The Lord of the Rings: Conquest Unveiled

IGN: I know you touched a little bit on the classes you have for combat before, but how involved are each of the pieces that you get? Do you basically have a strong and a fast attack for the Warriors? How does all that work?

Eric Gewirtz: We have a relatively robust combat system. It's definitely going to be accessible enough for casual fans to be able to grasp it, but it's definitely deep enough -- especially in multiplayer -- that you get satisfying combat when fighting against other players. There will be enough tactics to deal with. The other real challenge that we've been working on and we're really excited about is having a robust melee combat system and marrying it with a shooter. So while Warrior vs. Warrior combat really is going to feel pretty solid, Warrior vs. Archers is a whole different experience. And then of course when you get two Archers fighting against each other, it feels a lot like a third-person shooter.

IGN: Are there any "vehicles?" Can you ride any of the creatures in the game or anything like that?

Eric Gewirtz: You can ride them all. [laughs] Again, our mandate was that this game was really about diversity and all the breadth of different things you could do, and we wanted to make sure that if you saw a cool moment in the battles of the films that you could experience it. So you get to ride the Oliphants and fight against the Oliphants, you get to be the Trolls and the Ents in this game and they're just... they're awesome. They're like our tanks; they're kind of slow-moving, really powerful, with devistating attacks. And the AI is the same -- they can pick up guys and throw them across the battlefield.

You also have a ton of siege equipment in the game: there's catapults, and battering rams and siege towers and ballista; all the things you need to pull off a proper siege. Also, there's horses and Wargs. There's flying creatures that are in the game; you can call in flying strikes. There'll be an eagle swooping down, picking up guys systematically and carrying them off to their doom. Just really populating the battlefield with as many different tools and fun toys as you would want or experience from the films.

IGN: I'm assuming that, aside from the standard mode, there's some sort of free mode? Can you play whoever you want at any time?

Eric Gewirtz: Yeah. So we have the Campaign Mode -- we have two full campaigns on either side. The good campaign pretty much faithfully follows the events of the films, but again with the systematic gameplay that allows you to play up the battles any way you choose. The evil campaign is unlocked afterwards, and that's kind of a "what-if" scenario that assumes that Frodo failed in destroying the Ring. They hint at, both in the books and the films, that it would be very bad if Frodo were to fail, but they never really go into detail about exactly how Sauron would go about conquering Middle-Earth.

We let you live out that kind of dark fantasy of being Sauron and his forces at the end of the film. You start out as a Ringwraith and you catch Frodo and deliver the Ring to Sauron, and then it launches this evil campaign where you're basically conquering through Middle-Earth, playing as all the evil forces. You get to ride the Oliphant, you get to ride these Wargs, play as the Balrog and Sarumon and the Witch-King and the Ringwraiths and Sauron himself. Those are our two Campaign Modes.

In addition, though, we have a ton of Instant Action Modes that are playable in single-player, split-screen and online play. We have Conquest, which is capturing of control points like you did in Battlefront, we have Capture the Flag, we have Deathmatch, we have Hero Deathmatch where everyone gets to play as a hero; just a massive hero battle and we have a bunch of other cool modes. We're still exploring some other modes, but one mode that we just kind of stumbled onto that's really fun and kind of in line with the universe is called Ring Bearer. One player is Frodo and the other players are Ringwraiths and the longer you stay alive as Frodo, the more points you get until a Ringwraith finds you and kills you. The first Ringwraith to finally find the player, to find and kill Frodo, becomes Frodo, so it's kind of this game of tag where you're trying to stay alive as long as you can as Frodo, and you've got the Ring and you've got Sting and you're trying to outsmart the other players.

IGN: Can you become invisible?

Eric Gewirtz: Yeah.

IGN: But then can the Ringwraiths still tell where you are?

Eric Gewirtz: Exactly. Well actually, when you go invisible, you show up on the mini-map. They can't see you in the actual game, so you have to time it pretty well because you don't want to go invisible... you want to wait until they're on-screen and about to catch you, then you go invisible, but then it gathers all the other Ringwraiths. What's really cool that's been happening lately is you can attack the other Ringwraiths because they fight over it, so what happens is then the best Frodo players will try to get two Ringwraiths in the room together, like in an area together, then cloak and try to have them kill each other -- because they fight each other to try to become Frodo -- then sneak up and try to back-stab the remaining one.