You already know how to play Guardians of Middle Earth

Posted by on July 17, 2012 in Games

One of the obstacles for jumping into a real time strategy game like League of Legends or DOTA2 is the sheer variety. League of Legends has over one hundred characters. Picking one of them is literally just the beginning. Then you have to figure out the other nine in your current game.

One way around this is a license. Monolith, a once great developer who’s been on the rocks for a while, is bringing to bear the Lord of the Rings license to make a League of Legends style game (I just can’t bring myself to use “MOBA”, or multiplayer online battle arena, which does nothing to distinguish the genre from your average multiplayer shooter). Although League of Legends has developed a rich set of lore around its characters, I don’t know the first thing about it. But I do know my Lord of the Rings. Legolas is a ranged damage character, Gandalf is a support tank, Gollum is a sneaky assassin type, and Boromir will have some sort of self-sacrifice damaging power. There. I’ve never even played the game and I already know how some of the characters work. I didn’t even need to watch this video about the unique powers for Gandalf and Gollum.

Also, since Guardians of Middle Earth will be a console-only game, how hard can it be? We’ll find out this fall.

  • Mercanis

    I wish for a Lord of the Rings game that adheres to the rules of Middle Earth.

    I’m no Tolkien expert, but I think a game that treated magic the way Tolkien used it could be fascinating. Instead, Gandalf is reduced to your typical Dungeons and Dragons fireball-throwing wizard.

  • tomchick

    Lord of the Rings Online flirted with this for a while when it first came out. The lore-master, which was the equivalent of a magic user in any other RPG, was surprisingly restrained. I seem to recall the closest he had to a fireball was a flaming pine cone. Even the priest class was just a minstrel who played music to restore morale (i.e. hit points).

    But as the game was expanded, it eventually got a flashy magic user who summons ice storms and the sort of fireballs that would make Michael Bay proud.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jason-McMaster/607680289 Jason McMaster

    I am going to take you to task in Middle Earth, Chick

  • Joe

    Yeah, it’s not just jumping in that’s a bit daunting, either. I took a 10-12 month break from League of Legends and returned to over a dozen new champions and a series of nerfs/buffs to all the old ones. You really have to stay on top of these games to be competitive, though I think League does a great job introducing people to the genre with the weekly free champion rotation. At low summoner levels, you’ll only generally run into the same handful of champions which limits the learning curve to an extent.

  • wisdomchild

    I’m with you on this one. I played Lore-Master in LotRO, in part due to the fact that he pays a morale
    penalty when performing strong magical attacks. I thought that was a great mechanic to reflect the way Tolkien treats magic use.

    So as far as LotRO is concerned, the Lore Master is much closer to a “Gandalf” than the Rune Keeper (the flashy magic user Tom mentioned), which was added with the first big expansion. I forget how they justified the addition of the Rune
    Keeper, but I don’t remember it being very convincing lore-wise.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Nathan-Phoenix/100001009669803 Nathan Phoenix

    I’m with you on MOBA being a terrible term. The first MOBA I played was a text mud.

  • http://www.facebook.com/gregcarere Greg Carere

    Normally, I don’t have much of a problem with iconic characters being pitted against each other out of any proper context – Marvel vs Capcom rocks – but something about this game makes me twitch.

    Why would Gollum hang out with the Witch King? And where are the tens of thousands of orcs? What are these piddling waves of like six guys? Why isn’t Gandalf obliterating everyone?

    I don’t know, man. I just don’t know.

  • sid

    I wish Bloodline Champions had taken off better, it is purely a arena fighter, usually 3v3, where battles last maybe 5 mins – which to me has all the fun of the MOWBAH without the extra 30 mins of jungling, hiding behind towers, and shopping. That said, the LotR theme might get me to try this, even tho I got bored with LOL after a week or two.

  • http://twitter.com/gndwyn Urthman

    The Idle Thumbs guys are trying to get “Lords Management Games” to stick is a term for DOTA/LoL games.

  • tomchick

    Oh my. Suddenly MOBA doesn’t look so bad.

  • tomchick

    Greg, as your game doctor, I prescribe several matches of EA’s awesome Battle for Middle Earth II, which will cure you of this condition. The game is readily available from EA’s online digital distribution service, Origin. Oh, wait, no it isn’t because EA killed the game and cut off its online support. Thanks, EA!

  • tomchick

    I will take you down to Middle-Earthtown.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jason-McMaster/607680289 Jason McMaster

    Tough talk from the guy who won’t MOBA against me. That’s right. MOBA TIME