The fine folks over at Warner Brothers and Traveller’s Tales have officially announced Lego Lord of the Rings. The game will be released for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360 and the Nintendo consoles sometime in the future.
Just like Lego games of the past, players will be traversing through levels while controlling heroes from the books/movies. The levels are re-playable with any character from the game as soon as they are completed at least once. The game also features two-player drop-in/drop-out co-op play. Unlike some games from the past, this one will feature full voice acting from the movies.
TT Games chief Jonathan Smith said that Lego Lord of the Rings is more of an adventure game with grand quests.
“In contrast to our other games, covering those three movies is an epic journey,” he said. “It really is a sense of an adventure rather than a series of stories. You build up your characters as you venture through the world of Middle-Earth.
“Our hub will be the world of Middle-Earth. As you see that unfold, as you journey through it toward your ultimate destination on this epic quest, that gives it a sense that is completely different to the open world of Gotham of Lego Batman 2. You’re really driving forward on a quest.
“Practically, in terms of the levels there’s a mix between fighting and puzzling as you’d expect. We have some very big battles. We have some cool enemies. And then, for puzzling, if you’re a connoisseur of the series perhaps you’ll remember something more like Indiana Jones where we’re picking up and dropping items and there’s some inventory-based play as well and customization of characters as they go through the adventure.” Are we talking stat-based RPG? “No stats.. There will be quests on the hub, side-quests.”
Since the source material is a little more on the serious side, TT Games ran the risk of being to faithful to the movie and leaving out what makes LEGO games so fun.
“As we’ve done in the past where we’ve got wonderful movies to draw on, we will suck all the drama that we can out of them, so that means making sure that all the work that went into making those movies brilliant we replicate with the right sound, with the right shots, with the right editing, and the right pace, but then we condense and compress and to some extent caricature.”
(Via Kotaku)