A Lord of the Rings RPG Buried by Skyrim Gets a Second Chance — and Its Former Director Says It Was Always Worth One
A former WB Games design director says he argued against releasing The Lord of the Rings: War in the North two weeks before Skyrim — and was overruled. Now, fifteen years later, the game is back with a new port, and Christian Allen is glad to see it get a fair hearing at last.
Allen, who has 24 years in the games industry and was a design director at WB Games during the period War in the North was originally released, told Video Games Chronicle that he "argued vociferously" against the release timing when the decision was made. War in the North shipped on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in November 2011, just 15 days before Bethesda released The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — a juggernaut that went on to sell over 60 million copies across every platform it touched. VGC
The result, according to Allen: the game received "about one review" the week it launched and had almost no marketing visibility. He credits the development to the team at Snowblind Studios, a studio that later merged with Monolith Productions in 2012. Allen himself did not work on the title directly.
He suggested the release timing was likely driven by quarterly revenue pressure — the need to ship the game within Warner Bros' then-current fiscal period rather than waiting for a quieter window where it would not be steamrolled by a genre-defining competitor. That tension between production readiness and financial calendar deadlines is one many in the industry will recognise.
The game now has its chance. The Lord of the Rings: War in the North — Legacy Edition, developed and published by Aspyr under licence from Warner Bros, is available now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2, Switch and PC at US$19.99. VGC
The Legacy Edition adds more than a fresh coat of paint. It includes 60fps support — except on the original Switch — along with enemy lock-on, auto-saves, extra save slots, and improved enemy AI with visible health, mana and EXP bars. These are the kind of quality-of-life features that the original 2011 release lacked, and they address some of the friction points that held the game back in reviews at the time.
War in the North was a co-op action RPG — a game where players team up to fight through Middle-earth's northern front during the events of the main trilogy, playing as characters who never appeared in the books' core story. It was built by Snowblind, the studio behind the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games, which gave it a pedigree in the dungeon-crawling co-op space that many players missed entirely when it landed in Skyrim's shadow.
For fans who never got around to it — or never knew it existed — the Legacy Edition is a low-cost entry point. And for Allen, it is vindication of a argument he lost a decade and a half ago.
