands of players?
I don’t know, man. It was just always self-evident. If you make something cool like that, you have to put it out there. I mean, it’s funny that you say that because like, yeah, I guess there was a world without them. Don’t get me wrong, there are PvE characters, but even then I would imagine over time, they will probably evolve into ownable characters as well.
So much of game making, I feel like it’s an exercise in using the whole cow for lack of a better term. If you make something, you want to be able to make sure that it’s usable in a lot of different ways. So, if we’re going to go through the work of coming up with this cool What-If character and tell this really cool story and get people really hyped about it, it’s self-evident to us they would want to play with it, so of course we put it in their hands.
Q: Obviously mobile games are some of the biggest on the market, but there are certain subsets of gamers who will hear the term mobile game and just instantly disassociate from it. What would you say to someone who just refuses to acknowledge something like this just because it’s a mobile game?
That’s a tricky question. Not because of some of the strong feelings around, but I mean, the reality is that we are living in the golden age of game-making. There are so many incredible games being made, so what I would say is ultimately I want people to come that want to play these games.
We’re trying to make games people want to come and play. We have strong theories about how we ensure everybody gets to play with the toys over time, and so like, I have personal friends that have said “okay mobile game, pitch me on it.” Ultimately, it’s no different than anything, like we do any of us play a game?
Someone says, ‘Hey, I think you might like this,’ or I say, ‘I think you might like this.’ I would say come and try this, and if you like it, great. If you don’t, I understand because there are first-person shooters,role-playing games, puzzle games, and that’s all great. We’re just trying to make something great too.
Yeah, I’m thinking of that meme that goes around from time to time where it’s like ‘Oh you play the Sims? You play mobile games? You’re not a real gamer." I’m not the biggest mobile gamer myself, but that gatekeeping just drives me wild.
It’s tough. Because I think, talking about fan communities and fandom, people want to find others like them, they want to work through it. And what I would say is like, look, some people playboard games, some people play cup and ball, some people play mobile games, some people play PS5,and some people play imaginary games.
We should just be excited that people play games. I know that sounds hopelessly naive and maybe even silly, but it’s just to say how great it is to live in a world where we have an opportunity to engage in that sort of leisure and have that mental space to be able to just have fun. We need to celebrate that in whatever way it makes sense for people to celebrate it. There don’t have to be lines drawn in the sand over games. Let’s love them. If you love them, then love them. If you don’t, then let someone else love them, I guess ultimately be my point.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I’d just say we’re incredibly humbled and excited to be able to participate with the Lord of the Rings, with Middle-earth enterprises, to be able to attempt to tell these stories, to try to give a fresh new perspective on it. We recognize that we’ve been given an incredibly tall task, and that our only hope is that we’re able to meet expectations, as best as we can.
We’re just excited to be in the conversation. We’re excited to see what people think about it, and anybody that comes and plays, thank you. Thank you for being a part of it. We’re really happy to have you, and we hope that it’s as good as you’d hoped it was.
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Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earthis available now on mobile devices.
