LOTR - Treason Of Isengard Cancelled

Thanks to GameSpyDaily for the news that Vivendi's Lord Of The Rings game sequel, The Treason Of Isengard, has been cancelled. The PS2/Xbox title, a Surreal-developed follow-up to last year's disappointing Fellowship Of The Ring, was apparently "not going to achieve the strict... standards for our Tolkien games", and so the book-licensed game was axed, despite a number of public showings and the newly-unveiled ability to play as Treebeard. In other LOTR game news, EA has announced the ability to play online for its forthcoming, non-cancelled movie-licensed title, Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King.

Originality and Gaming

[Txiasaeia]

...'The PS2/Xbox title, a Surreal-developed follow-up to last year's disappointing Fellowship Of The Ring, was apparently "not going to achieve the strict standards for our Tolkien games"...'

Well, hmm. I would argue that any game based on an already-existing property (be it a film, novel, or what have you) is not going to live up to the expectations created by the original product. A book is meant to be a book; the ideas, characters and plot contained therein are created specifically for the literary medium. Attempting to transfer these ideas to a radically different medium (i.e., a non-interactive literature ported to an interactive game) is going to result in loss of quality. The same is true for the movies; non-interactive literature to non-interactive film is better, but the films are not going to convey the books as they were originally intended.

In the case of Tolkien and *any* game based upon his works, it's like playing Beethoven on a $5,000 stereo system, and recording it to a tape deck with a microphone held up to one of the speakers. Ya, it *sounds* like Beethoven, but what's with the guy opening a bag of chips in the background?

I think that I speak for the majority of gamers when I say that we prize originality, not spin-offs from movies, books, card games or whatever, when it comes to video games.

TO WIT: Of course gamers' expectations are going to be dashed by the majority of games which have been transfered from a different medium. Then again, show me a RPG based on Rushdie's _The_Satanic_Verses_, and I'll gladly eat my words.

Cheap excuse?

[MMaestro]

'"not going to achieve the strict... standards for our Tolkien games"'

I doubt this was the issue considering what Hollywood pressuring game developers to do. (ie. Crank out anything half-assed if it'll earn us a few bucks/extra hype and it makes a launch date the same as the movie.) I think they did it because they didn't wanna get yelled at or blaimed if the game didn't sell well and (possibly) caused the movie to not do well either.

Case in point : The latest Tomb Raider movie.

Re:Originality and Gaming

[zmotula]

Well, hmm. I would argue that any game based on an already-existing property (be it a film, novel, or what have you) is not going to live up to the expectations created by the original product.

Discworld {I, II, Noir}? Dune I? Indiana Jones?

Re:Originality and Gaming

[Charnock]

Games based on a movie/book/whatever can indeed be good. While Fellowship Of The Ring was indeed a poor game, Two Towers which came out around the same time was quite good. Games suck all the time even if they are not made based on an existing property. If the developer actually tries to make a good game and not a quick buck then i think these types of games have as much a chance of being a quality product as anything else.

Re:Cheap excuse?

[thinlineofsanity]

Ah.. But Lord of the Rings isn't immediately a Hollywood flick. Further more, the LotR audience does have much higher standards than the Tomb Raider audience. Tomb Raider started out as a game. Lord of the Rings started out as a book. It's not fair to compain a seriously weak setting like Tomb Raider to an extremely rich and deep setting like Middle-Earth.

The 'big' expectations people have for Tomb Raider tend to have to do with boobage and original gameplay. Eidos messed up - the game's controls and gameplay are as bad as those in the Lord of the Rings game. Paramount messed up - the movie had an incoherent script, and quite a few action scenes seem to be added "because they could".

A lot of people have high expectations from anything to do with Middle-Earth - it's the result of 'knowing' the books. That's why the Middle-Earth trading card game never really got off the ground all that well. That's why most game titles based on original Middle-Earth licenses die a slow death. The primary fanbase has a much better idea of what things should look like than game developers could ever implement, raising the bar for these games to almost impossible heights. Of course, if a studio then decides to release a half-tested game, it'll just crash and burn.

Peter Jackson's interpretation of the story opens the setting to people who ordinarily wouldn't have considered reading the books. This secondary fanbase knows the story only from the movies, and while 10 hours of film has a lot of footage, it's still only an interpretation. They will have a much easier time to identify with game characters based on movie characters based on a single person's interpretation of story characters than the primary fanbase, who have to relate game characters to their individual interpretations of the story characters. I think any game based on the movie license will have a much easier time selling than those based on an original license.