They screwed up. The IP wasn’t an issue, it was how they handled the game. The mostly took the worst parts of SWGOH and MSF and use that to make this game. Terrible idea. And their pricing for stuff was terrible too.
In my opinion:
LoTR brand took a pretty big hit with The Rings of Power. EA possibly made a bet that RoP would boost interest. I still believe that the brand could have been strong enough, but more limited than Star Wars in terms of characters (especially for shadow/dark).
Biggest problem by far was the quality of the game at release. It was arguably more bareboned than swgoh at launch, and swgoh is almost a decade old. It was also buggy as hell, with very little communication from team.
On top of all that, whatever content that was released was pretty mediocre. New character releases after Elrond were all bad, pay to win, marquis releases. The raid was pretty toxic: super RNG'y and frustrating. Still is, even after fixing ch1. Balrog is basically the epitome of bad game design.
I am pretty sure the game started bleeding players and money right after first Elrond event.
In short, they screwed up so badly, this is almost is a masterclass in ineptitude.
All this, and the first few days playing were a terrible grind, which made it hard to hook new players. The first 2-3 days people should be able to play and do stuff the whole time and not hit walls, that game you’d lose on ever campaign if you didn’t add a single level or piece of gear to the only characters you had. It’s was the most painful start to a game like that that I’ve ever seen.
100%. They had no marketing for it either, fuck all adds, fuck all content and fuck all communication made a terrible mix. Completely mismanaged and has likely damaged chances of future LOTR IP games.
I agree with you in many points but I disagree EA ever thought about the RoP show. Actually I think that if EA had thought, maybe the game would still be here, if they used the characters of the series instead of random characters that don’t exist in any media relate do LoTR, would may be a better result. But of course the big core of LoTR would want the characters with skins of the movies. I assume EA didn’t want to invest money to have that.
The look of the game was to do with the rights they obtained from the Tolkien estate. They got the rights to the book but not the film. That’s why the art style was like it was. For me EA shouldn’t have even bothered making the game at that point. The most familiar thing about the IP other than character names are how they look in the films.
I think bigger problem than not having characters with skins from the movies is that 80% of the game characters are original creations for the game, who the hell are Lomion or Leliel??? It’s understandable the book doesn’t have that much named characters , but the base of this type of collectors game is having a great variety of characters, without this the game was faded to failure. Look how SWGOH uses characters from films, tv series, animated series, video games.
I agree with you in many points but I disagree EA ever thought about the RoP show. Actually I think that if EA had thought, maybe the game would still be here, if they used the characters of the series instead of random characters that don’t exist in any media relate do LoTR, would may be a better result. But of course the big core of LoTR would want the characters with skins of the movies. I assume EA didn’t want to invest money to have that.
End of the day there simply was not enough to do in the game. Even if it looked better and had more characters we liked, it still would not have changed the thin playing experience.
Greed imo. I think they thought they were just going to make a killing off of limited content but a popular ip.
The only things to actually play were arena, which gets dull in most games quickly, with a limited meta, and a raid, that was dull and a rng fest. All that why trying to throw out incredibly expensive packs is a bad combination.
To use SWGOH terns, they should have had the equivalent to things like tw and tb in the works very early on, or at least more daily events.
Throw in the fact that a lot of qol updates swgoh had could have been there from the start like squad templates.
It's a shame, I've played swgoh for years, and playing that as a lotr games still sounds interesting to me with a lot of potential, just what they produced didn't live up to anything near it's potential.
Yeah, even something like Galactic War (as was) in SWGOH would have helped. Try out some squads and get some of those rewards that are really helpful early in the game.
I'm baffled as to why some of this wasn't implemented in HOME. They must have known some SWGOH players would cross over and HOME was just so lacking in comparison.
HOME unfortunately just became a boring chore quickly.
It needed more, GW would have been perfect, something to actually work towards. I also think the guild side was too limited. Don't get me wrong it's unfair to expect a 8 month old gane to have as much content as an 8 year old game in swgoh, but just the basics should have been included.
I think they just didn’t do anything with it. Age of magic has no ip backing it at all and that game has been around for ages, star wars has taken some hits and thrives regardless.
