EA is making a new mobile game called The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth, and you’ll have a chance to play it later this year.
Heroes of Middle-Earth is being described as a “collectible role-playing game” with immersive storytelling and turn-based combat. The announcement was light on details, but it sounds like you’ll recruit famous Tolkien characters to recreate iconic stories and battles from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
“The team is filled with fans of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and each day they bring their tremendous passion and talents together to deliver an authentic experience for players,” said Malachi Boyle, EA’s vice president of mobile RPG. “The combination of high-fidelity graphics, cinematic animations, and stylized art immerses players in the fantasy of Middle-earth where they’ll go head-to-head with their favourite characters.”
It sounds like Heroes of Middle-earth might share a few features with Warcraft Arclight Rumble. The upcoming Warcraft mobile game also revolves around collecting characters, who are represented in-game by tabletop-style mini figures. Here’s hoping Heroes of Middle-earth will do something similar to bring the game to life.
Unlike most previous Lord of the Rings games, Heroes of Middle-earth is solely inspired by Tolkien’s books and not Peter Jackson’s film trilogy. We can still expect to see characters from the movies like Aragorn and Legolas, of course, but they might not look like Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom. Truly a tragedy — but we’ll reserve final judgement until we get our first look at the game.
That might be as early as next month. The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth is expected to enter beta testing this winter. There’s no option to sign up for the beta just yet, but we’ll update this page when EA announces more details about the testing.
