Warhorse confirms that it's working on a Lord of the Rings RPG, and a new Kingdom Come Deliverance game

I am a secret Lord of the Rings obsessive. I can recite far too many scenes from the movies, and dragged my partner to a cinema watch-a-thon of the entire, uncut trilogy. I spent my childhood in the bloodied shoes of Shadow of Mordor's Talion, and I've been silent hoping we'll see another Lord of the Rings game with the same gravity as Monolith's classic series. While recent LoTR games have failed to wow, rumors have swirled that Kingdom Come Deliverance developer Warhorse was working on a Middle-earth-set game. Those alone were enough to get excited about, but the developer has now confirmed that they're true.

In a Wednesday, May 20 post on X, Warhorse writes that "You might have heard the rumours, it's time to reveal what we are working on." It goes on to confirm that the team is developing "an open world Middle-earth RPG," as well as "a new Kingdom Come adventure." Whether the latter is Kingdom Come Deliverance 3 is yet to be seen, but either way, my Wednesday just got off to a hell of a start.

There's unfortunately nothing else in the post - Warhorse states that it'll "tell [us] more when the time is right." But I'm watching the likes and reposts surge as I write this, so I'm pretty sure that people are excited.

While Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 took the gaming community by storm last year, with Lowell awarding it a coveted 9/10 in our review, it's been a rough few years for Lord of the Rings-inspired games.

Return to Moria, while rated 80% on Steam, failed to have the splash that the team likely hoped for. Cozy Stardew-style farming game Tales of the Shire, while at 82%, had a particularly rough development cycle, with staff claiming that they were working under crunch conditions. I don't think I really need to talk about the infamous Gollum game, either, even if I did watch an entire playthrough of it out of macabre curiosity.

With the 25th anniversary of the film trilogy arriving earlier this year (yes, we're old), now's the perfect time to bring the franchise back in a big way, especially ahead of The Hunt for Gollum. Given Warhorse's prowess in the open-world, medieval RPG department, there's no better studio to hand the franchise over to. I'm excited to see what comes next, but in the meantime, I'm feeling the itch to return to LOTRO. If you never hear from me again, don't send help.