It’s clear from the first sweeping panorama of Middle-earth what Amazon wants to achieve with its new Lord of the Rings show. The Rings of Power jumps incessantly between characters, each representing different regions of the greater Lord of the Rings legendarium. We have imperial elves living in leafy, everlasting autumnal kingdoms, humans digging the life of a yeoman in thatched cottages, and proto-hobbits rustling berries in dense, wild valleys. The camera often pulls back to reveal a sepia-colored map, laminated with all the Tolkien realms — the places found only in the Apocryphal comic books and RPGs — to show how the Lord of the Rings universe has officially broken loose from The Peter Jackson limits itself and can now soar through countless spin-offs, sequels, and multiverse digressions. The franchise era has finally arrived, and that makes it hard to watch The Rings of Power without hungering for a fully realized, Bezos-funded Middle-earth MMO.
They have already tried this once. Amazon, with its burgeoning games division, has been hard at work on an MMORPG built within the trappings of the mysterious Second Age, which is when The Rings of Power takes place. It’s the perfect vantage point for a video game based on a beloved story: a familiar environment, but a blank slate for storytelling. Nothing concrete about the design philosophy leaked further, but we may never hear about it again. The project was canceled in 2021.
Amazon’s interactive division failed to produce one resonating hit (not counting that six-week period where everyone played a ton of New World; that was a collective hallucination) but the cancellation apparently wasn’t due to rickety in Amazon’s store. Bloomberg reported: (opens in new tab) that the project was shelved due to a contract dispute between Amazon and Tencent, which is hard to comprehend. There was so much money to be made, couldn’t these two gilded behemoths figure it out?
You know what would make The Second Age a lot more immersive? If you could put 60 in it.
So now we have The Rings of Power, which practically serves as a advertisement for all the grand plans Amazon had for a megaton gaming venture. You can easily visualize the bustling capitals of the hypothetical game, the gloomy dungeons and the soaring flight paths while watching. Elrond descends into a lively Khazad-dum – bright, lively, full of ball-busting dwarves who are sure to wander between the auction house and the reagent seller forever. We see the island kingdom of Númenor – with its Balearic, white-stone architecture – that has left so many World of Warcraft veterans desperate for reps for our dashing nautical princes and princesses. A gigantic Elfin spire towers over the rugged Southlands, stretching out into an endless horizon. It looks like the perfect 20-30 zone. I’d love nothing more than to right-click on a wanted poster in one of those little farming hamlets instructing me to kill an elite Orc.
It’s a pain I’ll carry with me for the rest of the first season of The Rings of Power; if only my journey and Galadriel’s could be joined by mutual agreement. After all, a lot of people have complained that the show is a little too narcissistic with its endless shoots of ethereal CGI vistas. You know what would make The Second Age a lot more immersive? If you could put 60 in it.
I’m not going to let my grandkids bounce on my knee and tell them about Shadow of War.
To be clear, there’s already a pretty good Lord of the Rings MMO out there right now. Lord of the Rings Online is still advancing, 15 years after its release in 2007, with a trickle of new expansions to satiate its small but dedicated community. Back in the red hot peak of the MMO boom, LOTRO was routinely recommended as the hipster alternative to Guild Wars or World of Warcraft – it was a little slower, a little more focused on storytelling and equipped with a dogmatic devotion. to the fiction. (When the game rolled out a PvP mode, it did so by turning players into monsters – hobbit on hobbit violence was strictly prohibited.)
You could argue that publishers should be careful when diving into an established work of fiction with the promise that they’ll do the immersion better than the developers of yesteryear. (I mean, remember what happened to the endlessly hyped and ultimately boring Old Republic? Star Wars Galaxies veterans are still annoyed at that desecration.) But you have to think a Lord of the Rings renaissance at the very least would should give us something new to play. The recent catalog was pretty bare! I’m not going to let my grandkids bounce on my knee and tell them about Shadow of War. We’re thirsty here, and Rings of Power just makes us more dehydrated.
So please Amazon, after all these false starts and layoffs and confusing business setbacks, give us the Lord of the Rings MMO we deserve. Resist any fat investor language that is sure to whisper in your ears; don’t give us a LoTR Clash of Clans facsimile, or a LoTR idle dungeon, or a LoTR cryptogame. If you finally make a Rings of Power customization and Nori shows up on screen and asks me to buy 2,000 more Silmarillions to advance to the next level, we’ll burn the case down. Also don’t give me one of those tentative, half-stepped, modern MMOs like Destiny where you and a legion of Elves and Dwarves hang out in a beautifully restrictive hub zone – called “Dalandrath” or whatever – waiting to teleport to the tiny instance zones to reveal Sauron. track down. No man, we gotta go old school. We’re talking about Asheron’s Call old school. Now is the time.
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I know this is easier said than done. Who knows if Amazon will even be allowed to start a new LotR MMO project? Amazon Studios made The Rings of Power under license from the Tolkien Estate, but most of the Lord of the Rings TV, movie and video game rights are owned by Middle-earth Enterprises, which Embracer Group just bought. (Randy Pitchford’s Rings of Power, coming soon?) So maybe Bezos has to make an extra giant licensing deal to get these plans off the track at all. But I swear to you, it would be worth it.
Amazon has been failing its development efforts for years, but came quite near to nail it down with New World. It has the formula to satiate a legion of adrift 34-year-olds looking for something to fill them with a wonder they haven’t experienced since sitting in a movie theater for the original trilogy – which was simulated at the time. , almost plagiarized, by Blizzard in World of Warcraft. (They put a fake Mount Doom in the Searing Gorge! We could harvest Mithril veins if we improved our mining skills!)
So please Amazon: let me run a class and kill some rats until I unlock some better abilities that will allow me to kill some goblins instead. Let me eat and drink on the shores of the Sundering Sea. Let me score a Server First on Morgoth. You’ve got the world, now all you need to do is create a comprehensive, modern MMO and keep the player base fueled with juicy updates forever. (Suddenly I was producing a $1 billion TV show) (opens in new tab) seems like the easy part.)
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