Since we announced The Lord of the Rings: Living Card Game back in December, we’ve been thrilled by the reception. We’ve received great preview coverage from outlets like PC Gamer, PCGamesN, VentureBeat, and Polygon, and we’ve received a lot of feedback from interested fans and players.
Most important to us, however, is that we’ve built a community of game players who have joined us both here on the Steam forums and on our biweekly streams. Fantasy Flight Interactive was always built with a community-first mission in mind—we believe that transparency in development is an essential part of producing a game for an informed audience. Our transparency, through the developer streams and the articles here on Steam, has given us room to experiment and build The Lord of the Rings: Living Card Game into something great.
That’s why we want to inform you now that we’ve made the decision to delay the game. Though we recently announced that we’d miss the Q1 mark on our Twitch stream, we felt it was important to post this officially to anyone following us on Steam. We are now officially looking at a release during the second quarter.
This wasn’t an easy call for us to make, but we feel it is the right one. While we feel the game we’ve created thus far is strong, we have a few more ideas we want to try out before we take the game public. For that reason, we’re experimenting with some new ideas we think you’ll enjoy behind-the-scenes that we feel will make the game even stronger.
Our original plan had been to use the Early Access period for this type of experimentation with a game that was a bit less finished, but we only get one shot at making our first game public. We want to make sure that we are confident that impression will be a great one. For this reason, we’re going to be a bit later than we originally announced.
However, that delay won’t happen in a vacuum, and we want to keep you up on development. Here’s what we have planned:
The Early Access period for The Lord of the Rings™: Living Card Game™ is going to be more polished than we had originally planned. The game still won’t be feature complete in Early Access, but what is there will be more refined. We’ll also be able to prepare more content than we’d originally planned for rollout during that Early Access period and to a higher level of refinement.
Expect a development roadmap to get posted soon. Since we’re releasing later than we had expected, we want to give players a better idea of what we’ll be adding to the game and what they can expect at release and beyond.
Our video streams will continue. A lot of the experimentation we have planned will be a little too messy to show publicly, but as we continue to develop the game, we want to bring in-progress streams to you at the same rate as before. The streams may include more developer interviews, in-depth discussions, and other related content, as well. Let us know what you’re interested in seeing.
We also want to thank you for being along for the ride so far. We’re very blessed with a fantastic community of potential players. As much as everyone at our offices are excited to get the game in your hands as soon as possible, we need to temper that enthusiasm to make sure that the game is well and truly ready.
We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming weeks.
Fantasy Flight Interactive