Steamworks in Lord of Rings War in North

By Robert Purchese Published 2 August, 2011

Does your PC have enough Beleram?

The PC version of The Lord of the Rings: War in the North will use Steamworks, developer Snowblind has confirmed.

"Yes, I believe so," said producer Ruth Tomandl, answering a question asked by Eurogamer during a roundtable interview.

Steamworks integrates Steam on a development level. The benefits are that a game can take full advantage of nearly anything Steam offers; things like authentication, peer-to-peer multiplayer, voice communications, matchmaking, Steam communities, friends, statistics and achievements.

The downside for rival digital distributors is that they can't remove Steam from the game, so they end up selling a product that promotes a competitor. In the past, this has lead to boycotts.

Snowblind couldn't reveal any other extras heading to the PC version of Lord of the Rings: War in the North. "I don't know if there will be [any]," admitted Tomandl. "That's something that will be announced later."

The Lord of the Rings: War in the North is a bloody action-RPG being made by Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath: Realms of EverQuest developer Snowblind. The focus is on co-op gameplay, as human, elf and dwarf work as a coherent unit to decimate the forces of super-evil villain and Sauron ally Agandur in the north of Middle-Earth. The game unfolds in parallel to the well known events of The Lord of the Rings books and films.

Lord of the Rings: War in the North.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds. @Clert on Twitter.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (6) Latest comment 10 months ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • mamac123 #1 10 months ago

    yeah im buying it now that it has steamworks

  • bad09 #2 10 months ago

    I'm trying to go back to boxed except for under a fiver sale items so always disappointed when Steams internet DRM is in the boxed version, but hey it will at least work when my connection don't so all good.

    / glares at Ubi and Blizzard

  • Widge #3 10 months ago

    Is this coming out on PS3? are they going to push PS3 steamworks?

  • deadstoned #4 10 months ago

    Excellent news! Steamworks in a game tends to tell me that the game has been well designed for the PC. Whilst Games for Windows Live tends to point to a bad and lazy port. On their own site they proudly advertise that developers can keep 85% of their code, which underlines clearly games that lack PC effort. Bulletstorm, Fable 3 and soon Batman again :( .

  • kingz #5 10 months ago

    @deadstoned Bulletstorm and Batman were great ports, MW2 had steamworks, and that was a "great port"

  • deadstoned #6 10 months ago

    @kingz alright m8 you got me there with MW2 :p . I listened to the BashandSlash podcast when they announced no dedicated servers, stony silence. Cant believe the betrayal. I'm not sure on Bulletstorm being a great port, mouse smoothing always on? Aim assist on? No visual tweaking settings without going into the encrypted .ini files?

    Batman wasn't too bad on the settings front, but I felt like the game was secretly hating me for not using a gamepad throughout my game. Also wish the new one wasn't using GFWL again, that thing is dying and bringing other games down with it.