The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth II
- Platform: PC, Xbox 360
- Published by: EA Games
- Developed by: EA LA
- Release Date: Jul 5, 2006
- Genre: Strategy
- Multiplayer: Yes
- Online: Yes
The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth II Xbox 360 Preview
-- April 13, 2006 by: Chris Remo
Real-time strategy games haven't exactly had the most illustrious life on consoles. While console first person shooters have managed to overcome their analog stick roadblocks largely by piggybacking on the insane popularity of a few key games, the versatility and speed of a mouse has never really been adequately reproduced in a console RTS. A team from Electronic Arts LA, headed up by Louis Castle, is looking to change that. Castle has plenty of know-how in the real-time strategy realm, being a co-founder of Westwood Studios, the studio responsible for the legendary Command & Conquer franchise. EA LA is bringing The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth II, currently a PC-only real-time strategy title, to Xbox 360. At a recent Microsoft event, I had the chance to get a demo from Castle and some brief hands on time with the game to see how this ambitious effort is shaping up.
The first two iterations of EA LA's Battle for Middle Earth series has been well received on PC. As Castle was quick to point out, the games make use of EA's extensive Lord of the Rings license, which now includes both Tolkien's original source material as well as Peter Jackson's recent films. (Devout Lord of the Rings fans may recall that the Tolkien book license was previously held by Vivendi.) This allows the games to feature locations and battles from the entire Middle-Earth mythos, while still capitalizing on the popular and easily recognizable visual style of the films. Broad in scope, Battle for Middle-Earth II has campaign sets for both the good and evil factions, tied together with a Risk-style tactical game between missions. It is of the universally recognized resource-gathering, army-building real-time strategy segment, and is populated with a wide range of unit types and environments, including powerful hero units. This is all a tall order to bring to a console, but Castle explained that the crucial issue of accessible control is something with which EA LA has been grappling long before it was decided to bring this particular game to Microsoft's next generation platform. He and his team started from scratch, trying to devise a comfortable and ubiquitous way to play a real-time strategy game on a 
console, rather than simply trying to port an existing RTS over right off the bat. When that goal had been achieved, it was then decided to use the interface techniques they had devised on a game--and that game turned out to be Battle for Middle-Earth II.
Many of the control mechanics are fundamentally different on the Xbox 360 of the game than they are on basically any PC RTS. There has been no attempt to recreate the experience of an actual "pointer" that floats around the screen in a similar fashion to the cursor of a mouse on PC. Instead, there is a fixed reticle in the middle of the screen, and to move that you must move the camera along with it. Panning the camera is done with the left analog stick, and zooming in and out with the right analog stick. Individual units can be selected with this reticle, but because of the way the camera is tied to unit selection, all of the units on screen can be block selected. This is analogous to using the mouse to select a group of units by clicking and dragging to define two corners of a rectangle. You can also sweep over specific units with the reticle to add multiple invididual units to your selection. Another button allows filtering by unit type, so you can easily select all of your elves, or cave trolls, or Saurons, or whatever. The nice thing about the various types of unit selections is that they are all generic verbs, which means they can be intuitively combined in basically any way. You can select all the units within your camera view, combine the add unit command with the filtering command, and add all of your archers to the current selection. You could select everything in the army, remove all the cavalry units from the selection, then sweep over three specific cavalry units to add those particular horsemen into the selection while leaving the rest in place. There aren't actually very many buttons used for the different methods of unit selection, so once your hands are used to those several commands, it becomes fairly straightforward to grab the particular soldiers you need.
