Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor took many by surprise with its innovative Nemesis system and creative take on the Lord of the Rings world. Developer Monolith was blown away by the response, and knew a sequel had to be made. The real question wasn’t if the follow-up should be bigger than the original, it was how big could the sequel get?
Matthew Allen, director of technical art at Monolith, talked to iDigitalTimes about Middle-earth: Shadow of War, how much larger the scope of development was, and some of the changes players can expect to see in the sequel to Shadow of Mordor.
“One of the initial tenants was to make it huge, and we did it,” Allen told iDigi. “We came out of the original Shadow and we felt we did a lot with the Nemesis system, but didn’t push the technology that hard. It was Monolith’s first third-party game, and had bit off a lot of new stuff.”
Despite the hesitation, Monolith knew a sequel to Shadow of Mordor was definitely going to be the studio’s next game. “We knew before we released Shadow of Mordor that the game was unique. There’s so much more we want to explore,” Allen said. “We didn’t talk about anything else, we really went forward with ‘what does a sequel look like?’”
Once Monolith mastered the technology, the team was told to run wild with it. “When we first started talking about what we were doing with the sequel, and how big we wanted to make it, and everything we could do, myself and the tech guys were actually pretty excited,” said Allen.
In Shadow of Mordor, players caused in-fighting with an army of orcs, turning enemies against each other to help you climb to the top. Shadow of War takes the same concept, but spreads it across a number of different regions and fortresses. Thanks to how expansive J.R.R. Tolkien made his world, all of the locations in Shadow of War are true to Lord of the Rings lore.
“The IP itself is so rich and there’s so many locations that haven’t been explored,” Allen said. “That’s the genius of it, he [Tolkien] alludes to locations like ‘the desert in the far east.’ Those are places for us to explore.”
Another major benefit is that Monolith happens to be staffed by some of the biggest Lord of the Rings nerds around. “Over the last six years or so, we really trained and honed ourselves in this universe,” said Allen. “We have a pretty good idea based on stuff that’s come before and what that should look like. More importantly, we also know the right narrative feel for it.”
“Hopefully as we show off more of the game, and how it fits into the lore, people will have a moment of ‘Oh shit, that’s cool,’” he said.
Along with a number of different locations comes a number of factions for Orcs to fall into. Allen said that not only does this impact gameplay strategies, it can also change up the stories players make with the Nemesis system.
“In Shadow of Mordor, all of the Orcs you interact with are sort of monoculture. Until you really interact with them and build your own stories, all the grunts looked and acted sort of the same,” he said. “What we’ve done by now giving them their own tribes is to give them unique cultures. They’ll fight differently, they’ll interact with you differently, and that takes the Nemesis system and expands it on a ton of different vectors.”
A handful of the tribes have already been detailed. There will be the Feral tribe, that utilizes the flora and fauna of a region to help in battle, the Mystics, who can command armies of the undead, and the Marauder tribe, a group that plunders what riches an area has to take before moving on to the next. Additionally, these cultures can mix and match, resulting in a unique blend of enemy types to fight through.
Enemies are the only things getting a makeover in Shadow of War. One of Allen’s favorite new inclusions is the expansion of the skills and gear systems. “We greatly expanded our skill system and what players can do. Each skill you pick feels something different and cool,” he said. “We pushed the skill tree and even the gear to be more like an RPG.”
The gear isn’t just to change the way you look, there will be some major stat gains with each outfit. “As you get further along and you complete sets of armor and pimp out yourself, it makes a big difference,” said Allen. “There are some guys that you just can’t take on unless you have the proper equipment.”
Ultimately, the team at Monolith knew to walk a fine line between embracing what made Shadow of Mordor a success while also pushing for Shadow of War to be its own game. “We didn’t want to go so far away from what we did that we’d alienate folks, and we really felt like we had just scratched the surface of what the Nemesis system could do,” Allen said. “So a lot of focus was on ‘what other stories can we get from players playing?’”
Middle-earth: Shadow of War comes to PS4, Xbox One and PC on Aug. 22.
So what do you think? Are you excited to see the Nemesis system expanded to a range of different fortresses and factions? Would you like to see the Nemesis system used in a different game at some point? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
- Nemesis system does an even better job of letting players witness and tell unique, action-driven stories
- Most of the narrative content is just plain boring
