Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

[thaima1shu]

Anyone else gonna get this game? Reviews have looked really promising so far. Game looks like they took a LOTR setting and mixed it with some Assassin's Creed stealth/exploration and the Batman: Arkham series' combat. And it looks awesome. Got it pre-ordered and can't wait for Tuesday.

Joystiq: 5/5 - http://www.joystiq.com/2014/09/26/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-review-my-precioussss/

Kotaku: YES - http://kotaku.com/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-the-kotaku-review-1639361008

Polygon: 9.5/10 - http://www.polygon.com/2014/9/26/6254177/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-review-lord-of-the-rings-ps4-xbox-one

IGN: 9.3/10 - http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/09/25/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-review

GameSpot: 8/10 - http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-review/1900-6415884/

Eurogamer: 8/10 - http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-09-26-middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-review

[cflnut]

http://www.joystiq.com/2014/09/09/shadow-of-mordor-delayed-on-xbox-360-ps3/

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor won't storm retail's gates in September on previous generation consoles. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment announced this morning that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions "will take more time in development," with release dates now slated for November 18 and 21 in the Americas and UK, respectively.

The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of Mordor are all set to ride on September 30 in North America and October 3 in the UK. The PC and Steam versions are also set for September 30 in the Americas and Europe.

I've been looking at getting this as well. But will probably wait till the price go down.

[rollntider]

[Sakura]

It's the first Middle-Earth game that was open world in ever.  I wanted Lego Lord of the Rings to be open world, but it just wasn't.  Thankfully someone finally decided "people don't like corridors, maybe we should just let people go where they please..."

Not a big fan of the franchise, but even less of a fan of being boxed in to linear paths.

[thaima1shu]

Damn the Steam pre-load was something like 33gb! Damn thing took forever to finish downloading.

[thaima1shu]

Quite fun so far. The combat system is really smooth, just like in the Batman Arkham games. Nothing like taking on a wave of 40 orcs at a time and decapitating just about all of them. How could that not be a blast?

[Sakura]

Quite fun so far. The combat system is really smooth, just like in the Batman Arkham games. Nothing like taking on a wave of 40 orcs at a time and decapitating just about all of them. How could that not be a blast?

Pitting them against each other would be even more fun.

[thaima1shu]

Pitting them against each other would be even more fun.

Well that happens too. Not on that big of a scale though.

About 8 or 9 hours into it now and still loving it. The Nemesis system is very well done. It's really interesting to see how the Orc hierarchy changes each time you kill one of them or get killed by one of them. It's awesome too if you encounter the same one more than once that they reference the results of your previous meeting. Story has been pretty interesting so far as well, though certainly nothing close to groundbreaking. Loving what you can do with the combat system as you progress through the game. Also enjoying that you can choose to go stealth or just all out assault, with both being viable options.

[thaima1shu]

Getting further into it now and the game keeps surprising me with its level of depth and the story. I didn't realize you could do things like building your own army of sorts out of the orcs as you get deeper into the game. So I was wrong and you would be able to essentially create some pretty awesome battles of orc on orc violence. And some of the skills/abilities you can unlock as you get deeper are pretty badass too. Cannot say enough how pleasantly surprised I am by this game.

[Sakura]

Getting further into it now and the game keeps surprising me with its level of depth and the story. I didn't realize you could do things like building your own army of sorts out of the orcs as you get deeper into the game. So I was wrong and you would be able to essentially create some pretty awesome battles of orc on orc violence. And some of the skills/abilities you can unlock as you get deeper are pretty badass too. Cannot say enough how pleasantly surprised I am by this game.

Yeah, I saw that in the trailer, which is why I was thinking to myself "doesn't happen on that big a scale?  Is he playing the same game?" 

[thaima1shu]

Yeah, I saw that in the trailer, which is why I was thinking to myself "doesn't happen on that big a scale?  Is he playing the same game?" 

Haha yeah, my bad. Just wasn't far enough into the game. It's definitely awesome when it happens.

