There's this amazing mod for the original Rome: Total War (a game that's almost twenty years old but still boasts a modding community many times larger than those of later TW games) that's made as a hypothetical sequel to the events of Lord of the Rings, appropriately titled Fourth Age: Total War. It was painstakingly put together by fans for free over 12 years (2007-2019, when the last patch came out) based on nothing more than Tolkien's scant few notes for a 'New Shadow' sequel which he ended choosing to never write, the appendices of Return of the King (same source Amazon is supposedly relying upon for Rings of Power) and the general lore in addition to their own conjecture for how a Fourth Age Middle-earth might look.
It's a decade-spanning labor of love and it shows, being one of the best LOTR games I've ever played. I have no doubt that vastly more care & passion went into it than Rings of Power, even though the creators had no more lore to work with than Amazon and probably actually a bit less (as I said, Tolkien barely wrote anything about his 'New Shadow' before deciding that actually he didn't want to write a sequel to LOTR after all). Their love for the Professor's work has not abated and now even though development on FATW is over, the dev team has immediately segued into making another LOTR mod for RTW set in a more canonical timeframe which has more lore in it, the Wainrider invasion during which Gondor was badly mauled and Arnor was already on its last legs.
I have no doubt that if Amazon possessed even one hundredth of the talent, determination and passion of this handful of devs on a dying forum for a nearly 20-year-old game, they wouldn't be getting a hundredth of the shit they're rightfully getting for Rings of Power, billion dollar budget or no.
There's this amazing mod for the original Rome: Total War (a game that's almost twenty years old but still boasts a modding community many times larger than those of later TW games) that's made as a hypothetical sequel to the events of Lord of the Rings, appropriately titled Fourth Age: Total War. It was painstakingly put together by fans for free over 12 years (2007-2019, when the last patch came out) based on nothing more than Tolkien's scant few notes for a 'New Shadow' sequel which he ended choosing to never write, the appendices of Return of the King (same source Amazon is supposedly relying upon for Rings of Power) and the general lore in addition to their own conjecture for how a Fourth Age Middle-earth might look.
It's a decade-spanning labor of love and it shows, being one of the best LOTR games I've ever played. I have no doubt that vastly more care & passion went into it than Rings of Power, even though the creators had no more lore to work with than Amazon and probably actually a bit less (as I said, Tolkien barely wrote anything about his 'New Shadow' before deciding that actually he didn't want to write a sequel to LOTR after all). Their love for the Professor's work has not abated and now even though development on FATW is over, the dev team has immediately segued into making another LOTR mod for RTW set in a more canonical timeframe which has more lore in it, the Wainrider invasion during which Gondor was badly mauled and Arnor was already on its last legs.
I have no doubt that if Amazon possessed even one hundredth of the talent, determination and passion of this handful of devs on a dying forum for a nearly 20-year-old game, they wouldn't be getting a hundredth of the shit they're rightfully getting for Rings of Power, billion dollar budget or no.