And again a bit more regulary and therefore shorter, the first newsletter for November 2020. Have a nice read!
Activity at modding
Starting with the Total War series and here as usual with Medieval II: Total War: Kingdoms. The developers of Silmarillion: Total War showed off more units for the Haladin as well as ingame screenshots of the House of the Harp and community submitted screenshots.
At Castellan's Visual Enhancemets & Overhaul for Divide And Conquer the third upgrade tier for the Rozadan units is finished and Castellan started working on Gondorians.
At the TMC discord R3AP3R presented some recent images of the Munentaen (Hillmen/Dunmen) units at Conflicts of Eriador.
And at Third Age: Fall of Arnor the Men of Arthedain joined the ranks of the available units.
The hype is real for Total War: Wainriders for the game Rome: Total War. Two more articles with faction previews are now available, introducing you to the Tribes of the Harad and the League of the North. For both you can also find a bunch of screenshots and videos now. And at the moment I have been writting down this newsletter they uploaded preview images of the Avari Roster.
At Total War: Rise of Mordor for Total War: Attila you can find new unit cards for Lindon and the new models for the Lords of Westernesse which are having masks since they are just taking covid precautions as I have been told in the comments ^^
The unit card reminded me a bit of the art style I have seen by Sara_Temer, not sure if it's the same artist. At latter ones mod Last Alliance: Total War for Total War: Shogun 2 the Elves are getting a bunch of new equipment. A little patch, Leaders of Harad and the Wild Lands, has also been released which you might want to look up if you haven't already.
At Mount & Blade: Warband Kael_ seems to mock a bit the followers by showing screenshots but not releasing the new version of the mod Persistent Lord of the Rings (PLotR).
At Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord there appeared a second little development blog for the modding project Silmarillion which informs a bit about the troop tree design approach. You can have a full read here.
Meanwhile the developers of Kingdoms of Arda are playing the modding game with a long term strategy which I think I have figured out now. MacbethTheTyrant is releasing multiple step-by-step tutorials about how to create new scenes. And since these are to date basically the only available tutorial about scening in Bannerlord, every single modder who wants to do scening is forced to watch a LotR themed tutorial. Perhaps some people are then jumping on the train of the development team, we will see ^^
Coming to the BfME series and here Battle for Middle-earth II: Rise of the Witch King. At the modding project Age of the Ring the developers have written down an article about Overhauling the AI. It's an interesting read about how they make the AI more rational and thus the life of the players harder. They also showed off two videos, one with the voice acting of Kaze as the Elvenking and one more with a showmatch of the Woodland Realm in battle against Dol Guldur.
At the Bfme mini mod Mordor got a new spellbook.
And the developers of An Edain SubMod presented new buildings for Gondor, so we can rest for a moment of the many Khand images ^^
For Wars of the North an early access version is now available which includes a Rohan fortress expansion, more bug fixes and some adjustements, you can find it here.
And at the RR_Mod bilbothehobbit uploaded screenshots of new Rohan and Elven houses and a new Rohan spellbook power.
And at the end of todays modding news you can enjoy a quick look at the creation of some of sounds and music of the modding project Legends of Middle-Earth 5.0 for the game Age of Mythology: The Titans.
Tolkien in games outside the modding area
MikeTheEmperor announced that he will do weekly streams, always Saturdays at 21 PM (GMT +2). So if you are following the development of The Ring Roleplay Project - TRRP, have a short read here for the Twitch channel you need to watch.
The developers of The Battle for Middle-Earth: Reforged showed off meanwhile their impressive model for Barad-dur.
That's it for the first half of November 2020. I hope it was a nice and informative overview for you about the happenings in the Tolkien Modding Community!
As always, should I have forgotten to show off the recent progress of some of your favourite mod teams, don't forget to comment about them. They will be mentioned then in the next news article. Feel also free to join the Tolkien Modding Community Discordapp.com
Best regards,
Earendil
Once again thanks for the update!
Always welcome ^^
Just to make things clear.
I am not mocking PLotRs followers, I have already made several statements that as long as we do not have possibility to host all the servers we need, the release does not make sense. At the moment we are able to maintain only half of them.
Had it been a typical multiplayer mod, it would be released. But in PLotRs case it just would not work, as the whole gameplay type is completely different. Having multiple servers, connected to each other, is the only way to create Middle Earth of reasonable size in Warband.
And going for a regional approach until you can set up more servers is not a possibility? A full scale release will always be hard to manage, starting little is sometimes the key to success.
Disabling some servers would force me to change the quests and connections between the other ones. On the other hand, disabling any of the dungeons/enemy maps would make it much harder for players to gain experience. Currently it is well optimised.
In fact, full scale Middle Earth would mean around 60 servers. I am planning to expand it to such extent if MMO formula becomes successful.
I love this community so much!