Like most nerds, I have been a Lord of the Rings fan since around the beginning of time. So you can imagine how I felt when I saw the new trailer for War in the North. (Don’t worry, I’ll link the video in at the end of the post so you can see for yourselves.)

It promises to be an amazing single player medieval fantasy action RPG, without the loss of story or the endless repetition of an MMO.

And I want to believe them. I really, really do.
It’s just that I don’t trust the developers.
Or the publisher.
At all.

This whole thing smacks of copycat marketing. I can just imagine how the idea formed in the mind of some top EA executive: “Hmm, I’ve been playing this new Dragon Age: Origins game for like 35 hours straight! It’s an amazing-single-player-medieval-fantasy-action-RPG, without the loss of story or endless repetition of an MMO! Too bad it’s a brand-new franchise. Just imagine if we already had an established fan base for a game like this! If only EA held the rights to a popular fantasy role-playing franchise, we could totally cash in… hey, wait a minute!”

So yes, I believe it’s an attempt to duplicate the success of Dragon Age by making a nice-looking clone game wearing a fresh Lord of the Rings T-shirt.

But it’s not just the recent success of Dragon Age that makes me think this is all just a lot of hype. Does anybody remember a few years back, when the LotR RTS “Battle for Middle-Earth II” was coming out? Remember Hugo Weaving’s deep monotone voice booming that “the final battle of the War in the North is about to begin?” They made a huge deal out of expanding the LotR franchise to never-before-seen places and events. It’s like this: “all the huge battles in the LotR movies took place in the south of Middle-Earth, but there was an even more awesome and less well-known war taking place in the north of Middle-Earth that you never get to see, and we’re finally going to show it to you!” And BFME2 was very nearly a super-amazing game. Except that EA spent way too much effort on hype and not nearly enough on gameplay, so that it ended up only being an average game; fun, but not earth-shattering.

And now in 2010, lo and behold, a scant four years after the release of the over-hyped “War in the North” RTS game, we see the announcement of a sure-to-be overhyped “War in the North” RPG. Except this time, it’s actually called “War in the North,” because they just couldn’t think of a better title. Except that they already had a better title, because of the simple fact that they already had a better game in the works.

In 2006, a new game was announced under the working title “Project Grey Company.” This was soon revealed to be a cool-looking LotR action-RPG entitled The White Council. The concept art for this game looked really sweet. It looked like it had an interesting and original plot, and it was really going to bring some awesome new places, characters and events to the LotR franchise.

And then in 2007 it was inexplicably cancelled.

They say it was due to “management problems” or some such. It was replaced by a purely action-based game called “Lord of the Rings: Conquest,” which sucked, to put it mildly. I’m not certain, but I think Conquest may be the worst-rated LotR game ever made, and there have been some real doozies, like that ill-begotten farce of a console RPG known as “The Third Age,” for one.

But why cancel such a promising game just to replace it with a poorly-bundled package of tripe? That excuse EA gave about “management problems” was pretty ambiguous. What I think really happened is that someone in “management” had a “problem” with the game. As happens so frequently in the game market, another brilliant idea was squashed by an egotistical executive who thinks he’s smarter than everybody else and can come up with better, more lucrative ideas. I’m sure whoever this goober was used all sorts of rhetoric about how the age of RPGs was over, the market was dead, that action games were the latest big thing, and that to make real money off of LotR they needed to make an action game instead of an RPG. That’s my take on how The White Council died.

Unfortunately the hypothetical executive’s sentiment that I posited here completely misses the point of the entire LotR franchise, and that’s why Conquest was such a bland, worthless game. RPGs owe LotR for their very existence. If we acknowledge that the parents of the modern RPG were the well-suited pair known as “Dungeons” and “Dragons,” then that makes the Lord of the Rings a grandparent four times over, which in turn must make J.R.R. Tolkien a very happy great-grandfather indeed.

