Tales Of The Shire Feels Like A Step Backwards For This Lord Of The Rings Fan

I can picture it now – it’s 2024 and a fantastic-looking Lord of the Rings game is about to drop, filled with high-fantasy visuals, deep lore, epic battles and an array of colossal beasts and mythical creatures. I can barely contain my excitement because it’s something I’ve daydreamed about and wanted for so long since my last good trip into Middle-Earth with Shadow of Mordor, but then I remember, that isn’t going to happen because we now have, *drum roll*…Tales of the Shire.

It’s almost like lessons haven’t been learned at all with The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum, isn’t it? No one wanted it before and no one liked it afterward, but here we are with yet another LOTR IP sticker slapped onto a game that holds very little substance for fans who want a lot more than, quite frankly, a generic-looking “cozy” title that looks like it has been dug up from the early 2000s, resurrected and then propped up (still with a wee bit of rigor mortis) to resemble the next best thing into the Lord of the Rings gaming franchise.

We Don’t Wants It, We Don’t Needs It

Now I know how critical I sound about Private Division and Wētā Workshop’s “cozy Hobbit life” game and, on paper, it sounds fun and relaxing with its cooking and gardening shenanigans that will, undoubtedly, satisfy those who love little Hobbits and just want to kick off their shoes at the end of a hard day. I’m all for cozy and mindful titles, but what I do have an issue with is that if you take away the Lord of the Rings IP attached to it, Tales of the Shire offers nothing groundbreaking in its genre.

There are hundreds of these homely and cheery games currently on the market, and just because the Embracer Group decided to cattle brand it with yet another frivolous undertaking into the Lord of the Rings universe, does not make it something that this Tolkien fan ever wanted. Out of all the fantasy settings to explore, Tolkien’s ability to craft exciting lore-filled tales and meaty battles is second to none and to see his material consistently underused like this is frustrating, to say the least. Is there really no hope of getting one, just one, great Lord of the Rings game? The echo chamber, at least for the immediate future, seems to only be filled with the sound of rustling cash rather than the voices of what players want and that’s a sad situation.

What does ring out loud and clear though, and essentially the biggest red flag that can be seen from the moon, is that last year, in a call to investors, Embracer announced that it would be “exploiting Lord of the Rings in a very significant fashion…”, so if that statement doesn’t put the fear of god into Tolkien fans, because it does me, then it may as well be thrown into the sizzling lava of Mount Doom as at least then it would embody some kind of lore that’s very much missing over the recent years.

While the LEGO games were fun and Lord of the Rings online is still going steady today (take note Embracer), I crave a game that makes me feel like Middle-Earth:Shadow of Mordor did with its deeply immersive, well-designed open-world full of LOTR lore and seamless ability to blend hand-to-hand combat with bigger, meater battles – not to mention its engaging narrative and fun missions, or even a remaster of Xbox 360’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King that enriched the moviegoing experience and, for me, became one of the greatest co-op games of the 2000s. Fans have been crying out for someone, anyone, to craft an action-packed Middle-earth Tolkien-inspired adventure, but as yet, these pleas have fallen on deaf ears and pushed further into the dark void of deep corporate pockets.

The Lord of the Rings embodies the very essence of adventuring parties who face the forces of evil together and overcome it by finding heroism in the unlikeliest of champions within Tolkien’s love of worldbuilding and language, and that’s something special you can’t merely buy the property rights to. There has to be love and preservation involved, which trickles from the top down, and if Tales Of The Shire is anything to go by, the passion to develop something meaningful with substance to whet the whistle of LOTR fans is truly doomed.

However, I’m trying to remain hopeful that the Lord Of The Rings MMOmight be something decent (is decent really the benchmark we are happy with settling on now?) but I’m filled with crippling doubt that it will be marketed as a Middle-earth world where players are given the illusion of freedom and character creativity, but the dark underbelly could entail in-game monetization to merely get a feel for what players would actually want from a Lord of the Rings title.

As much as I would love to feel passionate and excited about Tales of the Shire, its creepy-looking characters that run mindlessly around an uninviting-half-baked Hobbit-inspired environment (is there even dialog?) not only fills me with dread about the future of Lord of the Rings games, but also about how many spin-offs are going to happen until I get the true LOTR game that’s crying out to be made which isn’t a technical or underwhelming mess? My guess is not for a very long time.

Embrace It

Middle-Earth Enterprises And Friends Is My Favourite Publisher

Embrace your fate.