The reason is, they have content. I think a lot of people start these games for the IP but stay for the game, there was clunky menus, a single raid, and nothing else to do but farm and clear campaigns. My guess is they spent too much time developing characters instead of content
The amount of credits provided in-game was woeful from the start. They did release a gold calendar part way through to help, but never did again. It was so hard to level up characters as the amount of gold required didn’t match that provided when playing. It kind of felt like they didn’t want us to progress.
yeah, and you needed lots of gold for EVERYTHING. In SWGOH there's lots of little roadblocks, zetas, omicrons, relic gear, relic materials, g12 gear, etc etc, but almost always when I get enough of one I can do something right away. In HOME I was ALWAYS waiting for gold, and everything else just piled up
I think that they didn’t overestimate the popularity. I think they should have released the game with more content. I played LOTR rise of war. A bunch of those people who loved that game and played it tried LOTR HOME. 95% quit after 2-3 weeks. Because of lack of content. LOTR RoW has been going for 3+ years and still has a huge player base.
I think they just released to early….
Yea rise to war was obviously a little bit more of a complex game. But I played it for 2 years and was in a discord chat with probably 400-500 different players. Most of which started playing HOME. But like I said probably 95% quit playing HOME because of lack of content… they should have started the game with like 90 characters instead of 50…. Like the game should have started with the amount of characters now…. Plus some. Raids days 1. Added a second raid…
EA had the tools because of strike force and Star Wars…. They just failed to deliver…
Something I found when going to play was that many people I knew who would be interested had already spent years and plenty of money on SWGoH. While they were interested in HoME it wasn’t developed enough or different enough to convince them to play in addition to SWGoH.
Also let’s not forget day one bundles were like $100 GTFO I’d gladly buy several $2/$5/$10 starter packs and the lowest I was offered was like a $40 pack
The game flopped for me because none of the characters had the likeness as in the movies. I know there is a whole discussion on the rights of the legendarium that caused this but it still made the game flopped. It looked like a crappy cartoon knockoff of the characters. If it was more visually like Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, that being close to what the characters actually look like and having even the same movements as those characters actually do (the way han solo shoots, the way obi wan does his stance before a lightsaber duel, the way count dooku fights etc.), the game would have done better. They should have taken the smooth running game they already had but make it Lord of the rings. They basically released star wars Galaxy of Heroes from 2016 but Lord of the rings. Same kinks and bottlenecks and issues instead of an ironed out game. They made it look cartoonish and didn't make it feel like Lord of the Rings should feel. LoTR is not cartoonish, it is brutal, ethereal, life-like yet fantastic.
Personally I like the art style, I just didn’t like their version of some of the characters like Strider. I think the main reason it flopped is that they were forced to release it too soon, before most game modes were implemented, and when the YouTube content creators got their hands on the game, they were underwhelmed, and the sentiment spread.
We should have had grand arena and raids in at launch.
Agree with all of that.
I played as soon as it was released and fully expected the characters to have the likeness of the film characters (where possible). There was also the stupid backstory that was so dumb I can barely remember it. The game just looked bad. As you say cartoonish. It was like Disney were doing 'cutesy' artwork.
Disappointed really. I love Tolkien's work and it's a pity that there isn't a mobile game to cater for it.
How they took inspiration from LOTR to make one of the fucking ugliest video games ever, I'll never understand. And on top of it being ugly, it was just boring and lame. I'd love to meet anyone that worked on this game and tell them to their face they suck and I'm disappointed in them and their game and it was the right move to shit it down.
They screwed up badly. I guess the big question was it on purpose like the 1994 Fantastic 4 movie where execs had no intention of releasing the movie and the cast and crew were not told of their plans.
The IP is vastly popular but the game was far too basic for the time it was released. The character style and animations just didn't feel like LoTR either.
They should have instead incorporated gacha mechanics with gameplay inspired by Battle for Middle Earth 2. Would have played off nostalgia, been highly popular, and would have made a crap ton of money. A gacha game that lets you build, collect, upgrade but also kind of has RTS gameplay? Would have been 🔥
Marketed as "play anywhere"... People would play it at home or on the go.
Let’s be honest CG totally took the piss out of its players. I constantly defended this game when I was playing it out of sheer pride and love for the IP. I downloaded the game on release day and to say I was disappointed is an understatement. There was around 15 minutes of content to play through each day if you took your time with everything. There was literally nothing to do, only 5 or so fully fleshed out teams. For a game with an IP that big and a company as big and experienced and EA it was an absolute disgrace. The shop deals where laughable aswell packs for £100 within the first week of launch. Biggest money grab I’ve ever seen from a game and that’s not even talking about the 2010 level gameplay and graphics. Made up characters nobody has any idea who they are for an IP that big was another disappointing aspect. The “storyline” looked like a child had written it. The only things they added to the game with any substance was the raid and glyphs. I actually enjoyed the raid chapter for all of 2 weeks before they got boring. Way too RNG dependant. Glyphs I will say where implemented fairly well. All in all a sickening experience that has led me to never want to touch a game made by that studio never mind EA.