[Sakura]

So I played SoM for a while, and in the end, I came from really digging the game, to being not quite so enthusiastic about the game.  This isn't because of the shady deals they tried cutting with their Youtube Brand contracts (though I feel that I'll probably end up addressing that matter some time soon).  But because the game is a bit hollow and not-quite-there.  There's quite a few problems with SoM though.  The first and big one is the lore thing (also part of the contract thing), which was that the game really is trying to do its best to distance itself away from Middle-Earth lore.

This is probably because of the fan-fiction level character that is the protagonist, a Dunedain / Elven hybrid whose Elvish half was turned into a wraith which could not be slain.  The game has the usual Middle-Earth fantasy fare Orcs Uruks (apparently they don't understand the distinction, so we must call every enemy an Uruk and not an Orc), Worgs Carragors, and Trolls Graugs.  They also have a race of Gollum-like mutants called Ghûls, whose origins are never explained (and no, they're not part of Middle-Earth lore).  In the game there are the mandatory references, which is Sauron and the Ring.  The main character starts as a Ranger who was exiled from Gondor.

So this gets to a very important part, which is lack of explanation.  The game never attempts to explain or justify anything.  Whether it's based on the actions you're taking (which never have any affect on the Orcish horde), or how we got here in the first place.  Who is the protagonist, and why was he exiled from Gondor?  We never find out, only that he is a Dunedain ranger, and his father-in-law is some guy who's got a lot of pull in Gondor, but not quite enough to get them returned from exile.  His family is targeted by the armies of Mordor, and ritually slain before he himself is slain in the same fashion.  That's the first few minutes of the game, so spoiler alert: That's literally nothing as far as plot details go.  Don't worry, this game doesn't have any plot to spoil.

The game tries its best to use names of Items, Creatures, and Weapons that are not used within Middle-Earth lore.  Of course, you never hear or see this in any day one reviews of the game, because the game's marketing firm actually had stipulations on their NDA/riders that stated that no one on Youtube or the big name sites was to mention any Middle-Earth book or movie, nor make comparison.  They actually got people to sign a contract for an early access copy of the game, agreeing that they would not tell people (especially Middle-Earth fans) that the game was so far removed from the lore.

So the game is basically 95% Goblins, Orcs, and Uruk-Hai -- but in the first few minutes of the game, they try to say "there are no Goblins or Orcs, they're all Uruk-Hai."  This doesn't stand up to scrutiny, as Goblins and Hobgoblins (aka Orcs) are easily identifiable, and so too are the actual Uruk-Hai.  Even if you don't like Middle-Earth lore, you can easily tell the difference.  The Carragor is a renamed Worg, that no enemy in the game rides, so their entire existence in-game is for the player to either get harassed by or ride the stupid things.  And every now and again a Graug (which is a Cave Troll) shows up and starts killing everything, including Enemies, Allies, and Neutral creatures.  They're intended to be creatures that you avoid (except in the sake of one hunting challenge), and if you fight them you do it at range.  I said "to hell with this crap" and spent the next few minutes moving in, swinging my sword at it, and then dodging away.  Only to have my hunting challenge fail because a Carragor pack showed up and bit him a couple of times, causing him to die and depriving me of my kill.  Thanks.

So how's the game work, where are the townships, what about quest hubs, et all?  There isn't any.  When you need to restock your ammunition, you either suck the life out of enemies using the wraith powers, or you find them conveniently stuck in the architecture all over Mordor.  Apparently there's some ghostly bowyer that you never see walking around Mordor, making wraith arrows and leaving them stuck in things that no one but you can see (and no one but you can use).  Obviously that's being facetious, it's another unexplained mechanic why there are arrows you can pick up off of the terrain that aren't physical arrows.  So how does this game work?  Like this, you wander around Mordor (which is actually extremely tiny, by the way) and kill things.  Sometimes you find a challenge or a story line quest, but for the most part the game is as far removed from a traditional game narrative as can be.

