Theres more to being a Hobbit than fleeing for your life and trying to survive increasingly hostile environments. This is why Wt Workshop invites you to a taste of adventure thats a little more wholesome. I had a cozy chat with Stephen Lambert, Tales of the Shire: A Lord of The Rings Game creative director, to dig a bit deeper into why this particular Hobbit hole will feel like a home away from home when it launches on PS5 on July 29.Play VideoHow would you describe the main pillars of gameplay in Tales of the Shire?Stephen Lambert: So much of the game is about community. Weve got four main areas that we focus on while living your idyllic life as a Hobbit: how you spend your time cooking, gardening, fishing, and doing peaceful activities.The other aspect is exploring by water, so looking around the environment and discovering little secret moments and lovely little glades and areas to hang out within the world.And then there are obviously the tales within the community. So getting to meet new people and help them along their journeys.How important is relationship building in terms of progression?Its pretty important. Every thread of the story is going to help you not only expand whats available to you as a player, but also broaden the depth of the characters and storylines. But you can explore the game at your own pace. So you can either dive deep into those stories or just live out your own little life along the side. Its all about enhancing your feeling of peace and tranquillity.Can you go into more detail about the games shared meals?With meals being a central part of Hobbit life, it was really important to be central to our game. Youve got to find a new recipe, grow ingredients or go to the market for them, or fish or forage for them. And then youve got to go through the process of cooking, and thats not just a case of putting the ingredients together. Its how much of something you add, how much you stir it, and how much seasoning you add that adds characteristics to the food.You want to make sure your food is to your guests taste, because the closer you get to their peculiarities the more youll please them and build stronger relationships. And like in the real world, the act of actually having food together helps build community. So presenting the food and enjoying it with people is huge. One of our 3D artists who modeled a lot of the meals used to work as a chef so theyre all beautifully plated up.Can you describe the decorating system and highlight what inspired the grid-less placement system?The biggest thing about Hobbit holes is theyre not really square or rigid shapes. Everythings kind of curved and a bit more organic, so the idea of having something that goes on a grid just didnt fit. It just made sense to build something that allows for a huge amount of expression, to be able to tinker with things and put them in exactly how you want. You can put things on top of tables, and on top of or in bookshelves, and then move those things around together. Its about freedom of expression, more than anything.How have Tolkiens works inspired some of the choices made in terms of gameplay?We really wanted what we made to fit within Tolkiens world, so we positioned it just after The Hobbit and before the events of The Lord of the Rings. Our artists spent a lot of time researching the families, events, and histories of what was written and weaving everything they could into that particular framework.The other thing was creating sort of Hobbit-sized problems in a Hobbit-sized world. Its fun trying to think of those small-town problems that cause conflict and drive their story forward.What were the sort of challenges that you faced in creating a game in such a beloved IP?Its hugely intimidating, but its also quite exciting to take on a world like this. The beauty of the written word in books is where your imagination takes things. My imagination obviously took me in a different way with some things, and its lovely to be able to kind of explore different directions.How do you want players to feel when theyre playing the game themselves, whether theyre fans, or not as familiar with The Lord of the Rings?I very much wanted the storyline to carry itself. We didnt want you to have to be a Tolkien fan to enjoy it, even though there are lots of references. This game was very much born out of the COVID period, a world that was so full of stress and anxiety. We wanted our game to be that place of peace and relaxation. Hence, The Shire meets a cozy game. We felt a strong idea centered around cooking and community felt the best match for that theme.Is there anything in particular that youd like players to pay attention to in the game?[We spent] a lot of time putting in lots of little easter eggs, details, and researching the history of the world. So its very subtle, but one of the things we really focused on is worldbuilding. You might be given an asset to design or an artifact, and its not just about making it look interesting its about who owned this? Where did it come from? How was it made? What was the world like when it was made? You start asking so many questions about what goes into making and creating a final object so that it feels grounded, and we wanted to apply that same methodology to what we did.What was your favorite moment in developing the game itself?The IP is such a huge part of my childhood because it inspired my love of goblins, dragons, and all those kinds of things. So thats whats brought me here. To get a chance to put my own spin on things and have a heavy influence on a new take on that world has been hugely satisfying.Its really important to us to make something that we felt Tolkien would be happy with. Hes been quoted as saying he wanted other hearts and minds to add to his world like a real mythology, and we wanted to be part of that.