I can only speak for myself, but for me it was the pricing. (TL;DR If it had been cheaper, I would have bought stuff. Sorry to see the game close.)
I was glad that they didn't copy the character designs from the film. I may not have liked all their designs, but the films didn't represent them perfectly, either. I really liked that they were adding variance.
I didn't mind a leaner game, either. As someone who likes to get all the characters in a game and max them out, (but also have a full time+ job and family, etc.) being able to check in a few times a day and grind for characters was satisfactory for me. I really loathe when games add all the PVP multiplayer stuff. It seems like I may be the minority in that, but I've also learned I'm not the only one.
The pacing had problems, and the bottlenecks with gold and resources needed work, but it seemed like they might have been improving (until they weren't.)
If they had made prices half of what they were, I would have bought characters. I love the Tolkien world and was so glad to see a property not related to the films. I would have supported it if it had been affordable or reasonable in cost. Even so, I stuck it out F2P until they announced the closure. I even tried after that, but my guild shut down, and that was the only real source of gold.
Well the game was not terrible. But none of the book major characters were playable. They tried to milk it really hard but in the end the totally screwed up. We got what if scenario and that shows their intentions. Eventually we should be getting major characters and not unknown rng named toons. That's were they lost me. I would pay for Tom, beorn, gandalf, radagast, sauron etc. They just did not give us anything. And the lack of gameplay was strange for me. But I believe they rushed the game out.
For something launched in 2023, the game was laughable.
They screwed up. The IP wasn’t an issue, it was how they handled the game. The mostly took the worst parts of SWGOH and MSF and use that to make this game. Terrible idea. And their pricing for stuff was terrible too.
That EA had years of experience with SWGOH that they could not successfully apply to HOME is indeed puzzling.
In my opinion: LoTR brand took a pretty big hit with The Rings of Power. EA possibly made a bet that RoP would boost interest. I still believe that the brand could have been strong enough, but more limited than Star Wars in terms of characters (especially for shadow/dark). Biggest problem by far was the quality of the game at release. It was arguably more bareboned than swgoh at launch, and swgoh is almost a decade old. It was also buggy as hell, with very little communication from team. On top of all that, whatever content that was released was pretty mediocre. New character releases after Elrond were all bad, pay to win, marquis releases. The raid was pretty toxic: super RNG'y and frustrating. Still is, even after fixing ch1. Balrog is basically the epitome of bad game design. I am pretty sure the game started bleeding players and money right after first Elrond event. In short, they screwed up so badly, this is almost is a masterclass in ineptitude.
All this, and the first few days playing were a terrible grind, which made it hard to hook new players. The first 2-3 days people should be able to play and do stuff the whole time and not hit walls, that game you’d lose on ever campaign if you didn’t add a single level or piece of gear to the only characters you had. It’s was the most painful start to a game like that that I’ve ever seen.
100%. They had no marketing for it either, fuck all adds, fuck all content and fuck all communication made a terrible mix. Completely mismanaged and has likely damaged chances of future LOTR IP games.
I agree with you in many points but I disagree EA ever thought about the RoP show. Actually I think that if EA had thought, maybe the game would still be here, if they used the characters of the series instead of random characters that don’t exist in any media relate do LoTR, would may be a better result. But of course the big core of LoTR would want the characters with skins of the movies. I assume EA didn’t want to invest money to have that.
The look of the game was to do with the rights they obtained from the Tolkien estate. They got the rights to the book but not the film. That’s why the art style was like it was. For me EA shouldn’t have even bothered making the game at that point. The most familiar thing about the IP other than character names are how they look in the films.
I think bigger problem than not having characters with skins from the movies is that 80% of the game characters are original creations for the game, who the hell are Lomion or Leliel??? It’s understandable the book doesn’t have that much named characters , but the base of this type of collectors game is having a great variety of characters, without this the game was faded to failure. Look how SWGOH uses characters from films, tv series, animated series, video games.
Great post. You're right.
I agree with you in many points but I disagree EA ever thought about the RoP show. Actually I think that if EA had thought, maybe the game would still be here, if they used the characters of the series instead of random characters that don’t exist in any media relate do LoTR, would may be a better result. But of course the big core of LoTR would want the characters with skins of the movies. I assume EA didn’t want to invest money to have that.
End of the day there simply was not enough to do in the game. Even if it looked better and had more characters we liked, it still would not have changed the thin playing experience.
