The Lord Of The Rings: The Third Age Would Thrive With a Remaster Now More Than Ever

The Lord of the Rings has expanded a lot over the years, but it’s been years since the franchise had its golden age of video games. While games like Shadow of Mordor and Gollum have shown just how vast the gulf of quality can be in these tie-ins in the last decade, the period surrounding the blockbuster film trilogy’s success saw the game market flooded with games. Many of them did their best to replicate the most iconic moments from the movies.

One of the strangest of that bunch was The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. A turn-based RPG with a narrative focus that took cues from plenty of its contemporaries while imagining a separate band of heroes playing a major role in the events of the film trilogy (and only the film trilogy). With EA reportedly planning on more Lord of the Rings remasters and rereleases, it might be finally time to revisit The Third Age‘s weird approach to adapting the War of the Ring.

The Third Age Could Build Off Of Modern Gaming Trends

The story-driven turn-based role-playing game has gone through a serious reprisal in the modern day. Although the genre has long been a favorite, it reached a new level of blockbuster success among modern players thanks to success stories like the story-driven Clair Obscura: Expedition 33 or the massive Baldur’s Gate 3. Both of these successes could easily be used as inspiration for a new take on Lord of the Rings: The Third Age if it were to get a remaster or a remake. The game’s design was very familiar to anyone who had played contemporary RPGs of the time, like Final Fantasy X, to the point where its obvious replication of that game’s design was often cited as one of its biggest flaws. A remake or remaster could refine the gameplay and move it more in line with modern versions of the genre, giving the Middle-earth duels a more cinematic feel.

The game’s concurrent plot alongside the story of the Lord of the Rings trilogy kept things moving at a decent clip, with a “Quest” system serving as a sandbox landing pad for adventures and missions. Taking cues from Baldur’s Gate 3‘s approach to bringing entire settings to vivid life, a remaster of The Third Age could expand the scope of the game and add a more stylized sheen to the visuals. If the team went for a full remake, the developers could add new layers and tweaks to the experience, even potentially adding counter prompts or more active movement mid-combat. A new version of The Third Age would be a perfect change for this non-canon side story to win over some fans, especially if the new version can find a way to tap into the fandom that developed around Baldur’s Gate 3 and Clair Obscura.

The Third Age’s Additions To LOTR Are Wild

The Third Age was developed by EA Redwood Shores, launching in 2004 and trying to capitalize on the success of the Peter Jackson-directed film trilogy. However, EA specifically only had the video game rights to what had appeared in the films. Vivendi Universal Games was the then-owner of the license rights. This forced the developers to create an entirely new side story set in a version of the film universe without any elements from other Tolkien works like The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, as well as anything cut from the film adaptations. The result is a world where an additional band of heroes — a soldier from Gondor, one of Galadriel’s elves, a dwarven warrior, and a mysterious ranger –move in the background of the Fellowship’s plotline.

Because the game was firmly going to be removed from the canon and took inspiration directly from extras seen in the films, the developers were emboldened enough to throw this band of original characters into battles against the Balrog and confrontations with the Witch-King. While the highlight reel element of the game gives it a sheer ridiculous factor that almost feels like a parody of self-insert stories, there’s also a more effective plotline focusing on Berethor, a soldier of Gondor who discovers that he’s been turned into a sleeper agent for the forces of Sauron and has to break the mystical conditioning before he plays a pivotal role in the fall of the city.

A remaster or a remake of the game could go in a lot of different ways. A collaboration with the current Lord of the Rings rights owners, Embracer Group could open up more of the universe and allow the developers to use the first Third Age as a stepping stone for a tweaked and ambitious RPG. The team could stick to the characters and world they’ve got and find ways to update the game in terms of presentation and gameplay alike. Even just a remaster that fully embraces the bizarre sight of classic Lord of the Rings scenes with the random bunch of minor characters could be a fun time. There’s a lot of fun places to take the game going forward.