Lord of the Rings: Rise of Mordor (Total War: Attila Mod Preview)

Hey, what's up guys? It's Oakley, and I am pleased to reveal to you the Total War conversion mod, Rise of Mordor. This is obviously Lord of the Rings themed, and this already gets me really, really happy and excited, and it should get you happy and excited too. It's gonna be a Total Conversion mod, much in the same sense that Third Age Total War was, so if you don't know, this is a previous mod that was built off of Medieval II Total War. Total Conversion as well with the custom campaign map, hundreds of individual units, customized settlements, and all that. So this is kind of what they're trying to do, take the Third Age model and now do it in a more refined and updated version. So they started with Rome 2, trying to build it off of this. This is one of the background menus you can see, so definitely putting a lot of work into the artwork and all that. And then Mr. J, who I was speaking to, who's the co-director for this project, is actually saying that they're now transitioning to Attila, because Attila comes with all the new mod tools. The specifics of those mod tools, we don't quite know what's in store, but it should be bigger than Rome 2, so hopefully we'll be able to have a really hefty, beefy, fleshed-out conversion mod. This is definitely an ambitious project though, so I'll introduce you to the project team rosters here. So they have a bunch of different guys, Mr. J, co-director who I was speaking to, I spoke to a bunch of different sub-teams, and then I want to call out specifically Private Camping and his team in Sound Designers. They're gonna be having their own music, and I'll be playing that throughout this video. We'll go and do more coverage of that in another video. But they're taking the theme from Lord of the Rings, and then they're reworking it completely originally, which is awesome. And then also, they have a team working on the map and the settlement. So for example, we don't quite know, as I said, with the mod toolkit, what we'll be able to do from a campaign standpoint, but this is all the factions that they're hoping to have, and if they can make their own campaign map, obviously they're gonna try and make it like Middle-earth. Now, if they can't do it, which seems to be the case, then they're gonna have to make a converted European map. Anyways, what's hard-coded into the game is gonna be four cultures that you have to choose from. So what they did is they chose Men, Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs. You can see the sub-factions here, and this is kind of the faction roster list. So if you look in the Men, Gondor is part of the Dunedain, you have Dale, Rohan, Breland, and Asshyra as the Northmen, and then you have Haradrim as Evilmen. Elves are broken into, you know, their sub-factions and sub-cultures. Then you have all the Dwarf houses, and on the right you have the Orcs, so the Snaga, which is like Orcs, Goblins of the Misty and Grey Mountains. Then you have Orcs of Gundobar, Mordor of Minas Morgoth, Dol Guldur, and then the Uruk-hai from Isengard. Then I also went ahead and broke it up into the various religions that they have into the game. So worship of Iru'ilvatar is gonna be the Elves and the Dunedain, and then you have various Paganism types, so for the Northmen, the Wildmen, and the Evilmen, and then you have the Dwarves worshiping Elwul, and then the worship of Melkor, which is kind of the Evil God, is gonna be the Orcs and some Evilmen. Now I wanted to go ahead and talk a little bit about how you build this mod. So obviously, they don't want to start from scratch, and so what they're gonna be looking around for is, on the internet, previous models, 2D, 3D, anything they can get their hands on in terms of other stuff. So the team has been going and scounging the internet for models that they can use, asking for permission to use these. And you can see some of the quality of the models that you can get, so for example, Frodo here. Then also, they can pick up some larger units that I'll show you in a little bit, but this is definitely gonna help out. So here, they were able to get free 3D models from various sites, and always looking to get for, you know, permission first. So if you have any access to these, if you know where you can find some of these models, or if you yourself can create these models, go ahead and contact the team on the forums. But I was blown away. I mean, look at this model of Gandalf the White that you're able to pick out, and I can't wait to have this guy, you know, in the game and animate it. Speaking of animation, they're actually gonna use the the Kinect from the Xbox One to actually try and animate some of their characters, which I think is a really cool, innovative way to do it. You have Saruman here, so I'm looking forward to see what they can do with these models in the final conversion, because these are highly, highly detailed, and especially, you know, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, get the heroes in there and actually see those on the battle map. Now, it's not just restricted to small, you know, human-sized characters. You're also looking at vastly larger characters, like these various trolls. And this guy is not so much armored to kind of show the skin and the textures on him, which is, you know, looking great. I can't wait to see that on the map, the battlefield itself. That's something they had in Third Age, the Medieval II mod, and that's kind of outdated. But look what it would look like in Rome II, or Attila, I should say, when you can get the high-res textures and the animations and the quality. This is kind of what you would be looking at on the battlefield, which brings it to life on so many different levels. So get excited for that. And obviously, you know, you would have to pick out models for the Muvakil, the Nazgul, all sorts of things. Anyways, we're going to go ahead and start taking a look at the specific factions. This whole video is kind of a general overview. Now, if you're talking about the factions, you're going to try and make specific settlements. So this is from the Medieval II mod. They remade Helm's