The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth II Designer Diary #2 - Final Thoughts

Take the classic fantasy novels of J.R.R. Tolkien and combine them with the artistry and vision of filmmaker Peter Jackson and his production team, and you get an award-winning series of epic fantasy movies. Bring that vision into computer games and you end up with 2004's The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth, a real-time strategy game that tried to cater to beginners who might have had more experience watching hobbits and elves on the big screen than harvesting resources, building bases, and creating huge armies on their computer monitors. But the sequel to the original PC strategy game is done and will be on store shelves soon. Executive producer Mike Verdu explains what the homestretch was like.

The Executive Producer's Journey

By Mike Verdu
Executive Producer, EALA

The Battle for Middle-earth II reached a key milestone one Thursday night in early January. Even after spending literally hundreds of hours playing the game over the last several months, I found myself playing late at night just for fun and completely lost track of time. I was at the end of a War of the Ring campaign against a computer opponent, and I was within striking distance of his home territory. "Just one more battle, then I'll call it a night," I muttered to myself as I ordered a massive elven army led by Lord Elrond to march into the land of Rhun. This was a key territory on the world map of Middle-earth, guarding the entrance to Mordor. Rhun was defended by the Witch-king, who commanded an intimidating force of trolls, elite Easterling pikemen, and orcs. The board was set. The pieces were moving. And then it was time for an epic real-time battle. The game offered me a chance to auto-resolve the encounter, but this was a critical strategic moment and I wanted to control my own forces to ensure the best chance of victory. I settled in for an extended real-time fight. The hours melted away as the armies clashed on the battlefield.

Not every project reaches this magic moment--when people on the team want to keep playing the game on their own time even after being immersed in its development for months or even years. Not this game. The people who made The Battle for Middle-earth II still enjoy playing it. We ran a voluntary multiplayer tournament in the last days of the project and had overwhelming participation. Matches between the better players drew a big audience--sometimes as many as 40 people watched battles unfold in real time as one of the producers or artists guided an "observer" camera over the battlefield. The atmosphere in the room was electric and people would yell, cheer, and even scream as the tide of battle flowed back and forth. We "broadcast" the tournament final in a theater setting on a huge screen with the entire team present.

The fact that we love the game that we built--including both the single-player and multiplayer elements--is a promising sign, but ultimately, you'll get to judge for yourself. By the time you read this, The Battle for Middle-earth II will have officially shipped and thousands of you will soon have a chance to play. If we have done our jobs right, you'll find yourself playing a fun and addictive game that is also the complete Middle-earth experience: You'll have the chance to wage war in the Northern lands in a story-based campaign, to imagine and play out your own campaign across the entire map of Middle-earth in War of the Ring mode, to create your very own hero (and custom unit), to battle opponents online, and to control every race, creature, and hero in Middle-earth.

It's hard to believe that the project is done. Looking back, it's been an amazing ride with the most talented team I've ever had the chance to work with in my career making games.

We started out with rather modest aspirations--but then EA unified the film and literary rights for The Lord of the Rings and we started to understand what an epic opportunity we had in front of us. We adjusted to aim much higher--to make a world-class sequel that would include an entire game's worth of new features and content and all of the units, structures, and locations from the first game. We wanted to create the ultimate Middle-earth experience with all of the races, places, heroes, and battles from both the books and the films.

We also listened to the fans. We really wanted to understand what worked and what didn't in the first game and what fans and the community were looking for in a sequel. We learned through communicating with the community members and we read thousands of forum posts on several fan sites. I also went on a "listen and learn" tour to talk to the members of the gaming press who had reviewed the first game.

The first few months of the project was a very exciting time…the team was bubbling with creative energy and we made rapid progress on many fronts. I remember seeing new things almost every day. There was a very cool dynamic on the team where people were inspiring each other with the work that was being done--it was like a virtuous circle of creativity.

How did we get a whole team of the most creative and talented people energized, productive, and moving very quickly on the project? We tried something new: We reorganized the team around our major features and game elements. We moved from a world where everything was being done by large functional departments (like art, engineering, or design) to a much more organic structure with lots of small interdisciplinary teams who owned every aspect of their part of the game. These pods and cells were phenomenally productive. The individual members of these small teams felt deeply responsible for the quality of their feature or piece of the game, and they felt empowered to make whatever they were working on better.

We started shifting into full production during the late spring and early summer of 2005. We showed our first gameplay to the world in July and August; we rolled the game out in a big way in Leipzig, Germany, at the Games Convention. The reaction was very positive and served to further inspire our team.

We continued to learn from our community even as the game took shape. We held a summit in August where we invited 30 people from the community to take a look at our game and give us some reaction to what they saw. We actually wound up with our current naval gameplay and create-a-hero feature in part because of the feedback we got from these community leaders. Later in the year, we invited two groups of the best players to join us on-site. We also continued to incorporate suggestions and feedback from forum posts all the way to the end.

By the end of October, we had the game playable from start to finish. We spent November, December, and January polishing, tuning, and getting the game ready to go. Player feedback from a multiplayer beta in December and January helped us work some last bugs and exploits out of the game.

I can't emphasize enough how the passionate and dedicated gamers in our vibrant online community helped us build this game--through their posts and participation in the community summit, coming on-site to help with the game, and then playing the beta and providing reactions. Please keep the feedback coming. We're planning to provide patches to the game and our intent is to improve the game.

Our journey to build the game is at an end. But that's really just the end of the beginning for gamers everywhere. The Battle for Middle-earth begins anew, and we hope that you enjoy it.