Of course, you'll want to actually do something with all those units you've had so much fun selecting. The 360 controller's A button is used for most of the game's basic interactions, as well as being the main unit selection button. It is context sensitive, so if you've got some warriors selected and the reticle is positioned over empty ground, pressing it will have those units move to the specified location; if it's positioned over enemy units, it will have those units attack. You can map both units and buildings to bookmarks (ie, hotkeys on the PC), and these bookmarked units can be called up and fully manipulated without ever having to actually physically return to these units. This means you can build units remotely if the necessary building is bookmarked and set a rally point to where the camera is currently positioned, resulting, all without moving the camera anywhere other than where you want the units in question to end up. Any other operations can be conducted remotely using the same method, if the required units or buildings are assigned to bookmarks. Advanced building operations are accessed by pressing the right trigger while the reticle is positioned over buildings, if the building is not bookmarked. From that menu, you can build units, upgrade the buildings, set rally points, and so on. These menus are organized into branching trees that can be easily manipulated with the left analog stick.
In addition to descrete bookmarks, BFME2 has a few automated selection options. You can always snap the camera back to focus on the currently selected unit. The game remembers your last selected building, so no matter where you are on the battlefield you'll be able to operate that building remotely as if it were bookmarked. There is something of a persistent dynamic bookmark that selects the newest non-occupied worker unit, so if you have unmined resources or need something built, it's easy to attend to the situation. If something happens that needs your immediate attention, such as an attack on a town, a button press will instantly snap the camera to that location.
As somebody who has been playing real-time strategy games on PC since their transformation into their present form in the mid 90s, it was unavoidable that using a console controller in an RTS situation would be a struggle for me at first. And it was, even here, but after only a few minutes my aiming awkwardness and constant accidental zooming gave way to greater dexterity with the controls. Basically everything to which one is accustomed to doing in a PC RTS is easily available with one or two button presses, it's just done in a different way. By far the most useful thing about EA LA's control scheme is the way that actions are broken down into fundamental component parts, each of which can be combined with one another to produce a variety of more complex actions. There is probably no way to ever replicate on a console the vast number of instant actions afforded by a full keyboard without resorting to plugging a keyboard into the machine, and with the possible future exception of the Revolution controller it's unlikely a standard console input method will ever achieve the speed and precision of a mouse. Really, though, that's not a big deal. As Castle stated a few times, the team started from scratch attempting to build a viable RTS control method for consoles, rather than trying to specifically replicate the PC RTS experience. Even though the game contains all the content of the PC version, he explained, it comes off as a fundamentally different experience on the Xbox 360, as it probably should. Like other Xbox 360 titles, Battle for Middle Earth II supports widescreen 720p resolution, and there's Dolby 5.1 support for those with the home entertainment setup to handle it.
Speaking of presentation, the game is quite nice in the visual department. It faithfully translates the graphical fidelity and scale of the PC version over to Xbox 360. There is frequently a lot happening both within the camera's view and elsewhere, without any noticeable framerate drops or graphical compromises, at least during my demo. It was hard to get a good feel for how the game sounds in the preview environment, but Hugo Weaving (or his voice, at least) is present to narrate the player's actions. There is, of course, a full range of achievements applicable to the single-player and multiplayer modes for those of you intent on beefing up your Xbox Live Gamerscore.
Four-player online support is present in the game by way of Live, and along with that functionality come a few new online multiplayer modes not offered in the PC version of the game. There's Capture & Hold, a contest to clock the most time in control of several capture points; King of the Hill, a contest to clock the most time in control of a single capture point; Resource Race, rather obviously a race to build up a given number of particular resources; and Hero vs. Hero, which has players use only hero units to compete in various gameplay objectives. The traditional gather-tons-of-resources-and-build-guys-to-crush-your-enemy mode also carries over from the PC game.
Battle for Middle-Earth II is a noble effort at bringing to a console platform a genre largely deemed to be unsuitable for console platforms. From what I've seen of the game, it is turning out quite well, with a polished experience that controls quite intuitively after only a few minutes of adjustment. While it's unlikely to bring die hard RTS fans over to Xbox 360 in droves, that's not so much the intention. For players looking for a robust RTS experience while sitting in the comfort of the living room, this looks to be the best option yet, and future endeavors to put real-time strategy games on consoles are likely to borrow many elements from this one.
EA LA's The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth II will be released for Xbox 360 this summer. The game was released for PC on February 28, 2006.