Deep. And what they're going to be trying to do with this new team is recreate various cities. So here is, for example, Minas Tirith, a 3D model that they found online, created by someone. Definitely looking very in-depth. They're currently looking to acquire the rights for this. And yeah, this is what was what they're intending to do. But as I said, they're waiting to have the mod tool. So hopefully once they have like assets like this that they can pick up, then it should be an easier transition to turn this into something that you would be able to see and work with with the mod tools and then finally get it into a custom map that you can play off of. And that's, you know, the custom map is something that CA has said they want people to be able to create. For instance, you can already take a look at some of the campaign maps in Attila and you can spot very large mountains. So the people in the forum were saying this is easier, you know, make this three times larger and you have the Lonely Mountain cut off the face and put gates on it and you have the Lonely Mountain. So you can start to get a sense of how you can sculpt the pre-existing terrain and all that stuff and give it kind of paint it with the Lord of the Rings brush, which I'm really excited for. Let's go ahead and break down some of the progress they're making on some of the factions. A lot of these are seeing more development than others. There's different teams working on each. So, yeah, we're going to start off with Gondor. So it's made by Devils, Advocates, and then Vikas Vandermeer. So you can see sort of a concept on the right and then some of the units on the left that they're starting to put together. The infantry, cavalry, artillery units, and then some of the leaders, Boromir, Faramir, general units like Fountain Guards, which are really cool. Some of these have, you know, they don't just have artwork like this on the right, but they actually have models and some of those you can actually play in the game. So we're going to get to that real soon. I do have some of these access. I have to thank the team right here. I have access to some of these images and stuff. And this one blew my mind. I mean, take a look at this. This looks almost like a screen cap from the movie. This is going to be the Gondorian infantry and they look great. They look awesome. Obviously, this needs still a little bit refinement on the metal to make it look a little tarnished and worn down. But this looks great. And this is actually taken to be a model from Mountain Blade Mods. And so obviously this is going to require a lot of coordination between not only, you know, Total War users, but they can actually use mod assets from other games. Again, take a look at this, how sweet this looks in game. Man, this looks freaking awesome. So slowly but surely, they're adding more and more units to the faction roster list and they want to get up to like 100 units and they want to make sure they represent adequately all the units that you see in the movies. So, for example, here, the fountain guards. And now you can see the look of the armor has a little more detail. You can see some dents in the shields itself. It looks very, very cool. Now, the fountain guards here, you can see them from the front and the back, obviously. And here's them in another kind of setting. These are, I don't believe, quite the fountain guards. They look kind of similar. Must be some elite type infantry from Gondor. But they look great. They look awesome. The capes looking very regal. And this is something they're definitely going to have to get right, is getting the theme of the units. You know, you know what to expect from Gondorian units. You know what to expect from Rohan units, from the Easterlings in the movies and in the books. They're very distinct. And so, obviously, the team is paying special attention to that, looking a lot of details down to, you know, crafting the swords and spears themselves. So here, for example, are some small models of some of the weapons you'll be able to see the Gondorian swords. And now we're going to go ahead and take a look at the dwarves that they're trying to flesh out. Like I said, they want eventually, I think, to get the seven dwarf houses. And that's broken down into different teams. But here are the teams in charge of, you know, bringing these to life. And they have a lot of Weta assets to work on. So here, when I originally quoted this, it seemed like they wanted four to five dwarven factions with that warrior. I've recently heard that they may want to represent all seven of the dwarf houses, but we'll see. And then they want to have confederation styles. So split the house of Durin to smaller sub factions, Erebor, Iron Hills, and have Erebor be like rich and have a lot of the stuff represented from the movies. So not only, you know, when you get to edit campaign map, you can also choose resources. So they can maybe perhaps have Mithril or gold specific in some areas that the dwarves will want to control. And then, of course, here, one of the guys, I quoted him, he was a little ambitious. He says, we'll create everything that could be seen in the film. That's a little ambitious, but at least it gets you most of the way. And you can see here, them starting to detail some of the dwarven weapons definitely looking very different from the previous weapons I showed you. But then, of course, there are some of the higher up mods who are saying, no, no, no, we can't render everything. So, for example, in the movie, if you recall, there were dwarves riding these type of, like, rams and goats. And they're deciding to scale that back. And so we're not going to add any dwarven units is one of the quotes I got off the forums. I'm not sure if that's updated or not, but they're going to replace these weird mounts with perhaps Dalian cavalry. So, obviously, they're ambitious, but they know when to scale it back. And this is, again, like I was talking about with the mountains, how they want to integrate that. Will there be an option to reclaim Khazad-Dum, like in Divide and Conquer? And he says, of course, but that's why Moria isn't a dwarven faction in the first