Im Sommer erscheint Tales of the Shire , das im Herr der Ringe-Universum angesiedelt ist. Ihr spielt darin Hobbits und lebt ein ruhiges Leben im Auenland, das sich spielerisch am ehesten mit Animal Crossing oder Stardew Valley vergleichen lässt. Im neuen Video kommt das Entwicklerteam von Wētā Workshop zu Wort, zeigt Behind-the-Scenes-Aufnahmen und gibt noch einmal einen Überblick über die verschiedenen Features des Spiels.
Wir konnten bereits eine frühe Alpha-Version anspielen. Unsere Eindrücke gibt's in der Preview zum Hobbit-Simulator.
Tales of the Shire soll am 29. Juli 2025 für PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch und PC erscheinen.
Wir konnten bereits eine frühe Alpha-Version anspielen. Unsere Eindrücke gibt's in der Preview zum Hobbit-Simulator.
Tales of the Shire soll am 29. Juli 2025 für PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch und PC erscheinen.
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00:00I am a Game Designer on Table of the Shire.
00:06I'm the Technology Director.
00:08One of the User Experience Designers.
00:11Technical Artist.
00:13Concept Designing, 3D Modeling.
00:16I'm an Animator.
00:18I have the fun job of just playing the game every day.
00:21We've come together as a team to create something that's really beautiful.
00:25You spend your time as a hobbit in Bywater.
00:32And all of the things that you would expect to do as a hobbit, we've pretty much tried to put in the game.
00:47I've been involved since the very beginning of the project.
00:50Really trying to get the foundations for the game set up and working out how we wanted this to look.
00:56The very first image I was looking at was Tolkien's illustration of the Shire.
01:00And it was that stepping off point of how to do our world's version of that.
01:06Hobbiton has been seen so much in the films and talked about it.
01:10We thought it would be nice to bring our world to an area that hadn't been explored as much.
01:14Which was while we ended up at Bywater.
01:16You kind of wake up in the Shire and the first thing you get to do as a player is choose what kind of hobbit you want to be.
01:25And then you get to arrive in Bywater in a cart with Gandalf.
01:31And I think for anyone who wants to experience life in the Shire, I think that's how they would want to arrive.
01:38You're able to kind of change your hobbit, the shape, the tone, the personality, everything so that you truly can, you know, kind of create this hobbit version of yourself or hobbit character that you would like to partake in this story.
01:57We wanted to make sure that you can change everything from your face shape to your foot here, but no, no shoes.
02:06No shoes for hobbits though.
02:09Part of the challenge with letting the player create whatever character they wanted meant that there were a lot of technical things that we had to get around.
02:18So we created a modular animation system and an emote library.
02:26Ha!
02:27Should we do it again?
02:29I'm sorry.
02:30Our dialogues are kind of like little interactive storybooks and as you read them the characters do these gestures or sort of strike a pose.
02:39This one is, without looking, that's annoying.
02:43If the character sees something and they're clearly annoyed about it, we play this one.
02:48Something I did in the game that I love that people don't really notice is that the hobbits look at each other.
02:55That is a very technical thing and I was able to do that alongside our animation team who were able to obviously make the rigging and the bits we have in those 3D models.
03:04And it was one of those things that when it wasn't there, the game looked lifeless and when it was in there, the magic happened.
03:18Home decoration is kind of one of our core ways of expressing yourself in the game.
03:23Very early on we actually decided on making it gridless so that you don't place anything on a square within a grid and to be a really powerful tool for the player to be able to place anywhere they want and also change whatever they want.
03:36If you want to, you can cover your wall with shelves and pictures and all of that and you can put individual items on every shelf, big items, small items.
03:45There is no limit to the kind of stuff you can have in your house, which allows the player to kind of engage in a clutter core experience.
03:58One of the issues that we faced really early on was how we would actually get the camera in there for the players to be able to have a good viewpoint into the hobbit hole.
04:06And so one of the very early ideas was taking this approach of almost like a doll's house that you could open up and you could sort of see the internals of the structure.
04:17The camera system is very dynamic and adapts to all sorts of different sort of situations.
04:22When they go into the hobbit hole, the camera sort of sticks very close to them and follows them through.
04:27When we go into the decoration mode, you can see that you get into this more of a like a cutaway sort of look, which is this dollhouse view.
04:37The end result looks straightforward and it sounds straightforward, but technically it was a very difficult sort of process.
04:45When you're designing your home, you get to sort of pick the vibe that you want.
04:49There's so many decorations and items to choose from. You can change the wallpaper, the floor, the skirting.
04:56But you can also mix it up as well and have something that feels more like specific rooms that have themes of their own.
05:04The furniture aspect was kind of cool. I got a lot of freedom. I was kind of told just like, hey, we need like five, seven furniture sets.
05:12So I kind of had the luxury of going through and figuring out what they were.
05:17I wanted the player to be able to theme their room. So like this is a musical theme.
05:23This was like a scholar theme. So like collecting books and scrolls.
05:26So you can really like roleplay as a Bilbo.
05:29There's just so many options and I'm so excited to see what people make.
05:35We're really focused on what the players will see on the screen.
05:39We wanted the imagery of the game to feel like it had been painted almost.
05:45We don't rely so much on a lot of the sort of modern rendering techniques of having very shiny objects and things.
05:53We really went for this painterly approach.
05:56We also have our wind system that all of our terrains and our grass and our trees can all read from and so that they can all move in unison.
06:06And the idea is to create these vistas where even if you're standing still and just looking out, there's always this natural movement that comes through.
06:17And we get that through things like the wind, but there's also insects and birds and there's all this just little touches of life that we've been able to scatter throughout.
06:26Very early on in the game's development, we knew that we had to start working on what kind of plants we want in the world.
06:36I looked at a bunch of flowers and plants and mushrooms and things from a lot of different seasons and parts of the world like forests or by grassy banks and things.
06:52And we tried to get a nice collection of things that would work well with cooking and foraging and things like that.
07:03Some of them we have to see at lots of different stages of their life while we grow them in the garden.
07:13So they start from seedlings and then grow up a little bit but they're still not ready.
07:18They grow a little bit more and they are ready.
07:23I got to put the pantry together.
07:26I got to hang up all the herbs and pile up all the tomatoes and things.
07:32So when you put a bunch of asparagus in there, you'll see it physically in your house.
07:39The birds are our navigation system in the game.
07:44On your map you can say, I want to go over here.
07:46Or if there's a tail who says go and find Farmer Cotton, the birds will know that you want to go to Farmer Cotton and they'll give you a path.
07:55And then on things like signposts or rocks or trees, the birds will land on them and facing that direction, that's them telling you to go that way.
08:04So they'll fly in, sit on the signpost and if there's like a right or a left arm, they'll sit on the left because they want you to go to the left.
08:11And the birds will just really discreetly tell you where to go.
08:14I did a lot of the implementation and setting up the bird system so that they knew where they could go and where they could drag the player.
08:21So I placed all of these points on this blue grid that the birds can kind of read to know where to go.
08:28Yeah.
08:30I'm hoping that the players, when they realise what the birds are doing for them, it will sort of embed them further into the world of Bywater and feel like, oh, this game knows that I don't want to be thinking about anything outside of the game itself.
08:44It's about, you know, meeting new characters and making new friends, finding different ways to relax, whether it's fishing or tending a garden or decorating a house or just customising your personality and your hobbit.
09:00We really hope that people will enjoy it, but also that they'll find a space there to represent themselves and to capture that dream of living a life in the Shire.
09:12Just kind of escaping from life out here in the real world.