New Warner Bros. video game will test if we’re sick of hobbits (video)

Gamers have played a lot of Lord of the Rings games over the years. The question, as Warner Bros. prepares to launch yet another game, is whether we’ve reached saturation.

The movie company certainly hopes we have not had our fill of hobbits, even after three outstanding Peter Jackson movies and video games to go with each one of them.

Warner Bros. has painstakingly invested a lot of money and time in acquiring universal rights to make video games based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s books and Peter Jackson’s movies. Martin Tremblay, head of Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment, told us in an interview that the series may have a revival of interest as the company launches its free-to-play Lord of the Rings Online game this fall, and as the film company moves forward with a movie based on Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

Most of the Lord of the Rings games to date have been terrible. But this new game is being designed by veteran fantasy role-playing game studio Snowblind Studios, which Warner Bros. acquired last year. Snowblind has a stellar record of making addictive games, such as Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance.

“For us, this is exciting because Tolkien is the origin of epic fantasy,” said Ryan Geithman, head of Snowblind Studios. (He is pictured above.)

The most recent Lord of the Rings game was a rush job by Pandemic Studios, which had to publish its game quickly before Electronic Arts turned over game publishing rights to Warner Bros. Before that, EA had published a series of games based on the Peter Jackson movies. It churned out one per year, each time to the release of the movies. That’s enough to exhaust just about any fan. It’s tiring even to someone like me, who re-reads the thick books every five years or so.

But Geithman argues that there is still a lot that can be done. First, the style of this game is different. It’s a third-person (over the shoulder view) of the action in a role-playing game format. It’s also a game that can be played via cooperative multiplayer; one player can be an elf, another can be a dwarf, and another a human. Each of those player characters has unique capabilities, and they can all play together much better. An elf, for instance, might see footprints that a dwarf can’t. There’s also a dynamic conversation system, where the dialogue and events change based on the choices you make.

Previous games were rated for Teens and up. But the game due out this fall is rated Mature for gamers 17 and up. That should give the game developers more creative freedom. They can have terrifying action scenes and shocking killing scenes that more closely resemble the action in the films. When you’re finishing off an evil doer in a particularly brutal way, the final animation is quite satisfying. Perhaps the best thing: There was no hobbit in sight in the level that we viewed.

And the part of the Tolkien mythology that this game covers is relatively fresh. It revolves around the war that happened in the north of Middle-Earth in Mirkwood and other places as the main action of the books/movies was taking place in the south in Gondor and Mordor. You create your own fellowship and journey through perilous adventures to tip the scales of war. This subject has been covered in games, such as the Lord of the Rings Online game. But gamers are probably not nearly as sick of this part of the literature as the main story. As for me, I can’t wait for somebody to tackle the epic story of the Silmarillion, the prequel book to the Lord of the Rings, in a video game.

The game debuts in 2011 on the PlayStation 3, PC, and Xbox 360. That’s pretty far away from now, probably closer to a Hobbit movie debut. And perhaps the Tolkien over-saturation will have dissipated by then. Check out my interview with Geithman below.