I am a big Hobbit and Lord of the Rings fan. That whole world that Tolkein created fills me with an immense amount of wonder and awe. While I don’t fancy coming face to face with an orc anytime soon, I would relish the opportunity to explore Middle-earth with my backpack full of lembas bread and a pint from the Prancing Pony in hand.
That is why when I was scrolling through X the other day, I stopped and did a brief double take. In a welcome change to some of the rubbish on social media these days, my algorithm had presented me with a beautiful, photorealistic re-imagining of Lord Of The Rings’ The Argonath scene, made in Unreal Engine 5.
For a tranquil minute and a half, I was transported from my desk to a small boat on the River Anduin, as the two monumental statues made famous in Fellowship of the Ring watched over me. After playing the video again, I quickly got in touch with the footage’s creator Micah Malinics to find out more about his project, and – importantly – if I would ever get the chance to play through this fan-made recreation myself.
“The idea for the scene actually came from a prompt I had given myself, which was ‘What games should exist, but don’t?’ and after jotting down a bunch of ideas, a bunch of Lord of the Rings ones really gravitated toward me,” Malinics tells me via email.
“So I actually wanted to create a LOTR ‘proof of concept’ tiny adventure game like this silly Shrek Western I had made, but after a friend shared Leo Torres’ beautiful river jungle scene, I immediately wanted to do the Argonath scene from Fellowship of the Ring as a first person experience.”
On the technical side of things, this scene was made in Unreal Engine 5.4, using Lumen and Nanite heavily. “The scene still ran at a steady 30-50 fps on an RTX 3080Ti. And you could lower the graphics yet to perform on other machines,” Malinics adds.
“The fluid system is completely dynamic, so it automatically interacts with the geometry in the scene. To me that is the most impressive part, and it’s all a result of the masterful Fluid Flux plugin.”
You can check out Malinics’ scene, which was made in “six days from start to finish”, via the video below.
Malinics now wants to work on some of the other ideas he jotted down during this brainstorming session. This includes a Helm’s Deep scene with a dynamic weather system which changes from the iconic moment’s pre-battle sunset to the storming night time. And of course that marching Orc army would also be there.
“I also have been playing around with movement mechanics a lot, and it would be fun to create a little moment when you are the hobbits running away from the Ringwraith on your way to the Prancing Pony,” he continues. “There’s so much you could do there that it could almost be it’s own game in the vein of ‘escape the monster’ type genre. I hope to make both at some point – as it’s such a blast utilising this technology to re-imagine Tolken’s world, and of course the Peter Jackson films are the ultimate visual inspiration.”
However, while Malinics has all of these new ideas waiting to be realised, he tells me “if there was enough demand for the Argonath scene” it could be released as a playable project.
“[Unreal Engine] would handle it like a champ, but the challenges to releasing it be a good amount of project cleanup, some optimisation, and there are some areas that aren’t fully built out for a 360 degree viewing experience, so I would need to go back in and finish building out those parts of the environment,” he says.
“The project sits at a whopping 100GB right now, so it’s also not yet ‘release’ friendly haha.”
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Malinics originally wanted to expand this scene so the boat could dock on a beach after it passes the Argonath, and the player would then be able to walk around the beach area. “I also was inspired by this creator to add Orcs in the woods that you can ride the boat past,” he says. However, at this time, this would have been “more of an easter egg” than a playable experience.
“If I had more time I would have added those, but I started to get eager to finish this scene up.”
So in short, “it just comes down to prioritising time,” Malinics says regarding that playable demo, before adding: “If there’s a big rally for it and demand, I’m happy to put in the time. Otherwise, I have some other cool stuff I’m really excited to make that I think people will enjoy, too!”
In the meantime, you can check out a time lapse of Malinics creating his Argonath scene in Unreal Engine 5 below.
“I hope the project is an encouragement to other artists and creators, 3D content creation is really becoming more accessible, and my hope is that the next generation of users will be able to make full fledged games like this in the near future,” Malinics closes.
“The technology is totally there!”