10 Reasons Lord of the Rings "Guardians of Middle Earth" Totally Works

Warner Bros. had a massive white tent staked out behind the San Diego Convention Center during Comic-Con for the express purpose of showing off Guardians of Middle Earth, the Lord of the Rings MOBA, and it seemed to be working—there were tons of attendees waiting in line to play the game.

Back up, though, you're saying—what the hell is a MOBA?

It's a "Multiplayer Online Battle Arena," a genre begun by DOTA (Defense of the Ancients) and popularized by League of Legends. Players control and level up "Guardians" with four abilities and try to capture their opponent's base on symmetrical maps, with lesser, computer-controlled soldiers fighting their way to various control points throughout each level.

Jason Olander, the game's senior designer, calls it "a hybrid action/strategy game," and he says it's perfect for consoles, despite being popularized on PC—and I completely agree.

"It's a perfect match for this kind of game," Olander replied when I asked him why they chose to use Lord of the Rings. "It was a no-brainer for us."

The MOBA genre can be rather off-putting to noobs, and "this gives you an automatic sort of interest and entry point," Olander explained. "It's like, 'Oh,' you know, 'I know Middle-earth. I know who Gandalf is. That's cool.'

"The other thing that it does for us is it's very interesting with the Guardian creation itself," he continued It gave us a chance to sort of say to ourselves, 'What would I think that Gandalf would play like? What kind of powers do I think he would have?' You know, which is very interesting. So it becomes a very sort of intuitive experience for players."

Within that familiar world, characters like Gandalf, Gollum, Sauron, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and Galadriel lend themselves perfectly to the MOBA style.

"One thing about Guardians is our characters are all split into general classes," Olander explained. "So we have enchanters, warriors, protecters, and strikers." Gollum, for example, is a striker, and he can cause massive damage in short bursts. That's "kind of what you'd expect from him, right?" Olander asked. "Whereas Gandalf might be like 'Oh no, we're going to stand here and go.'"

That said, if developers Monolith Productions took the lore too seriously, Gandalf and Sauron would be the only viable characters, being, you know, vastly powerful wizards and all. Luckily, they're taking some creative license with it.

"It feels right, without having to say alright, well obviously Gandalf will just destroy everybody in sight. You know, we're not going to design the game that way. So being able to take that and then balance everybody around those ideas is the key," Olander explained.

But isn't it kind of wacky that Gollum can beat up Gandalf? "Not for us," Olander replied. "I mean obviously it's a video game, right? So, you know, we're going to give everybody abilities and capabilities that match up well with others."

"I think we're the first to bring that full experience onto consoles," Olander told me as I played a quick, 15-minute match against several other combatants. "To us it just makes a lot of sense."

DOTA, League of Legends, and every other popular MOBA game so far have been PC exclusives, but thanks to Guardians of Middle Earth, that's going to change.

"For us, it was really about being able to bring a brand-new competitive experience to the consoles. It so happens that we were big fans of the MOBA genre, and we thought that would work really well," Olander said. "There's lots of shooters, etc. on the console, but nothing quite like this."

"The controls? We get asked about that a lot, obviously," Olander told me. It's not often that games from genres like, for example, real-time strategy or MOBAs, which rely heavily on full-keyboard PC controls, are ported to consoles.

But each Guardian's four abilities were easily mapped to a console controller's face buttons (A, B, X, Y or Cross, Square, Circle, Triangle for Xbox 360 and PS3 users, respectively).

"For us, we looked at it for a long, long time, had lots of lots of focus groups, and testing, you name it to get it right," Olander said. "It actually ended up being simpler than we really thought it would be in the end. It worked out pretty damn well."

Likewise, it was simple to move aiming controls from a mouse to the controllers' right control sticks. Olander even compared the console control scheme to the dual-stick shooter genre, which allows players to fire projectiles simply by holding the right stick in a certain direction. It's a common genre on consoles, and that's an apt comparison, although in Guardians of Middle-earth you have to hold down the right trigger as well.

"We got them really refined down. We even have two different control schemes," Olander boasted, hinting at an advanced scheme in addition to the vanilla one I used.

The matches played by Comic-Con attendees were capped at 15 minutes, though a typical game of Middle-earth will last "about 20 minutes, give or take," said Olander.

That's a perfect length for a console player, who might not sit down for extended periods like some PC gamers. And players start each match on equal footing, at level one and with three abilities, and can advance quickly up to level 14 by the end of a match, powering up abilities and unlocking their fourth one partway through.

Just because the matches are quick and the controls are simple doesn't mean the gameplay isn't complex, though. There are multiple advancement paths to go down during each match, and how you level up can determine the outcome just as easily as your actual skills can. And Guardians also have secondary abilities like brief spurts of quicker movement and area attacks with long cool-downs before they can be used again.

"The whole idea is to learn how to use your Guardian," Olander told me. "It's an ebb and flow of a battle."

That ebb and flow involves watching and learning about your enemies, as well as strategizing around the movements of your own AI-controlled, "meat shield" underlings as they advance to take out deadly enemy towers before closing on your opponent's base. It's really quite thrilling.

It also makes sense from a business standpoint—the rumored release date for Guardians of Middle-earth is Q4 2012, after all, which should be right around when the first half of the The Hobbit film is coming out.

The Hobbit could reignite fan fervor over Lord of the Rings, provoking them to seek out any and all related media. And if it's timed correctly and they happen to stumble upon Guardians of Middle-earth during that search, well, everyone's a winner, right?

Most of all, Guardians of Middle-earth works because it's something relatively new. Technically, the MOBA genre has been around for a while, but it's only been recently that it's picked up enough fans to register on the mainstream radar.

And as I noted before, that full experience hasn't yet been brought to consoles. It'll be interesting to see if the console demographics embrace it like PC gamers have, but either way, good on WB and Monolith for taking this first leap.

Do you disagree? Are MOBAs already tired? Do you have any beef with Guardians of Middle-earth, or do you think it'll turn out great? Tell us your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter.