In those years when Warcraft III thundered, the second game Liquid Entertainment called The Lord of the Rings: War of the Ring was left without the attention of the players. Many of her simply bypassed the idea that this is just a parody of Warcraft in the surroundings of the “Lord of the Rings”. But for me personally, this game has become a loved one not only among the strategies in real time of the first half of the zero, but also among my childhood games in general. And I consider her undeservedly forgotten. Those who remember her still remembers the “Ring War” with an unkind word, and in this post I want to remember what War of the Ring was and I will try to prove that in 2003, Liquid released an excellent game, which was worth turning their gaze to their gaze.

Background

Liquid Entertainment – The studio is little known. For the entire time of her existence, she managed to develop 13 games, but you are unlikely to know or at least heard about each of them. Personally, I knew only 4 titles, and I did not play all of them, and when I opened a page on Wikipedia and saw a complete list of Liquid games, I was very surprised. And not even from how many of their projects were not familiar to me, but because it was generally for games. Quest by "Desperate housewives", Fighting Karateka, A failure slasher Thor: God of Thunder 2011 and mediocre action Rise of the Argonauts. The last (not counting the mobile phone and a pair of games for Facebook)* their game was Max Steel based on the cartoon of the same name.

But how it all began … Liquid Entertainment was born in April 1999 in the family of a modest engineer T -shirt of Graiford And Ed del Castile, previously consisting of c Lord British Studios, Firaxis And Westwood Studios, in the walls of which he worked on the games of the series Ultima, Command & Conquer And even put his hand to Sid Meier’s GetteSBurg!. In general, I don’t know what kind of Mike Graifid was, but del Castileo is a guy what needs. The first games for which I truly respect liquids were real -time strategies. And, surprisingly, their debut project Battle Realms, dedicated to combat clashes in the setting of fantasy Japan, was nominated for the award "Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences", She Interactive Achievement Awards, In the category "PC Strategy". You say, “Nominee is not a laureate,” and I think that for the just emerging company, for its very first game, this is a great achievement of developers.

But I will not stop there in more detail. After the release, Battle Realms Liquid releases an addition to it Winter of Wolf (2002), and then quite peculiar, but interesting Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard, By the way, the only game in the setting of Eberron, except for D&D Online. And, unfortunately, Dragonshard has become the last strategy developed by Liquid Entertainment. There is a logical explanation for this: not one of the first games (and I remind you that these were exclusively real-time strategies) showed satisfactory sales, and therefore the liquids undertook to rivet games in other genres, but in the end of 2018 it became the last year for the company. Liquid Entertainment was abolished.

A sad story, but, as they say, the North remembers, I remember and I will never forget the liquids and I, for what they gave to the world "War of the Ring", which came out between Battle Realms and Dragonshard in 2003, and which made my childhood before I met a wonderful “battle for Middle-earth” ..

Advertising U -turn with War of the Ring in PC Gamer #117 (December 2003)

"Lord of the Rings" And "Hobbit" were quite widely known to the world in the twentieth century, however, after a thick P.AND. Filled the legendary saga Tolkien About the Ring of Emistence, the world simply exploded, and a new wave of epidemic of Tolkinism began to infect the minds of uninitiated like a T-virus in the city. Developers and publishers quickly recorded this business and began to rub their pens in anticipation of a solid food. Rights for the production of games based on films Peter Jackson belonged Electronic Arts, And the rights to use the materials of the book "Lord of the Rings" – Vivendy Games. And both of these ominous corporations, sitting in their Sauron towers, simultaneously planned the release of the Games on the Heritage of the Professor.

And thus, from 2002 to 2004, just at the very peak of interest in the subjug on the wake of films, as many as 7 games are released: The Fellowsip of the Ring, The Hobbit And War of the Ring from Vivendi on the one hand and The Two Towers, Return of the King, The Battle for Middle-Earth And The Third Age – from electronics with the other. EA Games were closer to films, which means they were more recognizable for a huge mass of cinema fans, and as a result, they crushed their less bright representatives from Vivendi, which was very sad, because the games of their competitors were worth paying attention to them, and I am going to prove it on the example of the “War of the Ring”.

