While Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game and The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria are good games, there hasn’t truly been a home-run hit of a Lord of the Rings game in quite a while. That’s a high bar to clear, to be sure, but perhaps one of the best possible developers has been tapped to tackle J.R.R. Tolkien’s enormous tapestry of Middle-earth lore, and that choice alone could be all we need to comprehend what kind of game it’ll be.
Warhorse’s upcoming game being described solely as an “open-world Middle-earth RPG” leaves a lot to the imagination, with no brush strokes to determine what kind of portrait is being painted. However, one of the features it’s likely to have, which would make this open-world RPG adventure truly gratifying, could take inspiration from certain special weapons bearing glamorous names.
Warhorse’s Middle-earth RPG Needs Cool Swords
It isn’t the only fantasy IP that dabbles in this convention (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, World of Warcraft, Warhammer 40,000, and plenty more), but The Lord of the Rings having named weapons with specific meanings and legends ascribed to them is a tremendously fun part of the lore. Named weapons, typically swords, appear throughout Tolkien lore, with a mere handful of the most popular including:
- Gandalf’s sword, Glamdring
- Bilbo’s sword, Sting (technically a dagger, but a proper sword in the hands of a hobbit, and later passed onto Frodo)
- Aragorn’s sword, Andúril (re-forged from the shards of Narsil)
- Théoden’s sword, Herugrim
- Morgoth’s war hammer, Grond
- Gil-galad’s glaive, Aeglos
To stumble across and loot elven wares in a random troll cave in Eriador like Gandalf, Bilbo, and the dwarves do in The Hobbit would be a fantastic open-world encounter in Warhorse’s Middle-earth RPG. Additionally, peppering in a bit of Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s unique realism features, it would then be neat to have to take an elven blade to someone who could read its runic inscription and teach the player its name (unless we can choose to play as an elf or someone who already knows how to read Sindarin, in which case we could transcribe it then and there ourselves).
The Lord Of The Rings Is Rich With Lore
There are bound to be countless unremarkable weapons in Warhorse’s open-world Middle-earth RPG, and thus, coming across a weapon with a name that may have an interesting history to learn about would be fantastic. Likewise, players could wield a weapon with a name and author its legend themselves as they cut down foes.
If Warhorse’s game inherits Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s first-person perspective, weapons could be doubly iconic while held in frame via players’ POVs at almost all times in combat (an elven blade that glows blue when orcs are near, like Sting, would make this even better).
A lot of what the story entails in this game will depend wholly on when in the timeline it takes place, such as the First, Second, or Third Age. We know that it probably won’t be set during the events of The Lord of the Rings’ War of the Ring, considering that it would absolutely have been marketed as a ‘Lord of the Rings’ game, rather than a more generic ‘Middle-earth’ game. Still, named weapons can and should be featured during players’ travels.
It’s also unknown what the possible depth of this game may be. Similar to Kingdom Come: Deliverance franchise’s blacksmithing, it would be incredible to forge elven- or dwarven-made weapons of players’ own and carry them into battle thereafter, cementing their legacy. The possibilities are endless; unfortunately, we might not see or hear from this upcoming Middle-earth game, Lord of the Rings or not, for a spell, especially if Warhorse has its hands full first with a “new Kingdom Come adventure.”
- Cast
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Norman Bird, Anthony Daniels, Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Cate Blanchett, John Rhys-Davies, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Sean Bean, Ian Holm, Andy Serkis, Brad Dourif, Karl Urban, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, James Nesbitt, Ken Stott, Benedict Cumberbatch, Evangeline Lilly, Lee Pace, Luke Evans, Morfydd Clark, Mike Wood, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Charlie Vickers, Markella Kavenagh, Megan Richards, Sara Zwangobani, Daniel Weyman, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Lenny Henry, Brian Cox, Shaun Dooley, Miranda Otto, Bilal Hasna, Benjamin Wainwright, Luke Pasqualino, Christopher Guard, William Squire, Michael Scholes, John Hurt
- Created by
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J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings is a multimedia franchise consisting of several movies and a TV show released by Amazon titled The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The franchise is based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book series that began in 1954 with The Fellowship of the Ring. The Lord of the Rings saw mainstream popularity with Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies.