Sledgehammer70 has posted a wonderful Q&A with the developers behind Conquest. Here we finally get answers on why some key aspects where changed and cut from the game. Enjoy!

Q.) Why were Ringerbearer mode and Strongholds mode not in the final game?

A.) The game modes that ended up being cut, most notably Strongholds and Ringbearer, weren’t coming together as quickly as we had hoped.  We wanted to make sure that everything in the game added enjoyment to the overall experience, and these two modes were not delivering on that. Cutting them allowed us to focus our efforts on the game modes that were staying and make them as good as they could be.

Q.) Are there really 150 units on the battlefield?

A.) There actually are 150 AI units on most of the campaign levels.  Levels like Pelennor Fields and Weathertop show this off nicely.  For multiplayer we wanted the experience to be player vs player as much as possible.  When we had 150 AI units in multiplayer, the overall contribution a player made on the battle was negligible.  You’d be slogging through a horde of AI and only once in a while would you find another human player. You would also have little impact on the end game.

Q.) Why are the Balrog and Treebeard not playable in Hero Deathmatch?

A.) In a word, balance. In order to deliver on the true strength of giants like the Balrog, we had to make them incredibly powerful. Now imagine a team of 8 of those coming at you in team Deathmatch. Suddenly, it’s not so much fun to be a good guy. We experimented with a significantly weaker version of those characters for multiplayer but felt it was too radically different from the characters in campaign mode and not true to the spirit of those characters in the universe.

Q.) Why doesn’t the tracking system account for kill assists in multiplayer matches?

A.) This feature was surprisingly difficult to implement and unfortunately we did not have the time to do it justice in the final game.

Q.) What was the thought behind making the Hero Arena game mode the first DLC pack for LotR: Conquest?

A.) Hero Arena was a game mode we had been playing internally throughout the development of the game.  We had a lot of fun playing a “mini fighting game” mode within Conquest and wanted to share it with the community. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to bring it to fruition until after the retail version of the game was done, so we decided to release it as free, downloadable content.

Q.) Rumor has it there are some special moves for characters (like Aragorn or Legolas) that players might not know about. Is that true?

A.) Yes these rumors are true. We usually like to add some of these in for fun. For those of you who are impatient and just want to know try this… With Legolas hold down his kick button for 2 seconds, then while still holding it press jump.  With Aragorn hold down his heavy attack button for 5 seconds, then while still holding it press the light attack button.

Q.) Why is only one playable hero offered in multiplayer for being the top player in the match?

A.) This was partially because of memory constraints and partially due to balance. It becomes exponentially more difficult to account for multiple combination’s of hero/villain match ups on a particular map and particular game mode. For some of the DLC maps, we were able to balance the matches so players could choose between two different heroes.