It’s for the Best That We’re Not Getting This Lord of the Rings Game

In theory, a Lord of the Rings MMORPG sounds like a slam dunk. Even though the concept has been tried (and has ended up shuttered) before, the world created by J.R.R. Tolkien should make for a natural playground for an MMO space. Despite that, previous efforts have struggled to reach the success necessary to keep a live-service title like an MMO afloat.

That might be why Amazon Games, after years of development, has pulled the plug on its attempt to make a Lord of the Rings MMO. While it’s a real loss for the developers who had been working on such an ambitious project, it’s probably better in the long run that we didn’t get the game. While it’s frustrating for the developers, it seems that the Lord of the Rings franchise’s next confirmed game is going to be a different style of RPG that is better suited for the current state of the gaming industry.

Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings MMORPG Was A Big Swing I Was Worried About

Announced in 2023, Amazon’s Lord of the Rings MMO has been formally shuttered by the studio. Although Amazon Games is still developing a Lord of the Rings video game, according to reporting from Eurogamer, it seems that the studio’s initial intention to turn the property into a counterpoint to something like World of Warcraft has been shut down for the time being. Although the game hadn’t been formally shut down until recently, the writing had been on the wall for a while. Layoffs at Amazon Games and the sundowning of Amazon’s other MMO-style game, New World: Aeternum, highlighted the challenges the game faced to make it to release.

The game had spent a few years in development before the plug was pulled, suggesting the title simply never found an angle that could justify the massive investment to the parent company. Part of the problem is that the MMO genre and forever games as a whole have been struggling as of late. That style of game is a massive investment of money, time, and resources. Especially with competition like the enduring hits like World of Warcraft and EverQuest while new attempts to enter the genre have largely faltered, it’s hard to imagine even something as popular as Lord of the Rings being able to make a big enough move into the genre to become successful enough to sustain itself.

It would be a challenge in the best of times, so the recent trends in gaming, where perpetually online games are struggling, were a bad sign for the company. Even with the vast world of Tolkien at their disposal, breaking into a crowded genre defined by long-running successes was always going to be a long shot. While it’s a tragedy for the developers who lost their jobs, it also seems like the sort of move that would have been inevitable if the game didn’t quickly become a hit.

Kingdom Come Gives Me Confidence For Warhorse Studio’s LOTR

A more exciting prospect for that IP is the newly announced immersive RPG from Warhorse Studios. The developer behind Kingdom Come: Deliverance II has announced that they have a Middle-earth setting in mind for their next game. The game will reportedly be an open-world single-player RPG, giving players a chance to explore the world and live out their lives as they choose. This approach seems more suited for Lord of the Rings fans than a perpetual RPG, as it can feel like a specific story instead of a never-ending quest.

Getting the chance to explore whatever age the developers land upon from a first-person perspective is an exciting prospect — but instead of needing hundreds of other gamers across several servers to keep the adventure alive, the narrative throughline will be handled by the team behind one of last year’s best-written games. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II was a thematically rich and easily engrossing story, where the immersive effects never fully undercut the central characters and their arcs. It’s the kind of approach that seems like a natural pick for a Lord of the Rings game, especially in the way it couched the narrative so thoroughly alongside the immersion.

It’s a style of immersive storytelling that better benefits from a single-player experience over the sense of perpetual adventure and larger community that an MMO often strives to create. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is such a strong entry in the genre that I have greater confidence in Warhorse Studio’s ability to craft a compelling, narrative-driven RPG than I ever did in the admittedly talented developers at Amazon Games being able to recapture the lightning in a bottle success needed to make a new MMO work in the current gaming climate. As a fan of Lord of the Rings and narrative-driven RPGs, it’s an exciting development to see the series going in this direction.