Arda chronicles

A few remember this game, few once played it, but for some reason after so many years the dominant opinion is still in War of the Ring, a thought expressed in combination "Clone of Warcraft". The "War of the Ring" is really like Warcraft III. The game skeleton of the game is almost completely built according to the scheme worked out by games Blizzard. Before us is a traditional strategy in real time, with resources that must be mined with the help of workers, a base that needs to be rebuilt, and then protect the enemies from attacks, and, finally, we need to hire an army in order to destroy the enemy base. I’ll make a reservation right away that I am not a fan of multiplayer, and therefore I evaluate this game only by its single component.

The single campaign of the "War of the Ring" is divided into two branches: this is a plot Sveta And the campaign Darkness. In order not to turn the whole game action into a series of missions going after another, the liquids came up with a more interesting thing. At the beginning of each of the campaigns, a Middle-earth card opens, of course, not as voluminous, large-scale and cool as in The Battle for Middle-Earth, released in a year, but still all the most iconic locations and places could be recognized on it. But it was impossible to interact with them, it was just a dead picture in which the marks of the missions were noted: 11 at the side of the world and 10 for darkness. What is interesting for some missions opened in parallel to each other and we could choose what to go the first, but as a result it was still necessary to close all the tags on the map in order to access some new key episode. It’s not that it somehow greatly changed the game and influenced the gameplay, but the perception was already different, unusual after Warcraft III, because we were given some kind of, but still the choice.

What a year?! Jackson did not prepare me for this.

The plot of the “War of the Rings” is interesting in that it tells not about the main events of the “Lord of the Rings”, both books and films, but about those episodes that remained somewhere in the back of the main story. The first missions of the Light campaign are dedicated to the struggle of the gnomes led by the Himli with orcs in Iron hills, the expulsion of evil forces from Mirkwood And Dol Guldura Legolas, confrontation between the Army of Mordor and the Garrison Osgiliata, led by Boromir … And in darkness, in general, some missions unfold several thousand years before the events of the Lord of the Rings, when Sauron was just starting to restore his forces after a devastating defeat at the end of the second era. Although not all the campaign of darkness is devoted to those distant events, and echoes the “modern” history of Mediterranean. And so that it is clear what is happening here and what place this or that episode shown in the game occupies in the annals of Arda, each mission is accompanied by a brief summary that introduces the case.

In the “Battle of Middle-earth” in 2004, the plot was given epic and on a grand scale, but still the story of Jackson’s films completely repeating, but the script in the War of the Rings already represented much more interest and partially intrigued, because you did not know what kind of events you would become in the next mission and in which era it would be found out in general. So here I would put a plusik this game.

The real villain is not looking for unoccupied sources of resources, he squeezes them with elves!

Something remains unchanged.

What needs to be done at the beginning of any strategic party? To establish the prey of resources, because without them as without a ring of omnipotence! In War of the Ring, this is food and iron. And if in the case of the latter everything is quite logical – you find an iron deposit and build a mine in its place, then a funny thing comes out with food: for its extraction, we also need to build a building – the mill at the light and the massacre of the darkness – and they are being erected in the well, that is, we are actually obtained by water, and when it ends the sunbathing voice for us verbatims that the “well has dried”. However, workers leaving the barn drag bags of grain from it, and not buckets of water, and in the case of orc slaves – pieces of meat, but again not water. In some way magically, the water turns into a barn and massacre into meat and grain remains a mystery.

However, I have one version on this subject. The fact is that in Battle Realms, the resource production system was much more interesting than in War of the Ring and the notorious Warcraft III. Just like in these two games, in the previous brainchild of Liquid there were only two resources – there it was water and rice. However, water sources were inexhaustible, although the peasants still had to carry it with buckets at the warehouse, and at the same time H2O was necessary for construction / recruitment needs to a much lesser extent than rice. However, the rice itself was mined not without the help of the same water: the fields where it grew had to be regularly watered before the rice could be collected. And it seems to me that the developers decided to simplify this scheme and hide it in backstage, so that the water mined from the well began to instantly turn into a provision.

Need more than more angry … kh! Myasaaa

As a result, the production of https://space-wins.co.uk/ resources in the “Ring War” came to copy the standards … No, not the third Warcraft, it was still a little different with the tree, and the first Starcraft with its minerals and Vespen. But this is not a minus, this approach is simple and convenient to use. But here in the "War of the Ring" there is one small distinctive feature. In Blizzard Games, when the worker chopped off a piece of crystal or took a bag of gold – it certainly reflected externally, but Liquid’y went even further: now a bag of grain or iron is not just a decoration on the shoulders of a peasant or a slave – this is an interactive object. In the event that you give the worker the order to rush into the attack, or start building a building, he will throw a bag to the ground and take up the assigned case. But at the same time, the resource he received will not disappear in textures, the bag will lie until you order the worker to raise it again and take it to the warehouse.