The game has a Director AI type system to it called the Nemesis system.  And the way that Nemesis works is, if you defeat a Captain he gets demoted and is no longer a Captain.  If you are defeated by an enemy, regardless of his standing, he gets promoted and can then challenge an existing Captain position if one is not open.  If a Captain-level or higher enemy defeats you, they gain more power which gives them more game-breaking abilities.  These abilities can be absolutely ridiculous too, for example two Captain level enemies were generated who could not be killed except by Finishers and Explosions.  Captain-level enemies are able to determine their own actions, so for example, at some point I ended up having a group of five captains who wandered Mordor as a team, hunting me.  If I stayed in one area for too long, they would show up.  This sounds really cool, everyone always thinks "that's awesome."  But these were some of those ridiculous former Captains that I was mentioning, who had abilities like Enraged by Carragors (so if a random Carragor attack happened, or you were riding a Carragor, they'd instantly heal up and do extra damage), and immune to all regular forms of damage.

In the Nemesis system, former Captains DO NOT disappear.  Instead they just become part of the hordes of enemies that inhabit the entire game world.  If I had to make a comparison, I'd say that it's like Assassin's Creed meets Skyrim, except every character on the map is hostile and out to get you.  There's a lot of endless battles you can get into, but the problem is, there's no point to get into them.  And the more advanced your character gets, the more powerful the enemies get scaled.  The max power level of an enemy is 20, I never had L20 enemies, because I always made sure to kill them before they could reach that state.  But the more Captains I killed, the more those former Captains would come back and attack me.  Soon I was fighting group battles, but it was groups of former Captains.  It's not an exaggeration to say that I got attacked by a group of 6 captain-level enemies with only 2 regular enemies while wandering around on the outskirts of Mordor.  These enemies were at first not too bad, but the thing is, there's like 5 to 8 varieties of enemies in the game.  There's Warriors, Slavers, Archers, Defenders, Berserkers -- there might be more, and any of these enemies can get promoted to Captain.  When they do, they gain special abilities that really harm you the player.  For example, Defender enemies would sometimes gain jump immunity and heavy armour, meaning you couldn't jump over them (they'd just hit you down to the ground) and you could only HURT them by doing combat finishers on them.

This goes on and on endlessly, and it never stops, because that's what Nemesis is programmed to do.  So the longer you go around, killing Captains, the stronger they get because the game actually AWARDS power level to characters who die.  So the game becomes a neverending grind, the only real winning move in the game is to do as little killing as possible, but there's a caveat there too.  Running away from a Captain is the same as letting a Captain kill you, it awards them with power level.  But you yourself do not gain power level for letting a Captain escape.  If you try to focus on doing the missions early on, then the first skill point you should spend is the one that lets you perform an instant combat finisher every 8 combos.  I didn't get to the end of the game, and I'm not going to, after 20+ hours of doing the same thing in the game, I pretty well decided I'd seen plenty.

So in summary, SoM has a LOT of good ideas, but bad implementations.  Nemesis is a GREAT idea for a sandbox game, the only problem is it gets carried away with itself and soon all the standard orcs are replaced by 5 guys who do stupid intros as they attack you.  I would have preferred being able to turn those intros off, because it's rather stupid and boring after the 50th time to have them yell "TARK! blah blah blah" every time they encounter you, which is more often than you would imagine.  And while the game is very lenient in letting you decide how the game flows, it leaves you with a game that makes you question why you're playing.  Why am I wandering around Mordor killing the same orcs over and over again?  In the end, I didn't really have an answer.  So I uninstalled the game.  I hear the final Black Hand fight is a real disappointment anyway, so I don't feel like "I should have done that fight before I quit" (and I was at that point in the game, don't get me wrong), because I was tired of killing Kroz the Undying for the fiftieth time every time I tried to do anything.

Were I to give this game a review score, I'd score it a 76%.  It's not a bad game, it's just not a very fun game.  Everything becomes a grind, and the game is the same-old same-old the whole time you play.  I feel like they really need to address the tedium of the game, and put in some kind of story-centric mechanic that gives the player the feeling of something to do, rather than needing to find something to do.  Too much freedom results in too little interest.  There needs to be a pull for SOMETHING.