Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game revolves quite heavily around the social aspect of meals. What inspired Weta Workshop to focus on meals as one of the game’s core gameplay mechanics?

Quite simply, our main source of inspiration was the books. As you delve into Tolkien’s stories, you very quickly discover that Hobbits are passionate about food, they typically consume seven meals a day! This firmly pointed us to making shared meals a core part of the gameplay. We had a Tolkien scholar on our team to guide us in terms of what would fit both in the game, and in the world of Middle-earth. We often say that “food is love” when talking about Tales of the Shire.

"We often say that “food is love” when talking about Tales of the Shire."

Shared meals are also one of the main ways your character builds relationships in the game, which allows you to unlock new decorations, gifts and generally progress. The meals also tie together the wonderful foraging and gardening aspects players can explore.

We put a huge amount of thought into the cooking mechanics; players need to tailor their dishes to each guest’s liking. Do they like their soup smooth or chunky? What will you use for the seasonings? Do they prefer sweet or sour? Within the game you can source your ingredients in a variety of ways, by foraging or fishing, trading with townsfolk, completing tales or growing them in your garden.

The recipe collection was really fun to work on. One of our developers was previously a chef, so we called on them to help with making the dishes look great so that there is a realism to what you get to cook in the game.

"While shared meals are important, it’s equally okay if you just want to wander around and explore."

In saying all that, Tales of the Shire is low stakes, and all about creating a sense of warmth and relaxation. While shared meals are important, it’s equally okay if you just want to wander around and explore. If you want to cozy up in your Hobbit Hole and decorate all day, you can do that too. Everything is matched with the Hobbit way of life. They don’t long for adventure; they exist to indulge in the simple pleasures of food, friends and fellowship.

What can you tell us about your post-launch plans for Tales of the Shire?

We are currently enjoying taking in feedback from our community of players and seeing what aspects of the game they really delight in

How was the development of the game affected by the sale of Private Division?

We stayed focused on developing Tales of the Shire and felt supported by everyone who has worked on this game.

As its name might imply, Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game makes use of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth as seen and read about in the Lord of the Rings series as its setting. The game takes place at around the same time as The Fellowship of the Rings starts, with Gandalf seemingly being on his way to Hobbiton to meet Frodo and Bilbo Baggins for the latter’s birthday. As he travels through the Shire, Gandalf comes across a Hobbit that seems to be taking a nap near the village of Bywater, and that’s where you come in.

This napping Hobbit is your character, and after some time spent in designing your player, Gandalf offers you a ride to the place you’re going to start calling home: Bywater. When it comes to the overall story of Tales of the Shire, this is about it. There are a bunch of smaller stories that play out as you spend time among the various other Hobbits that also call Bywater their homes, but otherwise, you don’t really get any more narrative that would push you forward aside from the tutorial. In fact, there isn’t much of a narrative for the rest of the game at all, aside from a few early bits that involve the Hobbits of Bywater trying to figure out whether or not Bywater qualifies as a village.

"There are a bunch of smaller stories that play out as you spend time among the various other Hobbits that also call Bywater their homes."

Generally speaking, the narrative is only really there to start you off in your new idyllic village life, and aside from a few visits by the Hobbiton Assessor that allows you to eventually upgrade your own house, there isn’t much of a narrative string to pull you along. Rather, the generally relaxed atmosphere as well as the fact that life in the Shire largely feels like a vacation are the key things that will likely make you play more. Ultimately, however, it all comes down to whether or not you actually enjoy the gameplay in Tales of the Shire.

When it comes to gameplay, just about every aspect of Tales of the Shire has been designed around its food system. Aside from interior decorating, every activity you partake in is going to result in you either unlocking new recipes, or getting your hands on more ingredients for all of them. This includes everything from foraging, fishing, farming, and even completing quests. Even the social system feeds into this; while you can give the villagers of Bywater various gifts to improve your relationship with them, most of your social interactions with your friends revolve around meals.

How it works is quite simple, and interestingly, also quite Hobbit-like. When you want to hang out with a couple of villagers, you can invite them to a shared meal that you can host at a venue of your choice. After an in-game day, the Hobbits you invited (by writing them a letter, mind you), will have sent you letters with their RSVP that then also tells you what kind of food they’re in the mood for on that day. It is then up to you to gather the ingredients and use the relatively complex cooking system to whip up a meal.

"When it comes to gameplay, just about every aspect of Tales of the Shire has been designed around its food system."

