Raze the Shire in LOTR Conquest

Pandemic lead designer Sean Sourcy has dropped a few more precious nuggets of information about the studio's upcoming Lord of the Rings title, Conquest - revealing that the game's Evil campaign will let hobbit-hating players live out their darkest fantasies at last.

Speaking to CrispyGamer.com, Sourcy casually mentioned that along with "all the big battles from the films", the game will also include several encounters that are only hinted at in the books. Moreover, there's an entire Evil campaign which explores what would have happened if Frodo failed in his task.

One of the major consequences of that, of course, is the razing of the Shire. "In the films, when Frodo looks into Galadriel's pool, Frodo sees what will happen to the Shire if he fails," explains Sourcy. "We let the player live that out."

Lord of the Rings: Conquest is essentially the fantasy follow-up to Pandemic's Star Wars: Battlefront games, and allows you to take on a number of roles across a sprawling battlefield - playing as the named heroes of the fiction, as officers in charge of various divisions or controlling huge units such as (in LOTR's case) catapults, siege towers, battering rams, wargs and elephants.

As you might expect, Lord of the Rings: Conquest focuses rather more on melee than on shooting, although each class continues to have a ranged attack of some description - and Sourcy is promising that overall, the game will give a better sense of epic battle and a better single-player campaign than Battlefront did, which is quite a claim.

He also hinted that a well-known actor from the LOTR films will be providing the narrator's voiceover for the game, but we'll have to wait to find out who that might be. There's plenty more info in the full interview, if you fancy popping over for a read.