LOTR Story

It's a long story, but if I had to sum it up in a few words I'd say between the New Line Cinema contract (what with the limited time window), the Tolkien Estate (further limiting dev time), & EA buying us 2/3rds of the way into development for $700 mil things got stupid. The game had to ship by a set date due to all the contracts. Don't want to bad mouth anyone, but there was a person in upper management who shouldn't have had the level of creative control they did. Sean Soucy was great. The level designers and technical designers were awesome, but large scale battles didn't work well on huge maps. The focus was entirely on single player and the MP engineers were given free rein to do what they wanted because design didn't prioritize it. In the last months when the new EA brass saw single player wasn't winning hearts and minds in focus groups tests everything changed so the focus was on MP. A bunch of guys from another internal secret project came on board to re-tune the game mechanics. Thanks to the MP team and all the other engineers being pros we wrested control to fix the game to get it ready for the drop dead date. Normally games don't get so much resistance from creative to make it better. TLDR: management tried to stick too hard to the Battlefront formula making everyone's lives harder.