i love lord of the rings, awesome movies the the music, the story, the plot, the locations. what if bethesda made middle earth.
please note that it would be boring to just cut and paste LOTR, so some ideas i'm making up off the top of my head.

you were a human brought by ship toward mordor, your a slave being sold by other men to sauron. the ship is attacked and liberated by elves who take you ashore but are quickly ambushed by orcs wanting revenge.
you are forced to run, and there you are, in middle earth open world goodness you see the misty mountains in the distance, the dark red glow to the south.

/end random story plot thoughts

now if bethesda made it we know it would have huge open world, and epic quest to go on, but it doesnt stop there. If you think about it there would be many cities and dozens of small towns or villages ripe for saving, or pillaging.
you could decide to join the forces of good, or join sauron. or you could go find the hobbits and take the ring for yourself leading to much re-playability
cities and towns could be attacked at random, you see smoke in the far distance and you know there is a battle, dungeons would be crawling with goblins across the floor and on the ceiling
there is so much bethesda could do with LOTR its scary.

but, they don't have the rights to it.... /sadness.

Yeah, it was pretty cool:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077869/

On a more serious note, I would prefer more TES goodness instead of Bethesda taking dev time to do something like this. Even though I am sure they would make a great game.

Let's leave Bethesda to TES, and let the modders do ME as they indeed are. My opinion of course.

I'd dig up Tolkien himself and kiss his skeletal [censored] for a Lord of the Rings game in TES fashion.

But gamesas has enough on their plate at the moment, what with bug patching, Skyrim DLC, more bug patching, Fallout 4, more bug patching, Rage DLC, and probably some more bug patching.

And I doubt they'd pay for the rights when they have a perfectly good fantasy RPG world of their own creation, where they can make up the lore rather than color within the lines of someone else's lore.

Agreed, and leave LotR alone as well. videogames based on movies and/or books don't usually translate very well.

If Bethesda is going to work on a fantasy RPG I'd rather it be the Elder Scrolls. If you're interesting in an open-world RPG set in Middle Earth you're looking for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings:_The_White_Council, which was unfortunately put on the backburner a while back.

After hearing the voice acting in Skyrim, I'm really glad Bethesda don't have the rights to LotR. What a horrible thought... :ahhh:

Featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger as Aragorn!

Why? There's already been a game for all three films, and god knows how many Third Age/battles of the LOTR era games. At this point they'd jsut barely be squirting milk out of the cow at this point.

Oblivion is just LOTR: Bloom Edition anyway :shrug:

The Magic of the Lord of the Rings was in its story. Bethesda doesn't do "story", they do setting.

I thought War In the North was great.

Leave Bethesda to there games.

TES TES TES TES TES, one track mind.

I just want to see a LotR game that doesn't focus on the narrative of Lord of the Rings. Silmarillion was so much more compelling, and much richer ground for story.

TES TES TES TES FO TES FO TES FO WW TES FO TES FO?

sorry for my name miss spellings as i dont watch movies with subtitles.

there has been no massive scale open world RPG LOTR game. unless your count the mmo, and last i checked it went f2p to save itself from extinction.

Also sorry to the guy who had to move the thread =\

and bethesda doesn't make the best stories up but with a template here it could be epic. i would like to be able to change the course of middle earth, maybe join and be the right hand of sauron, who knows maybe convince saromon to go good, or be a 3rd party in the war. and attack sauron when his guard is down then finish what remains of the humans.

I wish somebody would make a Warhammer 40k RPG the universe is so amazing I just want to submerge myself in it every chance I get. I guess I could settle for a LoTR one though.

The Rpg needs to be "not console-like" and rather oldschool.
I don't think that the game industry is capable of this.

But EA could make a sequel to BFMEII. Hey why is there no TES strategy game?

I voted for all of them

Not really. Rage was developed by id. They're the ones making the DLC.

As much as I would like to see a good LOTR game I would rather see Bethesda work on TES and FO.

Come on, it wouldn't be that bad... unless they take an arrow to the knee.

The Last Days mod for Mount and Blade could be what you're looking for OP.