Oh my gosh, it's finally happening. After years of social media posts pining for a Lord of the Rings game where you can just be a cozy hobbit, it looks like someone's finally making it. That someone is Wētā Workshop, in partnership with publisher Private Division, with the two having just teased a new game called Tales of the Shire.
We don't know much about Tales of the Shire just yet beyond the tease, but just from what we saw today we know that it's explicitly cozy, and involves hobbits somehow. We can gather a bit more from what we know of the Wētā x Private Division partnership, though. They first announced it a year ago, at the time stating only they were developing a game set in the Middle-Earth universe. For those concerned about lore ownership though after Embracer Group's acquisition of Middle-Earth Enterprises, fear not. The pair stated at the time that they had "licensed the literary works of the series, providing Wētā Workshop with the broadest creative license to interpret the underlying lore of the books." That means it sounds like when it comes to hobbit lore, there are no limits. We also learned that it would be "so different from what fans have played previously" which makes sense given the genre.
If you're unfamiliar with Wētā Workshop, don't assume it's an inexperienced studio. Wētā Workshop is a New Zealand-based special effects company that, among many other projects, helped produce props and set pieces for Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films. Since then, it's worked on numerous popular projects such as Avatar: The Way of the Water, M3gan, and Cocaine Bear just recently.
Wētā's video games division was founded in 2014 and has been responsible for a number of VR and AR-focused projects thus far. According to a press release though, this will be a more traditional game: Tales of the Shire is coming to console and PC in 2024. We aren't getting any further details until next year when the game is fully revealed though, so we'll have to wait a little longer for our hobbit dreams to come true.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
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