All buildings can be divided into different types of barracks for various units and individual buildings for pumping these very units, well, except for mines, protective towers and basic buildings – the light is a citadel, and the darkness has a shed. The dark side also has its own citadel, but it no longer serves a warehouse for resources, although it can also be pumped. And, by the way, this is not 2-3 levels, as in Starcraft and Warcraft. In the “Ring War”, the citadel has as many as 5 layers of the superstructure that are necessary to open access to certain buildings, units and heroes.

Even with a limitation of the content of units in 100 units, epic contractions could be arranged

Construction is carried out only in a certain zone: the bright side can build new buildings only at a limited distance from its other structure, not counting the citadel that can be erected, where it will only like;But darkness does not need any distances, but instead, like a undead of warcraft or graves yourself, you know, from nowhere, it is necessary to bring damage to the ground with special pillars. These pillars are being built over the warders, they are also “farms” for the fraction of darkness – again, the parallel with Starcraft and the overseers of the grains. And the light fraction, in turn, is enough to build ordinary farms to increase the ceiling of the number of troops. Well, though here are not farms, but camps, and they can even modernize them in War of the Ring.

Were’s The Prey

Although the “War of the Ring” could not boast of the number of playable fractions, and here I compare the game not with Warcraft, but with the same Battle Realms from liquids, but in the ranks of light and darkness there were a wide variety of fantastic and not very creatures. The side of the forces of good was represented by people, and gnomes, and elves, and even walking trees in the partisan detachment were pushed, only here are not entes, but huerns. Although there is ENT in the game too, he is one, and I will talk about him a little later. Goblins, orcs, trolls, spiders, ghosts and Haradrim gathered under the banners of Sauron. In total, there are 9 types of fighters on the light fraction, there are already 12 of them in darkness, however, this amount was compensated by the characteristics and cost.

In the plot campaign of light, additional units appear that can be controlled, but which cannot be built: archers of Rohan and the guards of the elves

Each unit has one of the three types of weapons: chopping, crushing and stitching, one beats another, then in turn the third, and the third-the first, in other words “stone-tin-paper”. But at the same time, all three types are equally helpless in front of the heroes for whom a special class of weapons was allocated. Heroes in the game on each direction were allocated 5 dulls and all of them are equally opposed to each other, of course, of course, if you competently dispose of them.

The most rotten heroes in the game are Frodo and Gollum, followed by a three of strong guys, but the fifth and last is the most powerful grandfather: in the world – Gandalf, in darkness – Saruman. But this is just about individual battles. In the campaign of heroes, much more, at least at the bright side: there was Erkenbrand, Boromir, and Faramir and three more hobbits from the brotherhood. And what did they also had their own unique skills, well, except the hobbits.

Huerns are good … but they cannot resist the balro

I will not engage in a listing of all types of fighters, but I will say that at different stages of the game you use units of different costs and, accordingly, of different efficiency. That is, you don’t want to, but you still have to hire the rotten gondor swordsmen and the warriors, before you have time to make all the upgrades and erect the necessary buildings to get to powerful thick trolls and huarnons. If you move a little from the cheapest soldiers, then the units of the middle scheme will stand out not only by their characteristics, but also by the abilities – passive or active, so you do not stop neglecting their help, even opening the imba. Beorns can turn into bears or heal the allied fighters, spiders paralyze their victims, and Gnomic axes of axes after upgrade can hit several goals at once.

In the presence of special pumping in units or when using special skills of the characters of the building in War of the Ring, they could light up and, unlike the same Warcraft, where the blazing flame was only an indicator of the fact that the specific building was already breathing on the incense, in the “Ring War”, the fire caused additional damage even if it was not triedOrdinary soldiers. This chip migrated to the game straight from Battle Realms. By the way, another feature that liquids moved from the previous game to the War of the Ring was the opportunity to turn the building around its axis at the moment when you only plan a place for its construction.

