LoTR: Battle for Middle Earth 2 Community Day Writeup

Day 2

I woke up at 7:30, showered, checked my email and headed downstairs to meet Aaron at 8:15 in the lobby (again he was a bit late; see above for what we did). Aaron arrived along with the taxis and we headed over to EALA. The studio was located about 5 minutes from the Ritz and we arrived there quickly. Aaron gave us a brief overview of the studio which looked like a great place to work, and we headed over to their cafeteria. The breakfast menu was fairly varied, but I decided to buy a breakfast burrito at Aaron's recommendation. It ended up being quite good. I sat with a bunch of C&C guys and listened to yet more game balance discussion, throwing my opinion when I felt I had a good point. By this morning everyone had arrived bringing the grand total of those invited to 28 people from at least six countries, the majority of whom were aged from 18-25, of course there were exceptions like myself (16), and others well above 25. Oh yeah, and did I mention there wasn't a single female among us?

Around 9:30 we headed over to the press room to get an introduction to BFME2. The press room looked a little like a theater, with stadium seating and nice seats. There was a screen up at the front and the room felt comfortable. Neil Young, the head of EALA gave us some basic information about the studio; about 500 employees, 80 of which were working on BFME2. Neil was fairly new to EALA and told us he wanted to focus on innovation and quality as important objectives for the studio. He said that eventually he would like to expand the RTS genre to consoles, but, obviously, there were some complications.

Executive Producer of BFME2, Mike Verdu came on to talk next. He gave us quite a bit of general information on the game, showed us a demo, and introduced us to some of the game's key features, that included the War of the Ring mode; in a basic sense a mini-game that's based on a map of Middle Earth. Again for more in depth information on the presentations you should check out our other previews which go into depth about what we saw.

After the introduction to the game some of the producers, including Chris Corry (the Lead Development Director) and Jason Bender (the Lead Designer) gave us an in-depth look at the game's main features. These features included create a hero (ability to create and customize your own hero for use in some games), the one ring (killing of Golum on a map allows for player to capture the ring and use it to create an uber-hero for their side), the tactical aspects of the game and some other cool stuff that's covered in Socvazius' preview.

At around noon we broke for an hour and a half lunch. During this time we also had the chance to interview Executive Producer, Mike Verdu and Lead Development Director, Chris Corry. These interviews were taped, and I imagine a lot of them turned out quite good. My interview was actually pretty bad, to tell you the truth. I had planned to go into more depth, but when I had the chance I failed to do so... but anyway, back to lunch. By total coincidence there was a Lord of the Rings barbecue; they were serving food that the hobbit's would have eaten. I had a big ol' turkey leg (it had a cool name, but I've since forgotten it) and some various side dishes. I sat, ate and then decided to walk around the non-classified areas of the studio. First I checked out the EA store which was said to sell copies of EA games for the killer price of $10. Unfortunately the only game I wanted to buy, Battlefield 2, was out of stock. I cried a bit after learning this horrible news, but continued to browse the store. They had some cool stuff, but I ended up buying nothing due to the fact that I don't believe in buying souvieneers (and the fact that I didn't want to blow all my money). I left the shop and headed over to the free arcade. They had some older games like Gauntlet and Pac-Man, and a computer set up to play Battlefield 2, among some other things. I hung around there for a while with some other guys, until Aaron asked me if I'd like to do my interview (see above). I was the last to get in an interview, and people began to arrive after I finished.

Around 1:45 Amir, a producer, came on to explain the War of the Ring mode. He gave a short presentation and played the mode for us. It looks like a cool mini-game similar to the campaign map of Rome: Total War, or the map of Civilization, except toned down. You know where to find more information about it. ;-)

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