Tales of the Shire might’ve featured hobbits who actually speak Westron, Tolkien’s canon language for the hairy-footed mortals, but developers didn’t think it was viable after consideration.
Weta Workshop’s lead writer and lover of all things J.R.R. Tolkien, Darren Ormandy, reveals as much in a recent episode of The Prancing Pony podcast. When asked if there are any “nods to the linguistic roots of the hobbits” and how any potential references were incorporated in the cozy game, Ormandy responds with an admission – devs weren’t able to make Westron fit well into Tales of the Shire, ultimately, despite giving it a go.
They couldn’t properly integrate the language while maintaining the game’s identity, and Westron also struck the team as having the potential to be similar to Simlish – The Sims 4 language. “One of the things we experimented with was seeing whether we could actually have the hobbits speaking Westron,” explains Ormandy, “because it would sound a little bit like Simlish – so we did actually spend some time doing that, but there just wasn’t enough to go on.”
The lead continues, describing how “cutting the cookie in favor of having Westron” wouldn’t have been the right decision for Tales of the Shire – even if “die-hard Tolkien fans would never have anything bad to say” about it. Even if Weta Workshop didn’t opt to have Westron as its hobbits’ spoken language in the end, however, Ormandy states that “linguistically, I tried to capture how Tolkien wrote and the colloquialisms of the hobbits.”
These take things like background, education levels, and regional differences into account, making for a far livelier and lore-accurate Shire. It’s undoubtedly difficult to capture such nuance, especially when considering games like Stardew Valley, such as Tales of the Shire, that focus much more on maintaining a solid cozy gameplay loop, but it sounds like Ormandy and Weta Workshop did their best to do so – and I, for one, can’t wait to experience it firsthand.
There’s not long left before I get to build my own life within the Shire, either. Tales of the Shire is set to release today, launching in just a few hours from now.
Here are some of the other most exciting new games this year and beyond to keep an eye on.