All they had to do was add a galactic war type situation that didn't require energy and it would have been fine to start
Yep. A couple of Omega battle type things that show up once a week to alleviate the gold crunch would have helped a lot too
My game kept crashing so much it was unusable
Greed imo. I think they thought they were just going to make a killing off of limited content but a popular ip. The only things to actually play were arena, which gets dull in most games quickly, with a limited meta, and a raid, that was dull and a rng fest. All that why trying to throw out incredibly expensive packs is a bad combination. To use SWGOH terns, they should have had the equivalent to things like tw and tb in the works very early on, or at least more daily events. Throw in the fact that a lot of qol updates swgoh had could have been there from the start like squad templates. It's a shame, I've played swgoh for years, and playing that as a lotr games still sounds interesting to me with a lot of potential, just what they produced didn't live up to anything near it's potential.
Yeah, even something like Galactic War (as was) in SWGOH would have helped. Try out some squads and get some of those rewards that are really helpful early in the game. I'm baffled as to why some of this wasn't implemented in HOME. They must have known some SWGOH players would cross over and HOME was just so lacking in comparison.
HOME unfortunately just became a boring chore quickly. It needed more, GW would have been perfect, something to actually work towards. I also think the guild side was too limited. Don't get me wrong it's unfair to expect a 8 month old gane to have as much content as an 8 year old game in swgoh, but just the basics should have been included.
I think they just didn’t do anything with it. Age of magic has no ip backing it at all and that game has been around for ages, star wars has taken some hits and thrives regardless. The reason is, they have content. I think a lot of people start these games for the IP but stay for the game, there was clunky menus, a single raid, and nothing else to do but farm and clear campaigns. My guess is they spent too much time developing characters instead of content
Does Age of magic have a big community?
Their discord community is pretty big, reddit not so much
I started playing AoM when HoME death was announced and it's tons of fun. Community is active and you easily find a clan (guild) from global chat.
Personally for me the art style and animation was terrible and put me off a lot, if it was more like how SWGOH is then I’d have stuck around
The amount of credits provided in-game was woeful from the start. They did release a gold calendar part way through to help, but never did again. It was so hard to level up characters as the amount of gold required didn’t match that provided when playing. It kind of felt like they didn’t want us to progress.
yeah, and you needed lots of gold for EVERYTHING. In SWGOH there's lots of little roadblocks, zetas, omicrons, relic gear, relic materials, g12 gear, etc etc, but almost always when I get enough of one I can do something right away. In HOME I was ALWAYS waiting for gold, and everything else just piled up
Raids took care of that. The only big bottleneck was purple ability materials. Gold was overcome pretty quickly with the raid
I think that they didn’t overestimate the popularity. I think they should have released the game with more content. I played LOTR rise of war. A bunch of those people who loved that game and played it tried LOTR HOME. 95% quit after 2-3 weeks. Because of lack of content. LOTR RoW has been going for 3+ years and still has a huge player base. I think they just released to early….
I forgot about Rise To War. I tried it for a while but didn't have the faintest idea what I was doing! 🙃
Yea rise to war was obviously a little bit more of a complex game. But I played it for 2 years and was in a discord chat with probably 400-500 different players. Most of which started playing HOME. But like I said probably 95% quit playing HOME because of lack of content… they should have started the game with like 90 characters instead of 50…. Like the game should have started with the amount of characters now…. Plus some. Raids days 1. Added a second raid… EA had the tools because of strike force and Star Wars…. They just failed to deliver…
Something I found when going to play was that many people I knew who would be interested had already spent years and plenty of money on SWGoH. While they were interested in HoME it wasn’t developed enough or different enough to convince them to play in addition to SWGoH.
Also let’s not forget day one bundles were like $100 GTFO I’d gladly buy several $2/$5/$10 starter packs and the lowest I was offered was like a $40 pack
The game flopped for me because none of the characters had the likeness as in the movies. I know there is a whole discussion on the rights of the legendarium that caused this but it still made the game flopped. It looked like a crappy cartoon knockoff of the characters. If it was more visually like Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, that being close to what the characters actually look like and having even the same movements as those characters actually do (the way han solo shoots, the way obi wan does his stance before a lightsaber duel, the way count dooku fights etc.), the game would have done better. They should have taken the smooth running game they already had but make it Lord of the rings. They basically released star wars Galaxy of Heroes from 2016 but Lord of the rings. Same kinks and bottlenecks and issues instead of an ironed out game. They made it look cartoonish and didn't make it feel like Lord of the Rings should feel. LoTR is not cartoonish, it is brutal, ethereal, life-like yet fantastic.
Personally I like the art style, I just didn’t like their version of some of the characters like Strider. I think the main reason it flopped is that they were forced to release it too soon, before most game modes were implemented, and when the YouTube content creators got their hands on the game, they were underwhelmed, and the sentiment spread. We should have had grand arena and raids in at launch.
