"We started off with the idea that we wanted to create what in a sense you might call a sandbox Middle-Earth, which is a version of Middle-Earth in which you will find characters, as Tolkien describes them, going about their business, doing the things they should be doing, having the interactions that they should be having and so on," Gray says.

"You would come into that environment and have the opportunity to make up your own story; to say, 'I'm the hero of Middle-Earth, and I want to go and do this, and I think this is important and this is how I'm going to spend my time.'"

But once the project was a bit further down the line, according to Gray, the team decided that a free-roaming Middle-Earth just wouldn't be enough to entertain everyone. "We felt that was great, and we still absolutely have that as a goal, but there are many people who, if we just dropped them off in Middle-Earth and said, 'Go have a good time,' they would feel lost, and they would feel gipped that we hadn't taken the time to at least offer them a storyline," he says.​