The Lord of the Rings: Conquest Unveiled

IGN: What's the basic combat -- and I guess the magic system as well -- like in the game?

Eric Gewirtz: There's four basic classes in the game, and much like Battlefront, you get to pick your class at any time and switch classes at any time you choose.

IGN: Is that regardless of which character you are? If you pick Aragorn, can you pick a magic class?

Eric Gewirtz: Well, the heroes are kind of designed and built-in as rewards in the game. So you actually spend most of the game playing as an officer in the army as a solider. You can pick between being a Warrior, an Archer, a Scout or a Mage, and each class plays out a little differently.

Whereas the Warrior is focused entirely around the melee combat system, the Archer plays like the traditional third-person shooter. The Mage is our support class, so he's a ranged attack unit and blaster, but he's also our healer, so he's really about staying at the back of the line and dealing damage from the vanguard. And then the Scout is our stealth mechanic. He can cloak and he's all about the back stabs and kind of your Rogue/Thief gameplay. What we've done is taken these archetypes from Lord of the Rings and also from fantasy settings, from your traditional fantasy expectations, and built them into an action combat mechanic that works well with each other.

And so the heroes are unlocked later on in the game as kind of super-units. You get them for a limited time, but then Aragorn plays like the Uber-Warrior. So his mechanics, if you're familiar with the warrior, once you get familiar with it, you'll be familiar with playing as Aragorn, but he's got a whole new set of special abilities. He's got different attacks and different ways of effectively dealing with enemies.

IGN: So when you pick the guy that you're going to play as, do you pick a new dude for every single battle you're taking on, or do you start with this one guy and run him through the game's progression?

Eric Gewirtz: No, you get to pick a different guy any time. Every time you die -- and you can die a lot in this game -- you just pick another solider and hop in. So you could start out on Helm's Deep and you're defending the wall and you're trying to make sure they don't blow it up and you say, "I want to start as a Warrior." And you're just running around as a Warrior a few times and you're like, "You know what, I'm going to switch my tactics, I'm gonna try the Archer." The Archer plays out entirely differently. So every time you die, you're presented with a character carousel and you get to pick a new unit at that point, or you can stick with the same unit.

IGN: You said that when you get to those hero-type guys, they're only on the battlefield for a little bit of time. So if, say, Aragorn comes into the middle of a battle, how long can you use him for? When does it trigger that you can't use him anymore?

Eric Gewirtz: It depends on how good you are. We kind of started based on the Battlefront II model which was basically, you get the hero as an access point and then he's slowly depleting health and the only way you can regain your health is by being effective in the battlefield. So the more guys you kill, the more objectives you accomplish as the hero, the longer you're going to be able to play as him. Once he depletes to zero health, you have to go back to playing as a regular soldier.

IGN: What happens with the heroes on the other side of the battle?

Eric Gewirtz: They're awesome [laughs]. No, the heroes on the other side are actually what we're really having a lot of fun with. For the first time ever, we're unlocking other heroes that you've seen -- evil heroes like the Balrog and Sauron and Sarumon - and we've just given them the power that they deserve, that you've seen in the films and really gone all out with giving them access. So Sauron has these sweeping attacks where he can knock guys flying in the air, the Balrog's got his fire sword.

You get to play as a Troll and when you play as the Trolls in the game, you can pick up enemy units and kill them and then walk around with them while you're swinging your club. Whenever you want, you can throw them and they're all physics-based, so you can throw them into enemy units and they'll knock the enemy units out like bowling pins.

IGN: How are you handling fights against singular characters, like against the Balrog or the Watcher in the Water from before they went into the Mines? How are you handling those sorts of confrontations?

Eric Gewirtz: So again, it's been a little bit of a challenge because we don't want to limit the player, forcing him into a very scripted scenario. That's not what this game is about. It's really about creating a choice, so what we do, for example with the Balrog -- when you're fighting in Moria at the point where the Balrog is unleashed -- we give you access to Gandalf, so we unlock Gandalf and you can choose to play as Gandalf or any of the other heroes and try to confront him. Gandalf's a lot more effective against the Balrog, and if you fail as Gandalf, you can try to take him out as a regular solider - it's just a lot more challenging. So we kind of give you the tools necessary to be able to defeat these bosses, but we still leave it up to the player to decide exactly how they want to defeat the boss.