The Lord of the Rings: Conquest is getting a second life online thanks to a fan infrastructure reboot. If you’ve been mourning EA’s shutdown of the original servers, you can now actually jump back into big team skirmishes instead of just soloing the campaigns.
A community project called MordorWide has re-implemented the EA Nation backend, effectively standing up a new master server for the PC version. The package not only restores online matchmaking, it also folds in all of the game’s DLC, so you get the full map and mode set without hunting for long-delisted add-ons.
Conquest itself has always been a bit of a weird relic. Built on an upgraded version of Pandemic’s Zero engine by the same team that did the original Star Wars: Battlefront games, it lets you play out Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings battles from both the good and evil sides, complete with an “evil campaign” that imagines Sauron’s victory. Reviews were mixed at launch, but it picked up a small, cultish fanbase who liked the class-based beatdowns and the novelty of chopping through Hobbits as Sauron’s forces.
Sadly, this was Pandemic’s last release before EA shut the studio down in 2009, just a year after acquiring it. When Conquest sales didn’t justify the license and server costs, Pandemic’s Brisbane office was closed in February 2009, with the remaining staff shuffled to other studios or laid off, with over 200 jobs lost in total. As such, there’s something a little poetic about fans wiring the game back into the grid more than a decade later, as separate groups work on full-blown remaster mods to push its maps, units, and AI closer to modern standards.
Source: Time Extension
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