Amazon’s mass layoffs have reportedly resulted in the cancellation of its new Lord of the Rings MMORPG.
A planned successor for the ongoing Lord of the Rings Online, Amazon Games’ MMO was designed to be a brand-new experience set in the work of Middle Earth.
Following the mass layoffs – which saw Amazon’s actually popular MMO New World also get scrapped – a gameplay designer on the new Middle Earth game revealed that the project is now dead.
Former senior gameplay engineer at Amazon Games, Ashleigh Amrine, explained that the “fledging game” had been killed in the layoffs. Spotted by Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the post didn’t reveal how far along in development the project was
“This morning I was part of the layoffs at Amazon Games, alongside my incredibly talented peers on New World and our fledgling Lord of the Rings game (y’all would have loved it),” the gameplay engineer wrote on the social media site.
“It’s always tough to see such a strong team go through something like this,” Amrine wrote in her post yesterday. “I’ve been lucky to work with some of the most skilled, creative, and kind developers I’ve ever met here.”
“It’s always tough to see such a strong team go through something like this,” she continued. “I’ve been lucky to work with some of the most skilled, creative, and kind developers I’ve ever met here.”
Not much is known about what the LOTR film would’ve been exactly. However, it is known that the game would’ve spanned the events of The Hobbit and the main Lord of the Rings trilogy.
In an early discussion by Embracer Group, which owns the rights to Tolkein’s universe, the game would’ve been a “persistent open-world MMO adventure”. Perhaps, one day, more information will be released about what the developers were cooking up.
While the new game has sadly been killed before its time, fans of Middle Earth still have Daybreak’s original Lord of the Rings Online to play through. While less shiny than a new game, Daybreak is still bringing brilliant new content to the game at a frequent basis.
