2023-05-15 17:35:00
The Lord of the Rings is back on Amazon… but as a video game! This is the announcement that has just been made this Monday, May 15 by the group, which once again illustrates its desire to become a major player in the sector after having recently unveiled the creation of a Tomb Raider game.
Amazon has just signed an agreement with Middle Earth Enterprises to develop an open-world massively multiplayer online (MMO) adventure title. We will therefore discover a kind of World of Warcraft in the universe imagined by JRR Tolkien.
It’s not the first time that the e-commerce giant’s video game division has planned to bring players from all over the world to Middle-earth. Already in 2021, Bloomberg announced the cancellation of an equivalent project. The studio in charge of the creation had been indirectly bought by the Chinese video game giant Tencent. The two giants had a priori failed to agree, forcing Amazon to simply abandon the current project. The Lord of the Rings had then fallen into oblivion… to better come back today? We can hope so.
Another studio, Amazon Games Orange County, is this time in charge of this new project. We owe the latter the game New World (2021), again an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) which has had some success.
At this stage of the project’s progress, information is nevertheless still scarce. We just know that the game will take place during the period covering the stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in an open world. However, we hope that the studio, by choosing this period that has been covered many times, will be able to offer an original story like what a title like Hogwarts Legacy, The Legacy of Hogwarts has been able to offer millions of Harry Potter fans. .
A saga adapted many times
A challenge, especially since it is not the first time that the Lord of the Rings universe has been adapted into a video game. Many of them have tried the adventure for decades. The titles imagined by the American studio Monolith (The Shadow of Mordor then The Shadow of War) had thus brilliantly shown that the richness of the universe of JRR Tolkien lent itself to similar development. But where Monolith offered a single-player adventure game with a real narrative, Amazon Games Orange County’s title will primarily play the online multiplayer experience card. The narration could therefore be secondary, more diluted, in this universe that it will however be possible to explore freely.
We hope that the universe of Lord of the Rings will be much more than a simple backdrop with this title which has, for the moment, no release date announced. We just know that it will be available on PC and consoles. In free-to-play mode? World of Warcraft is now partially (up to a certain level) but not New World. Everyone can go there from their own circumstances. The fact remains that since its first publication in 1954, almost 70 years ago, Tolkien’s work has made generations of readers, spectators and players dream. A feat that we hope Amazon Games will be able to live up to.
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