With Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game being just few hours from release, a new report has come out revealing some of the difficulties and hardships that developer Weta Workshop went through to realise its vision for the game. According to The Verge, the studio was plagued by problems like inexperience, lack of strong leadership, and communication issues between different studios during the development of Tales of the Shire.
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.