place. The conquest of Moria gives the dwarves access to more things. And this is here some of the resources that they shared with me, specific snapshots of the dwarves that they're looking at. So, obviously, from the movies, you get to see the representative armor, the stature of the dwarves, all that has to be represented in the game. And so you can take these models, their size, their height, and then compare them to, like you can see here. So in the background is some of the images of the dwarves from the movies. And then they start to create character models based off of that. So it's a lot of hard, tedious work, but it definitely pays off. And you can feel just how authentic that looks. For example, here's one of the dwarf sets of armor that they've put together. And, I mean, yeah, that's awesome. When you see this image, you know that this is a total conversion mod. They're going to great lengths and details to bring each of these factions to life. And, I mean, look at that helmet, look at that shield, look how much detail is built into that. It's impressive, and it's crazy, and it should get you excited. It's getting me very excited. Now we can go ahead and look a little bit to the east, which is going to be the Easterlings. And so you have a bunch of different confederations. So for here, for example, they say, The rune confederation will be divided into four factions with the ability to confederate into the rune. Which I think is really cool. So the Balkoth, the Wainriders, Bariags of Khand, Hastruth. And you can see the team members responsible for working on this. And also one of the shields, for example, that they're developing. Again, take a look at the detail, the coloring, the motifs, the geometry. It all represents, you know, a different feel for each faction. And that's one of the things I'm looking forward to in this mod, is how fleshed out the different units are. Again, like I said, the units are at different sort of levels of progression. And this is going to be the Easterlings. They have a model kind of shown walking around, and that's one of them. But they don't really have any models in place just yet. They're still working on the armor and the characters. Now another faction that I want to take a look at is another one of the Dunedain. But these are going to be the Lost Realm of Arnor. So this is going to be developed by Mr. J. And so you can see some of the troops here in front of you. There were some early images, and Mr. J was actually kind enough to share with me some of the working models. So I went ahead, and these are from my game. Like I downloaded the pack file, I put them in a game, and I looked at them. And I walked around with them, and I, you know, I took, I introduced them to the world of Attila. And these guys are, wow, this is really cool. But I was more impressed in them, because in Shining Armor, these guys look beautiful. So I got to get up close, take the shots that I wanted. And man, look at the detail on these troops. And this is just the first couple units. Wait until you have your entire army decked out like this. And he also, Mr. J, included in that pack file some of the rangers, the famous rangers from the movies. And you can see these guys, and I just immediately threw them in the battle. Put them in the woods, and wanted to see kind of what that looks like from an atmospheric perspective. And it looks awesome. I mean, this is just like the introduction to the rangers in the movie, where they're hidden in the bushes. And they come out, you can see this guy with sort of the hood and the scarf drawn up against his eyes. And these guys are looking fierce and ferocious, for sure. And then I decided to, you know, pit them against a couple of elephants in the distance. And so you'll see that in a short little bit. But yeah, definitely the archers of skill and renown. And here they're taking out a convoy of elephants, so just like in the movie. But expect those elephants, once the mod comes out, to be scaled up to the size of Mumikil. So now you're starting to get a sense of, okay, this is what the mod will mean in the future. So I was really excited, just testing out these early units. And now they're starting to make the character models for the orcs and the uruk-hai. So here, starting out with the base model, adding more textures. And then slightly varying the heads, and then applying textures. And you can see, for example, even going down to the fine detail of replacing the teeth to make them really look non-human. So that's about it. The elves are still under development. A bunch of the other factions and units are obviously under development. This is a long ways away. But they have a lot of lore and detailed artwork to draw from. So I will go ahead and say that the mod team is doing great work so far. I'm really impressed by it. But they're always looking out for more help. And I'll do more sort of recruitment videos in the future. I'm working with this mod team to see, okay, here's a specific place that we can shine a light on. Show the progress that's been made. And then ask you guys, hey, if you're interested in this, here's how you can help. For the meantime, I'll go ahead and link below to where you can help out. So, for instance, they're looking for people who can do Blender, people who can work with the music. So help is always requested. And they would love to see your participation in this. So thanks so much for watching. Stay tuned for more. I'll keep you guys updated on the mod. Hopefully, as I get more stuff from the mod team, we'll be able to share that with you guys. And then lastly, I wanted to share with you a little machinima I put together called Edge of Night. And what it's supposed to be is a recreation of that scene from the third Lord of the Rings. Where I believe Pippin is singing to Denethor. And in the background, it's kind of mirrored while the song goes on. That the riders, led by Faramir, are charging out to their death in a suicidal charge on Osgiliath. So I brought that back to life. And I figured you guys would enjoy that. So check it out. And then go ahead and check the links in the description below. See you in the next one.