The year was 2009. Electronic Arts was plethoric and with all fronts and genres covered. In the world of sports, the EA Sports division was still beating Pro Evolution Soccer by far; Battlefield stood a year earlier with Bad Company as a shooter that could really kick the crap out of a Call of Duty at the top with the first two Modern Warfare; and while the MCU was taking its first steps into the movies, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings still had a importance capital in the video game.
Inside the something sparse list of titles in the license, there was one project that departed from the line set by Peter Jackson’s trilogy adaptations – which, needless to say. shone with their own light-. A rare thing, I know. What worked was rarely set aside and even more so for an EA that made a profit with any IP, but it seems that John Riccitiello -CEO of the company at the time- wanted to give the same opportunity to Pandemic Studios that he gave 5 years earlier to Visceral Games and The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. Thus came forth The Lord of the Rings: The Conquest, a multiplayer game very similar to Battlefield and Battlefront based on Tolkien’s million-dollar license. ¿A resounding success? Well, not as much as that.
The truth is that many, myself included, enjoyed The Lord of the Rings: The Conquest from beginning to end. However, the videogame industry is capricious and this release marked the end of a Pandemic was just as successful as its publisher, who closed its doors for good a few months after the release of Saboteur in 2009. Was The Lord of the Rings: Conquest bad? Not at all, in fact the comparison with Battlefield has not been unintentional, not to draw attention, and Pandemic Studios was the architect of two of the best games of the galactic franchise that laid the foundations for the future of this war saga: Battlefront and Battlefront 2.
It seemed like the best possible team to take it on, and little could be blamed on the concept of the Middle Earth as a battlefield multiplayer. The idea behind The Conquest was to be able to fight on the battlefields of Pelennor, Moria, Mount Doom and even The Shire – the latter as part of a campaign where Sauron wipes out Aragorn and company at The Black Gate and expands across the continent – with up to 5 classes playable completely differentiated and with a gameplay style well known to the Pandemic team.
Had voices and music from the movies, plus war mounts.
The idea of including modes like Conquest or Team Duel, all in games of up to 16 players is something common in the modern shooter, I know, but something rare back then. Remember that there were still 3 years left for Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, who picked up the baton in this rare medieval online genre. However, this idea was transmuted to this work in a remarkable way, I must say. The Conquest drank from that feeling of “I am a participant of what before I was only a spectator”, very much along the lines of controlling the snow speeder in Battlefront 2 being a part, albeit a small part, of the Battle of Hoth .
Imagine the look on the faces of those kids who experienced the trilogy at a very young age by giving them the chance to ride on the Pelennor Fields as an Eorlinga while facing a mûmakil the size of a skyscraper -yes, perspectives change over the years, but what my young eyes saw was beyond belief-. Defending Helm’s Deep from the Uruk onslaught in its Conquest mode -not that the comparison was intentional- or Duel for Teams to the soundtrack of the movies, orchestrated again by the same composer, Howard Shore, satisfied the warlike cravings of more than one.
The development of this title sought to emulate what had worked in Battlefront and Battlefield. The assault, medic, support, or recon classes here were named soldier, archer, mage, and scout; all of them with unique abilities and items.. It was clear that a game of this nature had to leave aside the subtlety with which Peter Jackson had translated the magical and fantastic elements on the big screen to embrace the more imaginative and ostentatious of Tolkien’s world, something that felt truly refreshing for the license.
Conquest had no problem with “nobodies”, in fact it further enhanced a proposition that already felt flashy. All the characters were random soldiers, a smart decision to feel the weight of battle on our shoulders by not relying on immortal heroes. In fact, it maintained the logic of the conflict and the respawns constantly as one more at the gates of Minas Tirith, for example. Play as Aragorn or Legolas was already possible in the adaptations, but we wanted to see Tolkien’s world from another perspective, a more mundane one. Even so, Pandemic did not disappoint and rescued the same hero system from SW Battlefront with the cast of protagonists and even had the luxury of including playable Ents, Trolls and ulifants – though I’ll never get over the thorn of controlling a Nazgûl winged beast.
Was it all rosy? Not at all. Despite the powerful name that gave The Lord of the Rings, many users frowned at a somewhat wasted scenario design. This game had to host melee combat, so open maps took precedence, but that did not shake the pulse of a Pandemic that knew how to perfectly translate the movie epic with huge battle scenes and hundreds of scripted NPCs beyond the borders of these scenarios.
We are talking about an almost niche game, not so much for its proposal, after all it is one of the most important licenses in history developed by a recognized company. Even so, very few played this title and it sank in a 2009-2010 catalog where EA’s ship of good fortune began to capsize. It didn’t take Electronic Arts a year to close the servers -although and now we only have the memory of a great work that had everything, and ended in nothing.
