Arts first mentioned The Third Age as early as October 4, 2002, shortly before the PlayStation 2 launch of The Two Towers. EA announced they would be making a Return of the King video game, to be released in roughly twelve months time, as well as an as-yet untitled role-playing game based on all three films, slated for release in Fall 2004. Nothing more was heard about the game until April 27, 2004 when EA officially revealed the game was to be released on three current generation consoles (GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox), as well as the Game Boy Advance. They explained that rather than the hack and slash nature of the previous two games in the franchise, The Third Age, as it was now officially called, would be a turn-based RPG, with gameplay similar to that of Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2. They also revealed the game would be set in the world of the films, but the player would control new characters rather than existing characters already established, although key events in the films would appear in the game, thus allowing players to see familiar events from a new perspective. Additionally, the game would feature new missions, events and characters not taken from the films at all. They also mentioned that the game would feature an option to allow players to fight on the side of Sauron. Development of the game had begun in mid-2002, when The Two Towers was still in development. Work intensified towards the end of 2003, with the release of The Return of the King. Executive producer, Steve Gray, who had worked on Final Fantasy VII and directed Parasite Eve for Squaresoft, explained he had wanted to make a Lord of the Rings RPG since the 1990s, but had never gotten the chance, until EA acquired the rights to the film trilogy. As the game was under development, various ideas were rejected as the team settled on an approach. For example, initially, the developers planned to have an Active Time Battle combat system, before going with the Conditional Time Battle system. Another rejected idea was an auto-equip for weapons and armor, which would automatically equip the strongest piece of equipment. In tandem with this was an auto-allocation of experience points, whereby the game would choose to distribute points among the various attributes. Another rejected idea was that in Evil Mode, the good