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Lord of the Rings Media Movies PC Games (Games) Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

On Visualizing A Virtual Middle-Earth 30

Posted by simoniker from the gollums-and-saurons dept.
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the Middle-Earth Online website's new developer diary, in which the PC MMORPG's production designer Marc 'Taro' Holmes talks about the "epic responsibility" of visualizing Tolkein's world. He discusses some of the visual controversies: "The debates go back and forth, seemingly without end - does the Balrog have wings or is he made of living flame? Do dwarven women really have beards? How tangible are the Nazgul? How beautiful are the elves?", and shows some early concept art for the barrow-downs at Tyrn Gorthad.
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On Visualizing A Virtual Middle-Earth More

On Visualizing A Virtual Middle-Earth

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  • just think of all those sexy bearded dwarven women. Can't beat that. You can keep your scrawny PEF elves. Human women are so boring. Gimme a nice stout, hairy she-dwarf any day.

  • Yeah, I know they're saving Rohan and Gondor for expansion packs, but still. I want my City of Stone to be really, really big. And not at all like Camelot in DAoC.
  • The possibilities of this game are endless. Ents, Orcs, goblins, hobbits, trolls, humans, elves, and dwarves would be the starting species. You could farm potatoes or craft rings(at max level) or even go looking for loot. Imagine farming potatoes for some cash, then being invited by a group of elves to hunt for loot.

  • Movies reducing your options (Score:4, Insightful)

    by evilhayama ( 532217 ) <evilhayama@NoSpAm.gmail.com> on Friday August 08, 2003 @10:26PM (#6652527)
    For a lot of people now, the LoTR movies will have defined exactly what many of the aspects of middle earth look like. Previously it was mostly about imagining it yourself from the books, but now elves, dwarves and even balrog have a certain look. This would be especially true for the Masses who didn't even read the book. but saw the movie and now know what a nazgul steed looks like...

    • "know" what Nazgul steeds look like... a sad state of affairs, as a big LotR fan I really don't like the direction I see this going. The movies, while impressive, still rob people the ability to imagine the leader of the Nine reach out for Frodo as he huddles, alone, frightened...

      I just see this as an opportunity for LotR to reach the masses and become just some big fad, where everyone raves over how great the visuals are and how great the movie's story is (of course.. you're taking a revised script from

      • then find a cave and close your eyes, plug your ears and don't let popular culture reach your mind. C'mon, really - it's just a story.
      • Well, I guess you didn't mind the fact that the Hildebrandt brothers had defined the visuals of the LotR a generation ago in the Tolkien calendars. Or the Ralph Bakshi movie, which certainly capitalized on the huge popularity that Tolkien had in the 70's, and defined many of the visual elements of Tolkien (admittedly poorly in places). There were "Frodo Lives" bumper stickers and Harvard Lampoon riding the wave with their brilliant parody "Bored of the Rings". I had a LotR board game, which was actually v
      • I think what you should hope for is for the game artists (in most upcoming LOTR games, except may be for the ROTK) to be independent as much as possible. If they all feel like Marc Holmes (and like movie designers thought) and do their own designs based on their own research and ideas, all LOTR products will explore the original world and not the butchered (in a neutral sense) world of the movies.

        There have been more than a hundred Romeo and Juliet movies made and probably thousands of stagings and most of
    • Is it? Does it really limit the imagination?

      I tend to disagree.

      For me, I read something in a book and then get to see it on film. By your thoughts on the matter, this has now robbed me of my mental image of the character. I say not.

      Take for example the Dragonriders of Pern series, The Harper Hall Trilogy in particular. Robin Wood (www.robinwood.com) did an official book of artwork based off the DRoP series. However Robin's version of the character of Menoly just is a little too...tomboyish to fit my conc
      • I was mostly referring to people who hadn't read the books before seeing the movie. I know the feeling of a character in a movie not Looking or Sounding right myself, and it just means I disagree with the interpretation the actor has put into the character.

        If you have seen the movie first then read the book, you would have a preconceived notion of what the characters are like. Whether you acn bypass this is up to you I guess.
    • I think it depends on how well you visualised Middle-earth to start with, and how closely the films conform to your ideas. In my case at least the plot of the films hasn't affected how I imagine Middle-earth at all as far as I can tell. For example ,Peter Jackson' Shire wasn't, and still isn't, how I've imagined the Shire (too 'Celtically', not enough like the English countryside Tolkien based it on), though Bag End is. The films, which I like with reservations, came close at a few points, but that was i
  • This is what happens when you try to create your own idea of something that was written down. Sometimes every detail isn't clear, and you shouldn't dwell on this, because nobody except the author himself can confirm that anything's right.
    • Mod parent up please. Aside from Tolkien himself (and I sure as hell do not mean the kid), nobody will ever come closer than a best guess when it comes to the way middle earth really looks.
    • ...that most of Middle Earth was conjured in the imaginations of creative readers.

      In fact, Tolkien was criticized by some of the literary "experts" of his day for including so much detailed description (which had gone out of style and continues to be out of style among the even-more-attention-challenged generations spawned by TV and MTVJ). While Tolkien himself may have adopted this style to mimick the description-rich epics he was trying to evoke, he also professed a strong dislike for the visually impove
  • From the article (emphasis mine):

    > Middle-earth is not just an alternate history
    > of Britian - it's a world of its own -
    > something that is a distillation of all of our
    > myths and cultures. There is definitely
    > something Egyptian about the careful
    > preparation of the hobbit bodies.

    See, that is just the kind of cultural-relativist drivel which, taken to its extreme, will spell the end of all critical thought in Western society.

    I am all for artistic license, believe in cultural synerg

    • ...does not emerge from cultural relativists alone.

      Some of what this poster says is easy to agree with: Tolkien was not attempting to evoke Egyptian culture in his description of the hobbits prepared for some eternal sleep in the barrow-downs. And the author of this piece deserves to be taken to task for it.

      But stardeep commits the same crime of which he accuses the artist when he confuses "This reminded me of cultural relativism" with "There is definitely something relativistic about this." Then he goe

    • "In very general terms, in LotR 'west' means good and 'east' means bad."

      Actually, as far as East goes it's only 'bad' as it's the direction Mordor lies in as far as the characters in the books are concerned. Tolkien addressed this in one of his letters, pointing out that North had a better claim, as it was where the fortresses of Middle-earth's devil, Morgoth, lay. Presumably people east of Mordor would regard the west as the 'bad direction' in the time of Sauron.

      As far as Egyptian influences are con

  • The art for this game is sure to be spectacular. However, I wish that the designer would spend less time resolving which art is more true to the books, and more time figuring out how to keep the PCs more in character with the books.

    As a thread above this points out, the real problem with MMORPGs is that they much less to do with RPG and more to do with the O. I would prefer art that didn't quite smack of my recollection of the books, if the designers found a way to eliminate 'leet speaking gamers, and OO

  • Leave us not forget... (Score:3, Informative)

    by freeBill ( 3843 ) on Saturday August 09, 2003 @02:15PM (#6655790) Homepage
    ...the eternal debate about Gollum.

    Almost every artist who has ever portrayed him has made him the color of a blind cave fish. This directly contradicts Tolkien's unequivocal descriptions in numerous places, where he is always portrayed as completely black, with glowing green eyes.

    The translucent grey is just easier to do.

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