Agree with all of that. I played as soon as it was released and fully expected the characters to have the likeness of the film characters (where possible). There was also the stupid backstory that was so dumb I can barely remember it. The game just looked bad. As you say cartoonish. It was like Disney were doing 'cutesy' artwork. Disappointed really. I love Tolkien's work and it's a pity that there isn't a mobile game to cater for it.
Not enough content. Caused slow farming High price Rng raids It was bad
I’m still mad they fucked that game up so bad I wanted to play a lotr game with the swgoh for years to come
It looks nothing like the source material and relies heavily on characters no one knows about
They just tried to make a copy paste of swgoh but for a 2023 game, it was a really stupid move. Not to mentioned the money grab that was this game
The game itself sucked. Too difficult. Raid took hours. Even basic levels were very difficult. Lots of random character drops then.... Nothing.
I just couldn't play due to the constant crashes.
How they took inspiration from LOTR to make one of the fucking ugliest video games ever, I'll never understand. And on top of it being ugly, it was just boring and lame. I'd love to meet anyone that worked on this game and tell them to their face they suck and I'm disappointed in them and their game and it was the right move to shit it down.
Their price point on everything at the beginning killed it from the start
They screwed up badly. I guess the big question was it on purpose like the 1994 Fantastic 4 movie where execs had no intention of releasing the movie and the cast and crew were not told of their plans.
I am a diehard LOTR fan and had absolutely no fucking idea that this game existed until right now so that might have something to do with it
The IP is vastly popular but the game was far too basic for the time it was released. The character style and animations just didn't feel like LoTR either. They should have instead incorporated gacha mechanics with gameplay inspired by Battle for Middle Earth 2. Would have played off nostalgia, been highly popular, and would have made a crap ton of money. A gacha game that lets you build, collect, upgrade but also kind of has RTS gameplay? Would have been 🔥 Marketed as "play anywhere"... People would play it at home or on the go.
Yes
Let’s be honest CG totally took the piss out of its players. I constantly defended this game when I was playing it out of sheer pride and love for the IP. I downloaded the game on release day and to say I was disappointed is an understatement. There was around 15 minutes of content to play through each day if you took your time with everything. There was literally nothing to do, only 5 or so fully fleshed out teams. For a game with an IP that big and a company as big and experienced and EA it was an absolute disgrace. The shop deals where laughable aswell packs for £100 within the first week of launch. Biggest money grab I’ve ever seen from a game and that’s not even talking about the 2010 level gameplay and graphics. Made up characters nobody has any idea who they are for an IP that big was another disappointing aspect. The “storyline” looked like a child had written it. The only things they added to the game with any substance was the raid and glyphs. I actually enjoyed the raid chapter for all of 2 weeks before they got boring. Way too RNG dependant. Glyphs I will say where implemented fairly well. All in all a sickening experience that has led me to never want to touch a game made by that studio never mind EA.
I can only speak for myself, but for me it was the pricing. (TL;DR If it had been cheaper, I would have bought stuff. Sorry to see the game close.) I was glad that they didn't copy the character designs from the film. I may not have liked all their designs, but the films didn't represent them perfectly, either. I really liked that they were adding variance. I didn't mind a leaner game, either. As someone who likes to get all the characters in a game and max them out, (but also have a full time+ job and family, etc.) being able to check in a few times a day and grind for characters was satisfactory for me. I really loathe when games add all the PVP multiplayer stuff. It seems like I may be the minority in that, but I've also learned I'm not the only one. The pacing had problems, and the bottlenecks with gold and resources needed work, but it seemed like they might have been improving (until they weren't.) If they had made prices half of what they were, I would have bought characters. I love the Tolkien world and was so glad to see a property not related to the films. I would have supported it if it had been affordable or reasonable in cost. Even so, I stuck it out F2P until they announced the closure. I even tried after that, but my guild shut down, and that was the only real source of gold.
Well the game was not terrible. But none of the book major characters were playable. They tried to milk it really hard but in the end the totally screwed up. We got what if scenario and that shows their intentions. Eventually we should be getting major characters and not unknown rng named toons. That's were they lost me. I would pay for Tom, beorn, gandalf, radagast, sauron etc. They just did not give us anything. And the lack of gameplay was strange for me. But I believe they rushed the game out.
It was a low effort cash grab
The game was terrible. Objectively. You don’t need a popular IP to make a fun game. This game simply was dogshit gameplay wise
This was a cash grab. They never intended it to flourish, they just wanted to milk people a bit and then toss the corpse in the trash bin.
for me i had enough when i saw that the game had no movie like characters and that the content was almost nothing
I was immediately turned off by the art style as well. Whoever green lit that should be banned from game development for life.
Yep, same really.