A canned Lord of the Rings MMO from Eidos Montreal (the Tomb Raider studio) just surfaced in the worst possible way: as a pile of gorgeous screenshots for a game we will never actually play. Tech4Gamers pulled together new images and details on the scrapped project, which was in the works at Eidos in partnership with Amazon Games and Embracer, the current Lord of the Rings rights holder.
Instead of chasing a typical WoW template, this thing sounded surprisingly odd. It was an overhead‑view MMO with card mechanics layered into the design and a “Telltale‑style” branching story structure, which suggests something closer to a narrative tactics hybrid than a straight action RPG. The report does not go deep on how the cards would have worked, only that they were a core part of the pitch before everything got canned.
The setting choice was equally specific: Umbar, the Corsair stronghold on Gondor’s coast, was the main hub, with two distinct city designs shown in the leaked assets, one pre‑destruction and one after things go very wrong. There are also various untextured models and environmental pieces that Tolkien nerds will recognize as riffs on book locations and factions, even in placeholder form. It is the usual heartbreak cycle: concept art, greybox geometry, and UI mockups that are just finished enough to make you imagine the rest.
According to the report, development “wasn’t exactly going smoothly,” and then Amazon’s massive layoffs last year helped finish it off, along with several other in‑house projects. On paper, you had a strong single‑player studio trying something experimental and multiplayer with a megabrand under a corporate arrangement that collapsed as soon as the spreadsheets turned red. None of that is shocking in 2026, but it is still deflating to see the results in retrospect.
There is at least one more swing at Middle-earth on the way: Tech4Gamers notes that another Lord of the Rings game is in development as a third‑person title funded by a Saudi investment group (natch), reportedly positioned to chase some of that Hogwarts Legacy money. That one will almost certainly hew closer to “big cinematic action game” than overhead MMO card experiment.
Still, these leaks are a reminder that some of the most interesting licensed ideas never make it past internal milestones. Somewhere out there is a build where you are playing a card‑driven, story‑heavy Lord of the Rings MMO from the Deus Ex people, set in Umbar, that got wiped out by a balance sheet. All we get are the screenshots.
Source: Tech4Gamers