As for the cooking system itself, it tends to involve a number of steps even after you’ve gotten your hands on the right ingredients and the appropriate seasonings. All food in Tales of the Shire can have a number of properties related to how they taste and how they feel to chew on. Depending on how you go about with the various steps involved in cooking—from chopping up vegetables to deciding on whether or not to fry them before mixing them together in a bowl—will help define how smooth or chunky your dish will end up being. And similarly, the ingredients you use, be it a specific fish or vegetable, along with your choice of seasonings will help define how it will taste, be it salty, bitter, spicy or sweet.

To throw in an extra bit of complication over this fantastic way to become friends with others, each NPC Hobbit also tends to have dishes that they absolutely love. For example, the grumpy old Hobbit that loves to fish absolutely wants fish cakes. When you invite them over for a shared meal, they might be in the mood for something salty or bitter. This will help you narrow down on what kind of fish would be ideal to use to make cakes for this Hobbit. As you become better friends with the Bywater community, you’ll start to learn more and more about what they like and what they dislike. Thankfully, you don’t have to keep all of these things memorised either; there’s a fairly robust journal that helps you track your relationships with other Hobbits, as well as other things, like recipes for meals and how different ingredients might taste.

To help you along with your endeavours in making new friends by cooking nice feasts for them, there are a few activities to partake in. Foraging is the simplest one; butterflies you spot as you roam around Bywater will guide you to different ingredients. These butterflies are colour-coded as well; yellow butterflies, for instance, will help you find seasonings that you can forage for, like mustard flowers, while white butterflies will lead you to mushrooms. Fishing and gardening, on the other hand, are a little bit more involved.

"To help you along with your endeavours in making new friends by cooking nice feasts for them, there are a few activities to partake in."

Fishing has a simple minigame involved, requiring you to pull your fishing line against the fish you’ve got on the hook while also reeling it in, all before your line breaks. It’s not a particularly complicated fishing minigame, and largely falls in line with others of the genre. What makes the fishing more involved, however, is the fact that the kinds of fish you can catch are defined by a number of things, from time of day, to location on the map, and even the weather.

Gardening, at face value, just involves you putting down some seeds in a planter and remembering to water them once a day. Things do get a bit more complicated when you start figuring out how to raise your yields, however. Aside from dealing with the fact that most of the plants you can grow tend to be seasonal, the plants you’re growing can also be affected by other plants growing in the same planter. These effects can be positive or negative, depending on the seeds, and good use of mixing up crops tends to reward you with excellent yields.

All of these activities also have a few smaller stories that can be progressed through by joining various clubs associated with them throughout Bywater. As you progress through these clubs by completing simple objectives, you also start getting your hands on more advanced gear that can, for example, allow you to cook more complex dishes with more depth of flavour and more complicated textures. Clubs are, generally speaking, more excuses to bring you back to Tales of the Shire.

"Gardening, at face value, just involves you putting down some seeds in a planter and remembering to water them once a day."

Ultimately, what makes Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game interesting is how well it is actually able to make use of its source material. There is an understanding of the life of a Hobbit displayed in the game that is seldom really explored outside of the opening chapters of a few of Tolkien’s books, and some of their appendices. An excellent example of this is the fact that there’s no sprint button in Tales of the Shire. But there is a “merrily skip” button, which allows you to frolic your way across Bywater without really getting any movement speed benefits. This generally encompasses what the game is ultimately about.

Tales of the Shire isn’t an objective-driven game. Rather, it’s a game that you might want to visit every now and then to take a break from some of the heavier titles you might find yourself playing. What makes the game particularly great is that there isn’t really any time pressure to do anything aside from just chill out and enjoy a vacation in the Shire. The game is particularly even more enjoyable if you’re already a fan of Tolkien’s works. The only real downside here is that there isn’t really much to chew on when it comes to story. You’re here for a vacation more than anything else.

This game was reviewed on PC.

One of the biggest roadblocks for Weta Workshop was the fact that the studio had previously only worked on projects for augmented reality system Magic Leap, and this experience didn’t quite translate well into making commercial AA games. This started leading into issues like the studio not having much of a throughline for the title when it came to the core gameplay loops, and instead just having “a handful of disparate quests and minigames”.

The senior leadership also had its own problems, where it looked at game development as being not different from working on film. This led to a lack of investment in senior talent and resources for the projects, and programming and design departments ended up being understaffed.

Milestones tend to be quite important when it comes to game development, as they ultimately lead to a project taking shape and give publishers a thorough look at the studio’s progress. However, Weta Workshop ended up chasing the milestones rather than developing the core game. This led to quite a few features and ideas to get cut, since the project was internally constantly chasing milestones. One such feature was a Hobbit’s waistcoat bursting open after a feast. The buttons from these waistcoats would have been a form of currency that players could find and trade for more items.

“We were always chasing after the next milestone and the next milestone, and the timelines we were given were near impossible,” said an employee who had worked on the project for a few years.