Gori, Gori is clear

Without upgrades in War of the Ring, you can’t go far at all, and it’s not only about additional passwords for units, but also in an elementary increase in defense and attack level. But there are a pair of such pumps that some units make the main force in the game. Elven archers can get cloaks of invisibility with a sufficient number of shooters – they demolish everything and everything. Darkness has their own analogue, though their Haradrim-killer fights in close combat, but they can also spit with poisonous darts from a distance. And the presence of this element makes two other units – rangers and ghosts that can see disguised enemies.

And here Dysbalance is opened: the archers of the elves are able to shoot all opponents even before they get to them. While the assassins will have time to incur losses before they deal with the rangers and again hide from the eyes of the enemy.

But even if you do not take into account specifically this difference, the passage of the campaign of darkness seems much more complicated than the light. Here, the weakness of the basic units, with which you initially drop the yak Zerg cursed, and the need for competent management of individuals and types of troops, which I am by no means a master, and in the end of the difference in terms of construction are also. I don’t know how it was felt in the multiplayer, but in the single, when I without much tension went through the medium-sized campaign of light, I expected that the darkness of mileage was the same with the same success, but the college king showed me his bold ghostly fact and I had to lift my lifting my bunes-out.

Spiders – one of the most effective units of darkness. In one of the episodes of the campaign, it was possible to optionally find the shelob itself, but unfortunately it was not awarded to the management of it

For which I always loved a single campaign in strategies is that you constantly have some new goals, some conditions for passing a particular mission. Moreover, in the "War of the Ring" in some missions, after completing certain tasks, the map and the card were expanded. There were no such luxury in standard scenarios with bots or other players.

Outside the story campaign, the game offered several modes: “survival” in which it was necessary to destroy the enemy under the root;“Destruction”, where it was enough to reduce only the enemy’s buildings with the ground;An “hunger” was an interesting regime – a mountain of resources was awarded to each team, but there were no wells and iron on the map, and it was also necessary to break the enemy. On missions in the main campaign, it was possible to find special places of force that gave certain bonuses, but there their search and capture was not at all obligatory, but in the solitary mode of “control” they became the main goal of the player, thanks to the places of force, special points accumulated and after the timer expired was won the one who has the most of them most of all of them.

A shot from the Gnome Catapult

And finally the "catapult" mode. In one of the initial missions of the Light campaign, Gimli had to find the ancient catapult of the gnomes and with its help to break the orcs that were going to storm the gates of Torin. This very catapult migrated to the unique mode of the game: in fact, it was a standard mode in which it was necessary to break all the enemies, but at the same time a catapult appeared on the map, capturing which could be sent nuclear bombs to the enemy’s camp once a minute.

All the mentioned modes in the full force were playable in the multiplayer, but how well and convenient it all worked there is not known to me, because as I already said, the network game is not for me.

Absolute power

The most important and most interesting game feature in the War of the Ring was the points of force accumulating in the process of fights with the enemy. A similar system of special magical abilities, tied not to specific characters, but to the whole faction was in the “Battle of Middle -earth”, its creators clearly licked this feature with War of the Ring, twisting it a little, and yet the roots of this venture are immediately visible. In the game from Liquid Entertainment these abilities are only 5, and all of them are available to the player since the first mission. True, in order to use the 5th and the strongest, it was necessary to fight for a long time, because the glasses do not accumulate fast, and the last skill used as many as 7 units. But what was this skill! The light faction exchanged these glasses for the call of the super -powerful ancient ed, and darkness is the strong -handed Bang … Is there not too many coincidences, there were no electronics clearly at the development of the "War of the Ring", and not with one eye, but by all three!

… and 7 points down downward

The light faction could blind the enemy, depriving him of the opportunity to attack, could conjure the thorny thorns, slowing down and inflicting damage to all enemy units (by the way, if you remember the battle for the Middle -earth, this ability went to Mordora and out of the Under), there was also the ability to temporarily increase the characteristics of the heroes and finally the “Wind Manva” – a piece due to which the shooters could be connected in the near battle.throw away enemies.

It is funny that the ability to treat in this game, usually inherent in light races, went to darkness, which also could slow down the enemies forming a swamp on the battlefield, calling for helping a flock of ravens who protect Sauron’s warriors from arrows and blades, and finally stick an aura obelisk into the ground, taking over all the damage in the specified area. Personally, I most often used treatment, and I called on the old days of the balrog, of course, if glasses accumulated and I did not merge them to create black riders.

