Every game publisher and their brother have wanted to attach their name to an adaptation of the Lord of the Rings saga. No matter how old the franchise is, it remains an incredibly popular choice for adaptations, such as Lord of the Rings Online. Recently, we learnt that the honor of publishing a LOTR adaptation falls onto the capable shoulders of Take-Two Interactive.
This new breed of Middle-earth entertainment will be developed by Private Division – a Take-Two label – and Wētā Workshop’s interactive game division. Wētā Workshop is also involved in another LOTR-themed project, Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which will release next month. The new game was officially announced on Private Division’s Twitter page:
‘We’re thrilled to announce that we have partnered with @WetaWorkshop to publish a new game set in the literary Middle-earth universe of J.R.R. Tolkien. We look forward to sharing more about the project in the future!’
Apart from the fact that the new game will be based on Middle-earth, a fantasy world created by the legendary author J.R.R. Tolkien, we don’t know much about the title. Amie Wolken, the head of interactive gaming at Wētā Workshop did, however, teased that the game would be ‘one that’s so different from what fans have played previously.’ This was posted to Private Division’s official website.
This potentially tells that everything that we know about what it’s like to play a game set in Middle-earth could be thrown out of the window. However, the game would still need to respect the various aspects of J.R.R. Tolkien’s world. From a creative standpoint, though, there are probably more ways that modern technology could reinterpret Tolkien’s words to reframe the Middle-earth experience. I’m getting ahead of myself, though.
What we know for a fact about the new game can be summarized as follows:
We’re getting a new game based on the world of the LOTR franchise. The game has no official release date, but Private Division has stated that it expects to launch the game ‘during Take-Two’s fiscal year 2024.’ We also know that it’s planned to be something different from what we’ve come to expect from the LOTR franchise.
We don’t know conclusively which platforms the game will release on. However, we can tell from former launches that Take-Two is what we call a multiplatform publisher. Based on historical releases, we can, therefore, speculate that the new game will be made available for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.
In other LOTR news, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum has returned to an unannounced launch date due to delays. We don’t know when it’ll release, but we do know it’ll take some time.