The fact that milestones were being prioritised above everything else also led to problems in the game’s code; the code base was also described by an employee as a “a pile of dogs***”. Refactoring the code also suffered because of a lack of time, and leadership encouraged pushing code refactoring efforts to later on down the road rather than hire senior programmers who could do this work.

The departure of studio director Amie Wolken in 2023 from Weta Workshop also had adverse effects on the team’s morale. The role being taken up by former 2K Australia head Tony Lawrence brought in an “instantaneous” shift in the studio’s overall atmosphere, according to one employee. “It was like the air stilled, you could feel it, and morale slowly started to crumble from there on,” they said.

Since Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game was being published by 2K’s indie publishing label Private Division, the turmoil that company went through also had effects on Weta Workshop. The report describes an overall atmosphere of tension and low morale following Private Division’s troubles.

There have also been issues with “crunch” during the development of Tales of the Shire—the act of forcing developers to work through extended periods of overtime, as well as a general spike in working hours. “It was a systemic problem,” said one experienced developer. “It was a resourcing problem and general mismanagement of the project.”

Some of the staff members on the project had said that senior leadership put pressure on the developers to work long hours in order to hit deadlines. One employee also said that they felt “a little bit gaslit” when the leadership would then tell its developers that not meeting these deadlines would raise concern over the long-term sustainability of Weta Workshop as a game development studio.

Employees have also noted that, owing to the studio’s model where employees could bank extra hours that they had worked. “I do not see our studio as a crunch studio,” said one employee. However, another noted that this led to problems where the time staff members took off wasn’t tracked well enough.

“There was no ‘crunch’ during the development of Tales of the Shire,” said the studio’s chief marketing officer Jessica Wallace. “We extended deadlines to prioritize the well-being of our team, and all staff worked under New Zealand employment agreements, which ensure fair and adequate compensation for all hours worked.”

The studio’s morale would be hit even further thanks to a round of lay-offs back in October 2024, with the developers being told that the decision was made to “provide the studio with long-term sustainability”. Comparisons were drawn by staff members with trials from Hunger Games, with one noting that coming to work after the lay-offs “felt like coming to a funeral.”

The report has also noted that work on a DLC for Tales of the Shire was paused all the way back in February, and there is currently no assurance that the game will end up getting any updates after its launch. General manager of product at Weta Workshop said that the publisher would be giving the studio partial payment for work that has already been done on DLC, but “all post-launch content decisions have been delayed until the games in market performance is determined.”

Currently, the fate of Weta Workshop’s game development business is up in the air, with the report noting that documents it has seen indicate that Lawrence will be pushing the studio into a “work for hire creative services business”. This would essentially turn the studio into a support studio for other major companies working on games.

Despite these troubles, some employees have also noted that they felt immense pride at having worked at Weta Workshop, going on to call it a highlight of their careers. “The personal pride I have felt about this company is just completely tarnished,” said a former employee.

Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game is coming to PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch today.

Suffice it to say, they’re fairly manageable, at least on the lower end. At the very minimum, you need an Intel Core i5-7600K or AMD Ryzen 3 1200, 16 GB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 (4 GB), an AMD Radeon R9 270X (4 GB) or an Intel Arc A580 (8 GB) for 1080p/30 FPS at Very Low settings.

The recommended requirements include a Core i5-10600 or Ryzen 5 8400F, 16 GB RAM, and a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (8 GB) or Radeon RX 6750 XT (12 GB) for 1080p/60 FPS at High settings. Of course, the requirements for 1440p and 4K resolution alongside the highest settings have yet to be revealed. But at least you’ll only need three GB of installation space, which is impressive.

Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of The Rings Game will also be launching for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks.

The company is seemingly comprised of former Annapurna Interactive staff members, along with a few former employees of Private Division. Bloomberg’s Jason Schrier has also commented on the development, confirming that the new publisher is made up largely of former Annapurna Interactive employees.

Currently, along with Beast of Reincarnation, Fictions also lists LEGO Party among the titles it is publishing. Beast of Reincarnation was unveiled back in June with a trailer. The title, being developed by Pokemon developer Game freak, will revolve around themes of the creation of life, and how it comes into conflict with the march of technology. It is slated for release on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2026.

Reports of ex-Annapurna Interactive staff members wanting to take over ownership of Private Division along with Take-Two Interactive wanting to sell it off first came about all the way back in January. At the time, Private Division was believed to have been bought by Texas-based equity firm Haveli Investments, who then hired ex-Annapurna staff members to run the publishing label.

Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick had referred to the sale of Private Division to Haveli Investment as a strategic decision that would allow the company to focus more resources on its upcoming projects. Zelnick also spoke about how the company’s main focus was better served with the AAA market rather than the indie scene.