It’s a given that the role-playing game and Lord of the Rings go hand-in-hand, and losing sight of that fact is to lose sight of the essence of both. But of course EA doesn’t care about that. They’re a company — they just want to make money. Of course, they could have made bank with The White Council, because of the simple fact that good games usually make good money. Yet for a while, it seemed as if EA had doomed the LotR franchise to mediocrity, which is the equivalent in the gaming world of a slow, lingering death.

And then Dragon Age: Origins happened. The RPG gods (aka BioWare) finally released their Wunderspiel, a fantasy RPG in the style of Baldur’s Gate that was designed to single-handedly revive the dwindling fantasy RPG market. The bigwigs thought it was just a niche market game, that it wouldn’t really be noticed, that it would be the last hurrah of the genre, the last of the dying breed of fantasy role-playing games that actually involve both “fantasy” and “role-playing.” I don’t think anybody except BioWare expected it to do as well as it has. Some people think that somebody at BioWare must be prescient or something. They’re not. They just know the great secret: if you take well-prepared, fine-quality gamer-crack and bundle it in a pretty package with lots of wonderful little goodies mixed in, it will get spectacular ratings and IT WILL SELL LIKE MAD.

Which brings us back to War in the North. After Dragon Age’s big success, EA has announced what amounts to a lite version of what The White Council would have been. Instead of an epic fantasy RPG with real depth, we’re getting a good-looking RPG with no real substance to it. EA still doesn’t get it. It looks like they think that it was Dragon Age’s pretty package that sold, rather than its carefully-crafted gamer-crack.

I want to be excited about this game, but I’ve just been burned one too many times. Anyway, check out the teaser trailer below. It’s a visually impressive trailer, at least. As for the actual game, we’ll have to wait and see.

After everything that has been revealed so far, I really want to like Star Wars: the Old Republic. I want to be excited for it to be released. It’s just that I keep having this nagging feeling about it that I can’t shake.

Let me preface this: I’ve never been an MMO fan. I don’t like investing a ridiculous amount of time into a never-ending game only to get repeatedly pawned by some snot-nosed teenager in Shanghai with way too much time on his hands. But my general dislike of MMOs aside, I’m just not sure what to think of this game.

As Zuke and I have discussed previously, the previews for this game look awesome, but all BioWare seems to be saying is “look at what a cool single player game we’re making!” We haven’t seen very much real gameplay footage yet. They keep saying that it’ll be different from other MMOs; unlike its competition (cough… World of WarCraft… cough…), BioWare says SW:TOR will provide a fully immersive game experience, full of story, an actual plot, character interaction, meaningful choices, and NPCs with actual personality. In other words, it’ll be an MMO without the classic MMO downfalls.

I’m not sure how they can accomplish this. After all, you will have to share your game experience with millions of people around the world. Some of them will doubtless be very cool people who are fun to play with. Others will be total imbeciles that will make you want to eat your own face rather than play with them again. Yet BioWare seems determined to fight even this most difficult of battles. Now they want to save us from our inner idiots. Check out this video, especially the second half. It purports to contain the first real gameplay footage of the actual game.

In the video, you can see two players interacting with each other and the game world at a “flashpoint,” a climax in the storyline. As you can see, this game will have a different form of character interaction from other MMOs. The game will be fully voiced, and by that I mean it will have more voiceovers than any other game ever. Every character will be fully voiced. That means every single NPC you meet, as well as every one of your own personalized characters will have a vocal recording for every line they say. That’s an awful lot of voiceovers, and would be an impressive accomplishment in its own right.

But I want to focus on the fact that your character is voiced. If I understand correctly, we will no longer have to deal with the idiots who can’t spell, or can’t speak, or who just want to mess up the game. BioWare is voicing their characters for them. They will have to choose from pre-scripted lines within the game world. I remain sceptical, but this might just be a viable solution for the most awful part of the traditional MMO community experience.

I still don’t know what to think about SW:TOR. I really want to hope that BioWare knows what they’re doing and will actually make an MMORPG that I will want to play. It may be a fool’s hope, but it is a hope nonetheless. I really think that this will turn out to be either one of the very best, or one of the very worst games of its kind to ever be made. We will just have to wait and see how things progress.

For now, you can go about your business. Move along.