I some­times need to remind myself how amaz­ing 3D com­puter gen­er­ated worlds are. When I was a lit­tle gaming-brat I used to dream of being able to walk around a fan­tasy world and actu­ally see all around me, go wher­ever I wanted and do any­thing. 2D worlds were fine, but it was hard to get immersed in them. You would dream that one day, far in the future, peo­ple would be able to design games which really made you feel like you were there.

The first game to give me this sense of actu­ally being there was Elite, the space trad­ing game. It was 3D, albeit using sim­ple line graph­ics. What I really wanted was to be able to explore worlds which were famil­iar to me, and top of the list, surely top of everyone’s list, was Middle-Earth.

If you’d have told me 20 years ago that I would be able to log into a com­puter gen­er­ated 3D ver­sion of Middle-Earth and walk around with hun­dreds of oth­ers peo­ple, I would have made some very excited noises and then prob­a­bly said “Yeah, sure”.

But you can. Now. Every day. And it’s awe­some!
Or is it?
Does the Middle-Earth that Tur­bine have built bear resem­blance to the Middle-Earth that Tolkien envisioned?

I’ll have a stab at answer­ing this ques­tion, tak­ing each of the game areas in turn. I will look at the basic geog­ra­phy of the zone as well as exam­in­ing the inhab­i­tants found there. I’m not look­ing to pick at lit­tle errors and changes the design­ers made, but I will high­light any glar­ing dif­fer­ences between the books and the game. To assist me, I will be mak­ing ref­er­ence to The Atlas of Middle-Earth by Karen Wynn Fon­stad, an excel­lent guide, the con­tent of which is gen­er­ally accepted as being canon.

The Shire

No ques­tion really where I should start this series.  The Shire is the most heav­ily mapped area of Middle-Earth, and is the best loved, and most famous, of all Tolkien’s loca­tions.  Hav­ing so much in the way of resource avail­able to them, Tur­bine would have approached the design of The Shire with a degree of both enthu­si­asm and cau­tion.  On one hand, they didn’t have to invent many loca­tions, but on the other, they had to be very care­ful that they put things in the right place.  They also had to get the details right with this area.  There is prob­a­bly more descrip­tion of The Shire than any other region in The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit.  The place­ment of inns, hob­bit holes, rivers, even trees, was cru­cial here.

The Shire itself was very roughly mod­eled on Worces­ter­shire, and is a very ide­alised view the county.  So we have lots of green­ery, rolling hills, small streams, light wood­land and farm­land.  There is a big river in the East of the land, hills to the West and North West, smaller hills in the mid­dle of the area, and small set­tle­ments and vil­lages dot­ted all over the place.

The geog­ra­phy and place­ment of set­tle­ments in The Shire owes almost as much to Christo­pher Tolkien as to his father.  In 1943, Christo­pher drew an elab­o­rate map of The Shire, based on ear­lier draw­ings by his father.  This map became the basis for the one which was pub­lished in The Lord of the Rings (under the name of ‘A Part of the Shire’).  Pre­vi­ous maps by JRR Tolkien had been full of amend­ments and cross­ings out, plus no short­age of con­tra­dic­tions.  It is largely due to Christopher’s assis­tance that The Shire is so detailed an area.  Tolkien, in gen­eral, only recorded on maps what he planned to include in his sto­ries.  His son, how­ever, tried to map out a whole com­mu­nity, thus The Shire is pre­sented as the most com­plete region in Middle-Earth.  Other areas in the world, Gon­dor, Rohan, Dun­land, undoubt­edly include more set­tle­ments and geo­graph­i­cal fea­tures, we just don’t get to see them on maps.  There are many ‘fan-maps’ to be found on the inter­net which attempt to map out Middle-Earth, but only The Shire is fully realised and mapped by Tolkien (and son).

So, how have Tur­bine done with their ver­sion of The Shire?  Well, before I try and answer that we’ve got to pause and address one big prob­lem with the game world, one which Tur­bine couldn’t really do much about when it came to game design.  Middle-Earth is huge.  Massive(ly).  Big­ger than a game could hope to fit in and still be playable.  Dis­tance in the game is greatly scaled down.  It takes under a minute to run from the Brandy­wine Bridge to the Buck­le­bury Ferry, but in real­ity the dis­tance should be some 20 miles.  This can’t really be helped.  The game does speed time up so that it might feel like you’ve been rid­ing all night to get some­where, but the game world does feel a lit­tle cramped at times.

In some­where like The Shire, where there are lots of set­tle­ments, this can present some­thing of a prob­lem.  Hob­biton and Bywa­ter are dis­tinct vil­lages, yet in the game they are within a stones throw of each other.  The space in between set­tle­ments has had to be reduced, so it can feel like you leave one vil­lage only to enter another almost immediately.

