http://ps3.ign.com/articles/872/872401p1.html
The Lord of the Rings: Conquest Unveiled
Pandemic fills us in on its take on Tolkien.
by Chris Roper
May 8, 2008 - To coincide with today's announcement of The Lord of the Rings: Conquest, we sent out a beacon to Pandemic's shores to find out just what the game is all about. Luckily for us, Eric "Giz" Gewirtz:, the director behind the game, responded to our call and gave us the low-down on the studio's spiritual successor to Star Wars: Battlefront.
IGN: First, thanks for taking the time to talk to us here. Now, we know next to nothing about The Lord of the Rings: Conquest, so why don't you just start from the beginning and tell us about it?
Eric Gewirtz: The high-level pitch is this basically fantasy Battlefront. This is everything that you've wanted to do in the Lord of the Rings universe's battles but have never been able to before. We've basically set up a series of systematic battles where we re-create these battlefields from the film and then throw the player in the middle of it and let them figure out how they want to accomplish their objectives and how they want to win the battle, much like they did in Battlefront.
IGN: So which battles will you be able to take part in? Is this everything from the movies?
Eric Gewirtz: We've got every single battle from the movies and then some. We've got Helm's Deep, Pelennor Fields, Minas Tirith, The Black Gates, and then we've got a bunch of other cool stuff like the Mines of Moria. Weathertop, The Shire. We've got a whole level where you get to play as the evil guys, running through The Shire, trampling Hobbits and burning the place to the ground.
And really we've focused equal parts on the good perspective and the idea of re-creating cinematic moments from the films -- not faithfully so much, but just kind of allowing the player to experience moments that are like the films -- but also really, for the first time, letting you get the chance to play as all of the bad guys. Play as the Balrog, play as Sauron and Saruman, and really kind of live out that fantasy fulfillment of "what would it be like to really just destroy Middle-Earth? What if evil had won?"
IGN: Are the extra battles that you're talking about that weren't in the movies, are those from the books or are they things that you created on your own?
Eric Gewirtz: Some are from the books and some are fictitious. In the books they refer to going back to the Mines of Moria and cleaning it out, so we kind of elaborated on that. Because we have the ability to access from the books and the films (we have the rights to both for the video game), we've been able to expand on some of the fiction that was mentioned in the books. There's stuff like Minas Morgul. It's this really badass, evil castle that they showed from... it's where the evil army launches their attack from in the films and you never get to see the inside of it. They never talk about it. In the books, they consider going and attacking and they decide not to on their way to the Black Gates, and in the films you just see it from the outside. We were able to model the entire inside of it and have this whole epic battle where the good forces are laying siege to Minas Morgul.
IGN: So is the art direction for places that we saw in the movies taken directly into the game? Is it as close as possible, or do you take a bunch of liberties with that?
Eric Gewirtz: I would say, you know, we started with the films as inspiration, but depending on where the game needed to go from a gameplay standpoint, we started taking more liberties. The best example I can think of is the melee combat system. We really wanted to make sure that the game felt spectacular and really responsive, so the attacks are a little more dramatic and elaborate than having Viggo Mortensen swinging a sword. I'm not saying it's crazy wireframe stuff, it's just a little hyper-real. And the thing with the environments, too, we definitely started with the movies as a base, but we've started kind of exploring how to make this really feel like a really next-gen game, and be robust, so we expanded from there.
IGN: So how big are these places that we're going to be able to fight in?
Eric Gewirtz: They're really big. We started with... I'd love to be able to show you this [laughs] "it's this big!" For example, at Helm's Deep, we pretty much modeled the whole battlefield, so we have the wall and then the keep and the outside where the army starts, and then inside the keep we have the Glittering Caves and the throne room and that whole area where you see the battles take place from the films.
For things like the really expansive battles like Pelennor Fields, we really kind of needed enough space to be able to play with all the toys you have access to. You're going to be fighting Oliphants and these massive siege towers and you're riding around on horses at top speed, so we needed to make these maps really extensive the entire time.
IGN: What's the basic combat -- and I guess the magic system as well -- like in the game?
Eric Gewirtz: There's four basic classes in the game, and much like Battlefront, you get to pick your class at any time and switch classes at any time you choose.
IGN: Is that regardless of which character you are? If you pick Aragorn, can you pick a magic class?
