Amazon Games boss Christoph Hartmann has provided an update on the ongoing development of the studio's Lord of the Rings MMO, and it sounds like the project is still very early on in its development.
In an interview with IGN, Hartmann says the Lord of the Rings MMO is "still early" and that the project is still "trying to find the hook". Hartmann says he and Amazon don't want to "go and do the same thing over", but instead to "find a fresh twist" on the MMO genre.
He says Amazon and the development team are still searching for "what could be the thing which is different to all the other games out there", so it sounds like it's going to be a very long time before we actually get to play the company's Lord of the Rings MMO.
We first learned about the upcoming Lord of the Rings MMO back in May last year, when it was revealed that the development team behind the somewhat ill-fated New World would be working on it.
This is, it should be noted, distinct from the project that Amazon reportedly canceled over a contract dispute with Tencent back in 2021, although since neither game was technically officially unveiled, the new title could certainly be using some of the DNA of that canceled project.
In any case, Hartmann also provides an update on the new Tomb Raider game in the IGN interview. He says Crystal Dynamics is "fairly sheltered" from what IGN calls the "recent turmoil" with the developer's parent company Embracer Group.
Hartmann acknowledges that making a new Tomb Raider is a "huge, huge task" with a "high" bar, but he says "things are progressing". That's arguably not much of an update, but hey, it's nice to know the game hasn't been canned.
Amazon Games' boss also says some...interesting things
It's not just updates about games that Hartmann provides in the IGN interview, though. He's also got some...interesting (some might say "questionable") things to say about the gaming industry as a whole.
One rather intriguing comment Hartmann makes is that the gaming industry doesn't "really have acting", a sentiment with which I'm sure the industry's voice actors and motion capture professionals would vehemently disagree.
Hartmann is making these comments as part of a wider point about generative AI, which he says can "help us to have new gameplay ideas" and take away "the boring parts" of game development. Hmm.
Elsewhere in the interview, Hartmann acknowledges that with both New World and Lost Ark, Amazon enjoyed "some promising success", but that people quickly rotated "back to their evergreen franchise".
He goes on to say, however, that having such a franchise is "the whole point" for Amazon, because it's a "larger than life company" and because smaller franchises would "not be interesting". He also says Amazon's not "in here to try it out and do some cute game development".
If you want to read the full interview with Hartmann, which has some interesting insights into his approach to managing Amazon Games as a whole, you can do so here.
