The Lord of the Rings: The White Council Preview

Eurogamer is offering up a preview of EA's The Lord of the Rings: The White Council, which includes some new information revealed by executive producer Steve Gray.
Well, "The fundamental idea is that you build up your character and become of sufficient stature that you eventually become an agent of the White Council. They ask you to go out and do things for them, and eventually you become so powerful that they ask you to confront the ultimate evil of that time," says Gray.

In other words, you'll spend most of your time completing quests - but whether you follow the game's storyline to the letter or go off and do your own thing is up to you.

"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.