Eric Gewirtz: Well, the heroes are kind of designed and built-in as rewards in the game. So you actually spend most of the game playing as an officer in the army as a solider. You can pick between being a Warrior, an Archer, a Scout or a Mage, and each class plays out a little differently.
Whereas the Warrior is focused entirely around the melee combat system, the Archer plays like the traditional third-person shooter. The Mage is our support class, so he's a ranged attack unit and blaster, but he's also our healer, so he's really about staying at the back of the line and dealing damage from the vanguard. And then the Scout is our stealth mechanic. He can cloak and he's all about the back stabs and kind of your Rogue/Thief gameplay. What we've done is taken these archetypes from Lord of the Rings and also from fantasy settings, from your traditional fantasy expectations, and built them into an action combat mechanic that works well with each other.
And so the heroes are unlocked later on in the game as kind of super-units. You get them for a limited time, but then Aragorn plays like the Uber-Warrior. So his mechanics, if you're familiar with the warrior, once you get familiar with it, you'll be familiar with playing as Aragorn, but he's got a whole new set of special abilities. He's got different attacks and different ways of effectively dealing with enemies.
IGN: So when you pick the guy that you're going to play as, do you pick a new dude for every single battle you're taking on, or do you start with this one guy and run him through the game's progression?
Eric Gewirtz: No, you get to pick a different guy any time. Every time you die -- and you can die a lot in this game -- you just pick another solider and hop in. So you could start out on Helm's Deep and you're defending the wall and you're trying to make sure they don't blow it up and you say, "I want to start as a Warrior." And you're just running around as a Warrior a few times and you're like, "You know what, I'm going to switch my tactics, I'm gonna try the Archer." The Archer plays out entirely differently. So every time you die, you're presented with a character carousel and you get to pick a new unit at that point, or you can stick with the same unit.
IGN: You said that when you get to those hero-type guys, they're only on the battlefield for a little bit of time. So if, say, Aragorn comes into the middle of a battle, how long can you use him for? When does it trigger that you can't use him anymore?
Eric Gewirtz: It depends on how good you are. We kind of started based on the Battlefront II model which was basically, you get the hero as an access point and then he's slowly depleting health and the only way you can regain your health is by being effective in the battlefield. So the more guys you kill, the more objectives you accomplish as the hero, the longer you're going to be able to play as him. Once he depletes to zero health, you have to go back to playing as a regular soldier.
IGN: What happens with the heroes on the other side of the battle?
Eric Gewirtz: They're awesome [laughs]. No, the heroes on the other side are actually what we're really having a lot of fun with. For the first time ever, we're unlocking other heroes that you've seen -- evil heroes like the Balrog and Sauron and Saruman - and we've just given them the power that they deserve, that you've seen in the films and really gone all out with giving them access. So Sauron has these sweeping attacks where he can knock guys flying in the air, the Balrog's got his fire sword.
You get to play as a Troll and when you play as the Trolls in the game, you can pick up enemy units and kill them and then walk around with them while you're swinging your club. Whenever you want, you can throw them and they're all physics-based, so you can throw them into enemy units and they'll knock the enemy units out like bowling pins.
IGN: How are you handling fights against singular characters, like against the Balrog or the Watcher in the Water from before they went into the Mines? How are you handling those sorts of confrontations?
Eric Gewirtz: So again, it's been a little bit of a challenge because we don't want to limit the player, forcing him into a very scripted scenario. That's not what this game is about. It's really about creating a choice, so what we do, for example with the Balrog -- when you're fighting in Moria at the point where the Balrog is unleashed -- we give you access to Gandalf, so we unlock Gandalf and you can choose to play as Gandalf or any of the other heroes and try to confront him. Gandalf's a lot more effective against the Balrog, and if you fail as Gandalf, you can try to take him out as a regular solider - it's just a lot more challenging. So we kind of give you the tools necessary to be able to defeat these bosses, but we still leave it up to the player to decide exactly how they want to defeat the boss.
IGN: I know you touched a little bit on the classes you have for combat before, but how involved are each of the pieces that you get? Do you basically have a strong and a fast attack for the Warriors? How does all that work?
