A portion of a Digital Spy interview with producer Nick Ricks...

DS: You've worked on a number of movie trilogies with LEGO, but Lord of the Rings - from the films to the books - are really long. What did you first think in terms of how to approach this? What was going through your mind?

NR: "Well, that was one of the reasons why we are doing Lord of the Rings at the point we are doing it. It was a case of we knew we wanted to do the idea of this journey and a big scale of adventure. And that's reflected in, like you mentioned, the length of the films. They're absolutely massive and they are crammed full of bits that make great gameplay from a level point of view.

"From our perspective we knew we could do something cool with it, and it just came to a point where we were sat looking at it from a tech perspective going, 'OK, we can actually do this now, we can make this game'.

"We can follow it right the way from the beginning of Fellowship right the way through to the end of The Return of the King, do all the cool levels that we want to do, but also have this much bigger world.

"That was it; it was one of these cases where we usually sit there going, 'What can we do to make this condensed to be a game?', whereas this one was what do we include to make this as big as it feels it should be.

"So it's kind of been a slightly different perspective for us. In reality we have all this content. We went, 'Let's try and fit all of it in, let's try and do as much as possible and really make something that feels a bit different'."

Full interview and more screens here

- walk from The Shire to Mordor in one go
- not a single loading screen
- pass through interconnected villages, caverns and forest trails
- role-playing game-style fetch-quests
- a backpack allows characters to hold objects
- some items can be combined with others to create something new
- Mithril bricks are collected during side-quests to craft new weapons or enchanted equipment
- create a pair of boots that give any character the ability to leap like Legolas
- a musical jug makes any nearby individuals helplessly dance on the spot
- Missions within the open-world are the same isometric puzzle-solving variety
- jump between different characters to make use of their respective abilities
- one mission set during The Fellowship of the Ring has Sam use his horticultural expertise to dig up tomatoes while Pippin goes fishing
- these foods are combined for a breakfast feast
- in the story, follow the Ringwraiths to the peak of Weathertop
- use both Sam and Frodo to evade capture
- with Frodo wearing the Ring, he has to enter the blurred, Wrath dimension to collect wood so Sam can build fires and keep the attackers away
- LEGO Lord of the Rings rips audio directly from the movies
- Aragorn slurps milkshake instead of smoking a pipe in Bree's tavern
- Arwen's apparent continuity error with her costumes as she's first introduced is also reflected in-game