Power glasses were also used to receive new skills from heroes. That is, this was not influenced by the character level, he only increased the characteristics, namely your stock of power points and, of course, the desire to spend them on obtaining personal abilities. Each open skill, passive or active, was preserved in the hero when moving to a new mission. But there were also such skills that demanded the strength constantly. Well, at least one thing was definitely. This is the ability of the King of the Coldun to turn ordinary ghosts into names. In addition, if the hero died, his resurrection in the main building was carried out not for resources, but for the same points of strength, and the stronger the hero, the more strength it was necessary to spend.

In my opinion, the “Ring War” looks better than the Third Warcraft, of course, this is logical taking into account the fact that the first was released a year after the Blizzard game. But I am not only about the general quality, about the larger number of animations in units, about the most beautiful at the time of 2003, the grass swaying in the wind and exciting river waters. War of the Ring turned out to be much more gloomy than Warcraft III in its atmosphere, in color scheme;Almost all figures are drawn with realistic proportions, and thanks to this, the game does not look so cartoon. And this is good, at least I like this more.

I felt like a Grishnak from the film when Rohan’s riders came to the camp

Yes, in some places, on some maps the game is replete with flowers, but in general it is not so critical. But I do not forget the hacking orcs and the fact that, for example, archers in close combat do not continue to shoot at the enemy point blank, but change animation and really reflect the hand -to -hand combat.

As I said, War of the Ring and Peter Jackson’s films have nothing in common and this is another plus. The developers did not use ready -made images of heroes, voices and music, and at the same time they managed to turn their game into a fairly original project based on the Lord of the Rings. The heroes were announced excellently, like units and orders, voiced a brief description of the missions on the map of Middle -earth;And I really liked the soundtrack of the game. Maybe it’s all about nostalgia, but you just listen to the topic that plays Mirkwood in the missions of Legolas, listen to the combat track from the battle for Helmova Pad … And what is the super atmospheric title theme playing the menu and in Kirit-Gorgore.

So I have already told so many good things about the game, but there is almost not a word about the minuses, except for a small dizbalass. And the game of the game certainly has the disadvantages of the problem of elven archers. Another thing is that all these shortcomings did not particularly affect my impression of the game. War of the Ring does not have a clear construction of detachments – units are simply neatly grouped around the specified point, do not crowd, do not bump, but there is no system here. And at times, when the army begins to move, it completely turns into a continuous stream, in which all the fighters go into one row, breathing to each other in the back of the head. It happened that the new units, leaving the barracks building, gathered at one point and did not disperse until you use them. Well, and sometimes I was very strained by the balrog, too often he was stupid, unable to get close to some huarnna and begin to wave his fiery sword.

There are also bugs in the game, though not often at all, and not the fact that they were or will be at all. For example, at some point the game tightly hung in Helm Padi, and so much that I had to reload the PC. And in the mission, where Saruman for the first time leads Uruk-Hai, I decided to cheat and in advance to stick protective towers at the place of the ritual. As a result, when, following the purpose of the mission, I drove the ghosts there, the task was not counted, and I infinitely repelled the enemy attack. But this is perhaps all the problems that I personally met.

So in the end? Is War of the Ring really a “Warcraft III clone”? This is partly the place to be, but only in the same sense in which it is usually customary to talk about Diablo Clones. That is, this is not a “miserable parody” of Warcraft, this is a full -fledged product that uses traditional for RTS, including Warcraft, the basis of the gameplay, but at the same time, the guys from Liquid did not stupidly copied the works of close -up and put a shell on this skeleton, which was tailored based on the sovereign of the rings and other works of John RonaldRuela Tolkien. They brought their own unique ideas that refreshed the genre. And in what other game of 2003 you could see such a magnificent grass ..

In my opinion, the “War of the Ring” is much closer to the third Warcraft, but even to Starcraft, but again this does not make the Lovids play the “clone” of the last. The developers got a cross between Starcraft’s and their previous Battle Realms game, for some reason they simplified their previous developments for the sake of convenience and dynamics (which, by the way, sinned by Blizzard with Warcraft). But in general, I see no reason to record War of the Ring in the list of cheap imitators of Varik and discard the game from accounts. Even after so many years, I still received only pleasure and delight from this game, and I found absolutely nothing in it that could make me turn away from it.

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