Guardians of Middle-earth arrived on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on December 4, 2012, sold through the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade. A retail package followed, bundling a download voucher and a Season Pass for future downloadable content. Windows players got it on August 29, 2013. It is a multiplayer online battle arena game, developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, and it is built on a bet: that the MOBA belongs on a couch, not a desk.
Trailer, via CoinOpTV.
Gandalf, Sauron and Radagast in the Pool
The setting is Middle-earth, drawn from The Lord of the Rings with tie-ins to the film series of the same name and to The Hobbit films. Guardians of Middle-earth keeps the standard multiplayer online battle arena frame — two teams, lanes, a base to break — and leans hard on team coordination. Ten players split five against five. The roster runs to thirty-six guardians pulled from The Lord of the Rings, among them Gandalf, Sauron and Radagast. You pick, you group, you push.
What separates Guardians of Middle-earth from most other MOBA titles is the platform it aims at. Monolith built for home console rather than desktop, chasing what the game describes as a “cinematic” experience. That is the whole pitch, and it is also the whole risk. A multiplayer online battle arena lives on precision and quick reads, and a controller is not a mouse. The genre’s deep bench had already settled on desktop. Guardians of Middle-earth asked those players to move.
The GameSpy Shutdown
Guardians of Middle-earth was one of the many games afflicted by the GameSpy server shutdown. The servers are no longer operational, and the game is no longer available on the PlayStation Network. That is the end of the story for a title whose entire reason to exist was ten people in one arena.
Here is the shape of its life, plainly:
| Date | Platform | Release route |
|---|---|---|
| December 4, 2012 | PlayStation 3 | PlayStation Network |
| December 4, 2012 | Xbox 360 | Xbox Live Arcade |
| August 29, 2013 | PC (Microsoft Windows) | Later release |
The retail package sat alongside those digital launches, carrying the download voucher and the Season Pass.
What the Roster Actually Bought
Three things decide whether a console multiplayer online battle arena works, in order of how much they matter:
- The roster — thirty-six guardians is a wide pool, and Gandalf, Sauron and Radagast give it range across heroes and villains.
- Team coordination — the game’s own emphasis, and the thing that separates a win from a loss.
- The controller — the bet Monolith made.
The modes reach further than a straight five-versus-five: single player, multiplayer, co-operative, and massively multiplayer online, with a bird’s-eye isometric view over the action. The themes are action and fantasy, and the genres stack real time strategy and strategy against hack and slash, arcade, and multiplayer online battle arena.
The published critical score sits at 7.3 out of 10, an IGDB critic aggregate across eight outlets.
The problem the record shows is that the idea and the audience never lined up. The players who understood lanes and pushes were on desktop, where the game eventually showed up a year late. The players on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 got a competitive arena that asked for coordination from people holding controllers.
The GameSpy shutdown is the detail that gets remembered. A game that needs ten people in one arena dies when the arena closes. Guardians of Middle-earth needed exactly that, and the servers went dark.
What is left is a decent argument that the multiplayer online battle arena could have worked on a console, made by people who did not get to finish proving it.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