Eric Gewirtz: We have a relatively robust combat system. It's definitely going to be accessible enough for casual fans to be able to grasp it, but it's definitely deep enough -- especially in multiplayer -- that you get satisfying combat when fighting against other players. There will be enough tactics to deal with. The other real challenge that we've been working on and we're really excited about is having a robust melee combat system and marrying it with a shooter. So while Warrior vs. Warrior combat really is going to feel pretty solid, Warrior vs. Archers is a whole different experience. And then of course when you get two Archers fighting against each other, it feels a lot like a third-person shooter.
IGN: Are there any "vehicles?" Can you ride any of the creatures in the game or anything like that?
Eric Gewirtz: You can ride them all. [laughs] Again, our mandate was that this game was really about diversity and all the breadth of different things you could do, and we wanted to make sure that if you saw a cool moment in the battles of the films that you could experience it. So you get to ride the Oliphants and fight against the Oliphants, you get to be the Trolls and the Ents in this game and they're just... they're awesome. They're like our tanks; they're kind of slow-moving, really powerful, with devistating attacks. And the AI is the same -- they can pick up guys and throw them across the battlefield.
You also have a ton of siege equipment in the game: there's catapults, and battering rams and siege towers and ballista; all the things you need to pull off a proper siege. Also, there's horses and Wargs. There's flying creatures that are in the game; you can call in flying strikes. There'll be an eagle swooping down, picking up guys systematically and carrying them off to their doom. Just really populating the battlefield with as many different tools and fun toys as you would want or experience from the films.
IGN: I'm assuming that, aside from the standard mode, there's some sort of free mode? Can you play whoever you want at any time?
Eric Gewirtz: Yeah. So we have the Campaign Mode -- we have two full campaigns on either side. The good campaign pretty much faithfully follows the events of the films, but again with the systematic gameplay that allows you to play up the battles any way you choose. The evil campaign is unlocked afterwards, and that's kind of a "what-if" scenario that assumes that Frodo failed in destroying the Ring. They hint at, both in the books and the films, that it would be very bad if Frodo were to fail, but they never really go into detail about exactly how Sauron would go about conquering Middle-Earth.
We let you live out that kind of dark fantasy of being Sauron and his forces at the end of the film. You start out as a Ringwraith and you catch Frodo and deliver the Ring to Sauron, and then it launches this evil campaign where you're basically conquering through Middle-Earth, playing as all the evil forces. You get to ride the Oliphant, you get to ride these Wargs, play as the Balrog and Saruman and the Witch-King and the Ringwraiths and Sauron himself. Those are our two Campaign Modes.
In addition, though, we have a ton of Instant Action Modes that are playable in single-player, split-screen and online play. We have Conquest, which is capturing of control points like you did in Battlefront, we have Capture the Flag, we have Deathmatch, we have Hero Deathmatch where everyone gets to play as a hero; just a massive hero battle and we have a bunch of other cool modes. We're still exploring some other modes, but one mode that we just kind of stumbled onto that's really fun and kind of in line with the universe is called Ring Bearer. One player is Frodo and the other players are Ringwraiths and the longer you stay alive as Frodo, the more points you get until a Ringwraith finds you and kills you. The first Ringwraith to finally find the player, to find and kill Frodo, becomes Frodo, so it's kind of this game of tag where you're trying to stay alive as long as you can as Frodo, and you've got the Ring and you've got Sting and you're trying to outsmart the other players.
IGN: Can you become invisible?
Eric Gewirtz: Yeah.
IGN: But then can the Ringwraiths still tell where you are?
Eric Gewirtz: Exactly. Well actually, when you go invisible, you show up on the mini-map. They can't see you in the actual game, so you have to time it pretty well because you don't want to go invisible... you want to wait until they're on-screen and about to catch you, then you go invisible, but then it gathers all the other Ringwraiths. What's really cool that's been happening lately is you can attack the other Ringwraiths because they fight over it, so what happens is then the best Frodo players will try to get two Ringwraiths in the room together, like in an area together, then cloak and try to have them kill each other -- because they fight each other to try to become Frodo -- then sneak up and try to back-stab the remaining one.
IGN: So how many people are we going to see on-screen, because one of the screenshots we've seen has a crazy number of people on the field.
Eric Gewirtz: You know, it depends on the battlefield and it depends on the situation, but we're looking at around 150 units on the battlefield at a time, so there can be up to that many on the battlefield. We also have the armies extending out for the sense of the battle. So the units extend out past the game space as well.
