Battle for Middle Earth Community Day Writeup

Group picture!

The group finished with lunch and finally got a tour of the BFME floor of the offices. I must say that there are quite a few interesting things on that floor: unit relationship charts, god knows how many movie posters, concept to in game art progressions, I could've stayed on that floor for a lot longer than the tour allowed.

Once we got to the main floor, we headed off to the movie room again for some more presentations and Q&A by the EA guys; Richard Taylor showed us - step-by step - how a cinematic in BFME is created. It's a lot more work than you would think, figuring out what the cinematic will do with each individual unit, manipulating each individual unit, and finally manipulating the camera to make the cinematic look natural and real.

Matt Britton shows us the Moria scenario

After we learned all about cinematic-making, we got to look at something that not even some members of the EA team had seen: the Moria scenario. It's typically pretty difficult to make enclosed environments with RTS games, but they seemed to do it at least adequately; the most impressive aspect of the level was the detail in the environment, from the architecture to all of the extra little things you'd find in a mine (pulleys, chains, Balrogs of Morgoth...) The lighting in the room with Ballin's tomb was fairly impressive, though I was also interested in seeing how they managed to get the lighting in the firey depths of Moria near the bridge of Khazad Dum; unfortunately, we didn't get to see the level beyond Ballin's tomb.

Following our look at in-game Moria, we finally got a chance to get our paws on the game itself; specificially, the Osgiliath scenario. We were on the evil side playing Mordor, trying to get across the bridges and smash apart Gondor's defenses. I encounted a number of bugs in the capture of Osgiliath such as my inability to capture settlements - effectively making my military production a third of what it should've been - though I made it across the bridge by the time the game crashed. As you could've been able to tell, the game was pretty buggy, but that's to be expected from anything that's pre-alpha; what I did get to play and see get played was pretty impressive and gave me a much better idea as to how the game works and the overall quality of it.

Oh yeah, kicking some armored Gondor ass

While most of us were either watching or playing the game, two of us were randomly chosen to interview Mark Skaggs and Harvard Bonin for 5 minutes. We got to ask just about anything we wanted concerning the game (though not always with an informative answer), so I'm sure a decent amount of information was convered in the 10 minutes of interview time for each of the 18 guys.

By the time that we were done with the interviews, the folks from Sideshow Collectables came by the place to show us some of their pieces and affiliate information that we might find useful. We learned about how each piece is made, which is pretty complicated. A sculptor creates the intial piece, where it then goes to a mold specialist who makes a mold of the sculpture. After that, it goes to China where each individual piece is worked on by hand by a group of artists and are sent back to the states for distribution. The pieces we saw were the Witch King's satue, a bust of Gollum, a statue of the Balrog, and an environment sculpture of Moria; all were pretty impressive.

Next: The end of the day
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