“We made this strategic decision so that we could focus all of our resources on growing our core and mobile businesses for the long term,” said Zelnick in November. “We’re really best at these big AAA experiences. We have the biggest intellectual properties in the interactive entertainment business and some of the biggest intellectual properties in the overall entertainment business, and to make sequels to existing beloved franchises, as well as create new hit intellectual properties, is our mission.”

When it was active, Private Division had released quite a few games since its founding in 2017, with one of the more popular titles from its catalogue being Obsidian’s RPG The Outer Worlds. The publisher also helped with the release of other indie games, including OlliOlli World, and even Rollerdrome. It was also the publisher for Kerbal Space Program 2. However, the ambitious sequel to the space program simulator Kerbal Space Program has since been largely abandoned.

Ahead of the game’s looming launch, in fact, developer Weta Workshop and publisher Private Division have released a new gameplay trailer. Showcasing various environments around the village of Bywater, the trailer showcases different seasons, different characters and NPCs that you’ll find and interact with around The Shire (including Gandalf the Grey himself), some of the many activities you’ll partake in around the village (like fishing, among others), and more. You can check out the trailer below.

Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game will launch on July 29 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

Tales of the Shire will see you living out your idea Hobbit life, and a lot of that is on full display in this video. With several members of the development team providing commentary and details, the video showcases customization mechanics (for both your custom Hobbit and the home that you will live in), farming and gardening gameplay, various locations scattered in and around Bywater, exploration, and more. Check it out below. 

Tales of the Shire is due out on July 29 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. There’s no word yet on whether it will also release for the Switch 2.

Creative director Stephen Lambert also outlined the core gameplay pillars to the PlayStation Blog in a new interview. The focus is on the community as you spend time cooking, gardening, fishing and “doing peaceful activities.” Players can also explore by water and inspect the environment to discover secrets and “lovely little glades and areas to hang out within the world.”

Adding to the community aspect is building relationships, which Lambert calls “pretty important.” “Every thread of the story is going to help you not only expand what’s available to you as a player but also broaden the depth of the characters and storylines.”

Of course, you’re free to take things at your own pace. “You can either dive deep into those stories or just live out your own little life along the side. It’s all about enhancing your feeling of peace and tranquillity.”

Another community aspect is shared meals, where you prepare food and invite guests to eat which is pretty laborious. “You’ve got to find a new recipe, grow ingredients or go to the market or fish or forage for them. And then you’ve got to go through the process of cooking, and that’s not just a case of putting the ingredients together. It’s how much of something you add, how much you stir it, and how much seasoning you add that adds characteristics to the food.”

If the food matches a guest’s taste, you may become closer. Players can expect plenty of detail in these dishes if nothing else. “One of our 3D artists who modeled much of the meals used to work as a chef, so they’re all beautifully plated up.”

As for decorating your Hobbit’s smial, you have extensive freedom for moving things around and can even adjust the curvature of the hole.

Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game launches on July 29^th for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, PC, and Nintendo Switch.

In a statement on Twitter, the developer revealed that it’s “taking a little longer to ensure that every Hobbit, on every platform, can enjoy the same cozy experience.” It wants the title to “feel like a warm hug from Middle-earth, and we are making sure that no matter where you play, you’ll feel right at home in The Shire. From foot-hair styles to the fluffiest cakes, every detail will be just right.”

Announced in September 2023, Tales of the Shire is a life sim title set in Bywater, part of Middle-earth’s Shire. Players can customize their own Hobbit and engage in numerous activities, from decorating their home and cooking to fishing, gardening and farming.

You can also trade with several villagers and invite them to dinner parties to foster friendships. Given The Lord of the Rings license, there are also some “lost treasures” to discover and hidden glades to investigate. Check out more extensive gameplay here, and stay tuned for further updates in the coming months.

📢 Tales of the Shire needs a bit more simmering… Now coming July 29th, 2025. Thank you for your support and patience.🍽️🥧#TalesOfTheShire #LOTR #cozygaming pic.twitter.com/8afaLnGfFL

— Tales of the Shire (@talesoftheshire) February 20, 2025

Kerbal Space Program 2 is still available (for better or worse). There’s no explanation for why or when OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome will return. It’s worth noting that the developers for all these titles, Intercept Games and Roll7, were shuttered in May last year, which Take-Two would confirm six months later.

Perhaps it’s a similar deal to Triangle Strategy, which became temporarily available on the eShop to facilitate a publisher name change from Nintendo to Square Enix. Stay tuned for updates.

Private Division is still publishing Weta Workshop’s Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game and Project Bloom from Game Freak. Former Annapurna Interactive staff members are reportedly running it now under Haveli Investments, though details have yet to be announced.