The Tur­bine ver­sion of The Shire begins in the west with the Far Downs, extends East to the Brandy­wine, includes the lands to the north as far as the North Moors on the edge of the Hills of Twi­light and in the south as far as the edge of the South­far­thing.  We have most of the main vil­lages included — Michel Delv­ing, Hob­biton, Bywa­ter, Tuck­bor­ough and the other larger set­tle­ments are all here.  Amongst the places not included, but men­tioned in The Lord of the Rings, are Whitwell, Took­bank, Whit­fur­rows and Rushy.  The Yale is included as Yale Heights.  Oat­bar­ton and Dwal­ing are moved north into Evendim.  Bind­bole Wood is pre­ferred as a spelling for the wooded region to the north of Over­hill, despite some car­tog­ra­phers (most notably Fon­stad) using Bind­bale.  This dif­fer­ence orig­i­nated from Christo­pher Tolkien’s map where the writ­ing is not very clear.  Gen­eral con­sen­sus is that the wood is called Bind­bole, but even Tolkien him­self used both spellings inter­change­ably at times.

The zone includes some ruins, pre­sum­ably Arno­rian.  The Shire was indeed part of Arthedain, and was granted to the Fal­lo­hide broth­ers Mar­cho and Blan­cho in TA 1601 by Argeleb II.  The Brandy­wine Bridge itself, called by the Dunedain the Bridge of Stonebows, was ancient already when the Hob­bits moved in.  Other struc­tures were likely to have been found nearby.

The main build­ing in The Shire is, of course, Bag End.  The place looks and feels roughly what I would have expected Bag End to look and feel like.  It’s not my favourite loca­tion in the game, but it’s good enough.  The Party Tree looks great, although the field it’s in still looks like the party took place only last night, whereas in the books the clean up began the day after Bilbo’s departure.

More impor­tant, I think, than place names and loca­tions, is the feel of an area, espe­cially one as close to Tolkien’s heart as The Shire.  Well, to me, The Shire feels lovely, sim­ply a delight.  When you’ve spent an entire evening stuck in the gloom of Moria and return to your house to repair before log­ging, you can­not help but feel your spir­its being lifted by the place.  It’s an area of green­ery, of trees, of farms, of happy peo­ple per­form­ing sim­ple domes­tic tasks, eat­ing, drink­ing, mak­ing merry.  My most enjoy­able time spent in LotRO to date was get­ting my Hob­bit War­den from 1 to 20, a time I spent solely in The Shire.  Pure gam­ing bliss.

I do have some issues with the area though, one in par­tic­u­lar.  The Tur­bine ver­sion of the game includes a rather large river val­ley run­ning east to west through the cen­tre of the zone.  This is the val­ley of The Water, a trib­u­tary of the Brandy­wine.  This just feels a lit­tle too steep at times for me.  A  minor point though, it just bugs me.  The north of the area is, I feel, a bit of a mess.  Oat­bar­ton and Dwal­ing are prob­a­bly too far north.  Needle­hole is included but the ver­sion in the game is more like what Long Cleeve would have looked like had it been included.

Some­thing that would have been a chal­lenge for Tur­bine, and one which they were also pre­sented with when design­ing Lorien, was the prob­lem of how to make a full MMO zone in a place where you really can’t have that much com­bat.  Before Frodo leaves Bag End there was vir­tu­ally zero risk in the area.  We know this because there are two times before the War of the Rings in the his­tory of the Hob­bits of The Shire where they have been directly attacked.  The first was in 2747, when Orcs invaded from the north and were dri­ven off by Ban­do­bras ‘Bull­roarer’ Took in The Bat­tle of Green­fields.  The sec­ond was dur­ing The Fell Win­ter of 2911, when the Brandy­wide froze over and White Wolves attacked.  Tolkien specif­i­cally men­tions these attacks, so we can be rel­a­tively cer­tain that The Shire doesn’t nor­mally con­tain any­thing hostile.

In the years before 3018, before Frodo leaves The Shire, it is clear that many things which pre­vi­ously had no inter­est in Hob­bits were now begin­ning to look towards The Shire.  It is rea­son­able to assume that the Dunedain, who were posted on the bounds, were able to keep most of the unde­sir­ables out.  How­ever, with the com­ing of the Nazgul the Rangers were scat­tered, and The Shire was open.  Thus, we get to the zone in LotRO when evil things, Orcs, Gob­lins, Men and Beasts are begin­ning to move in.  They remain on the edge of the land, but they are get­ting closer to the main settlements.

So, does The Shire in Lord of the Rings Online feel like The Shire in The Lord of the Rings?  Yes, I think it does.  It cer­tainly feels smaller than I would have liked, even tak­ing the size of the inhab­i­tants into account, but I can live with that.  I think that when you’re off fight­ing in Angmar or in Moria, The Shire feels a very long way away, and it also feels like home, or at least homely.  You do almost get the sense that you’re fight­ing to pro­tect it, and in that way I think the area is a great suc­cess.

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