IGN: When you're playing a single-player game by yourself, do you have any management control over what your army is doing?
Eric Gewirtz: Out management control is a little more dynamic than that. You can directly affect the tide of the battle based on the combat and your skill as the players, especially in the Instant Action Mode. The more effective you are at taking out enemy units and the more effective you are at accomplishing objectives, the more effective your allied army will be. So you can start to see the tide of battle starting to turn if you're really good. But there's no direct control over, "you go there," or a squad command.
IGN: What are those objectives that you just mentioned?
Eric Gewirtz: In the Campaign Mode, we've been trying to strike this balance. We've started playing with this idea in Battlefront II in kind of having a narrative story but still allowing you the freedom to play any way you want, and it's been a real challenge in this open battlefield-type gameplay. For instance, to give you an example, in Pelennor Fields, we've set up these scenarios where, in the campaign, there's these massive siege towers that are being pushed by these Trolls. It's all happening systematically, but they're trying to get to the walls of Minas Tirith and as the good player, you're trying to destroy these siege towers. You can destroy them any way you want; you can commandeer a catapult, you can use your fire arrows, you can attack the Trolls themselves, you can set up signal flares.
There's a ton of ways you can accomplish the objectives, and it plays out differently every time because sometimes if you pull the Trolls away, they'll come off and fight you but then other Trolls will start pushing the siege towers if you kill them eventually but don't destroy the siege towers. If you destroy the siege towers, then a cavalry will attack you. So it plays out differently every time and then of course depending on what class you are, you have different tactics available to you. So as a Warrior, you're going to be focused on the melee combat, and there are different approaches to accomplishing that objective.
That's just one objective. After that objective is accomplished, the Oliphants are unleashed and these massive Oliphants are charging through the battlefield and you have to take them out. And they get, depending on the class you are -- depending on the situation, if you're playing co-op you use combined arms -- but basically we've put these basic situations and presented them to the player and then let the player figure out how they want to accomplish them.
IGN: Is there any sort of upgrade system as you work through the game? Can you upgrade your character at all?
Eric Gewirtz: Our upgrading is built into the actual combat. For example, with the Warrior, he has a combo meter; the more damage he does and the more effective he is in combat, the more access he gets to more special moves and chain combos. The same applies for the special abilities for all the classes, so as you start becoming more effective in combat, you start unlocking more of these special abilities and start becoming more powerful. But it's per-unit-based, so when you die you have to rebuild that.
IGN: You already mentioned some of the online stuff, but will be able to play co-op online?
Eric Gewirtz: Yeah, we're actually really excited about co-op. We're big fans of co-op here, so the full campaign is playable online co-op with up to four players. It's also available in split-screen with up to four players. We have all those Instant Action Modes that I just mentioned are available with up to 16 players in Vs. Mode.
IGN: So it's an eight player cap per side online?
Eric Gewirtz: Eight players per side, yeah. Sixteen players total, and that number isn't set in stone yet, it could go up.
IGN: I think that's all I have to talk about based on what you gave me. Is there anything that we haven't hit on that you wanted to mention?
Eric Gewirtz: Well, just the interesting story that is the origin, the way it was created. This is the team that did Star Wars: Battlefront I and II and after we- well, we were contemplating what we wanted to do next and we've always had... again, you play this open battlefield in World War II and we played it in modern times and in Star Wars. So we really did everything that we felt we wanted to do in the Star Wars universe with this kind of gameplay and we started talking about how cool it would be to have this kind of gameplay but in a fantasy setting but where you're dealing with horses and creatures and trolls and swords and bows and arrows and castles and sieges and everything. We just started throwing around these ideas, and in perfect serendipity, happened to get access to the Lord of the Rings license, and that was just the center for us on making this game. So we started working on it as kind of a fantasy Battlefront that was set in the Lord of the Rings universe and it was just really cool that we got access to the coolest fantasy setting of all time for this game that we were really passionate about, excited about making in the first place.
IGN: I think that does it for my end. Did you have anything else you wanted to mention?
Eric Gewirtz: I think that's about it. We're looking forward to showing to you in the next couple months as we get closer to E3. Or if you ever come down to LA and just wanna hang, come over...
IGN: Awesome. Well thanks a lot for your time.
(even if my silver PStwo is only 2 yrs. old) 