Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor Impressions

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor is a hack and slash assassination type game along the lines of Assassin's Creed and the new Batman franchise.  I haven't played through an AC game since I labeled the first one "The best boring game I ever played" and dismissed the Batman games as completely overrated.  I'm not really all that interested in the Lord of the Rings movies and haven't read the books since they were assigned reading in high school.  So, why buy it?  100% of the reason I decided to give this a try is their new (and about to get used by every other game under the sun) nemesis system.



More after the jump

The Nemesis System

The captains of Sauron's Army

In Shadow of Mordor you play a "ranger" named Talion who has been brought back from the dead and has to share his body with a wraith who wears a crown but has no idea who he is.  That wraith gives you special sight [read: eagle vision if you're familiar with Assassin's Creed.]  You get a roster of captains of Sauron's army that you have to dispatch in order to weaken Sauron himself.  This is all pretty standard.  The 15 or so captains are available to check out from the pause menu and all start out as silhouettes.  Once you run into one you'll learn what he looks like, where he hangs around, and his name.  If you interrogate a "worm" or a captain you can find out their strengths and weaknesses.

That's all standard stuff up to now.  This is where things begin to get interesting.  These captains are all procedurally generated, live their own lives independent of Talion, and react to your presence in a way that I've never seen before.  They fight among themselves for power, have their own individual motivation, form and break alliances, and do all sorts of cool stuff even if you just sit there staring at scenery.

As it turns out, every orc you see huddling around a fire or driving slaves around the countryside sees himself as captain material and is just waiting for the right situation to move up.  If you look at the picture above you'll see there are 4 tiers of dudes on the screen from top to bottom.  The top tier are Warchiefs and then they go down in rank as you go down the screen.  If there is an opening at the bottom rung and a random orc kills you... there's a good chance he's going to use that fact to slide right in there.  Also, just because he started out life as a slave driver doesn't mean he's not going to end up a badass captain... as I found out the hard way.

I was fighting way too many orcs just screwing around when one caught me with my pants down and killed me.  He must have added that to his resume and ended up filling an open slot in the captains' hierarchy.  I figured it wasn't a big deal.  In fact, I was excited to be able to get my revenge.  Well, fast forward a few short minutes and he's killed 3 other captains and made himself the heir apparent to the next warchief slot.  Not only that but he's brought his power level from 1 to 17!  Along the way he became immune to pretty much everything and made himself a certified badass.  He went from "who cares" to "OMG he needs to go" extremely quickly.  I actually stopped everything I was working on to try to single him out and it STILL took me a few tries to kill him.

Because he killed me more than anyone else and was starting to become my own personal problem he became my "Nemesis."  From what I can tell, it's just a title, but it becomes my driving purpose in life to take him out once he gets that title.

So far, the only complaint I have is that dropping off ledges is rough.  I've been playing with a xbox 360 controller and it's been smooth sailing... unless I'm trying to drop off a ledge.  Holding B will normally do the trick if  you want to go straight to the bottom and holding down on the movement stick will drop one ledge at a time, but I find myself unable to drop when I REALLY need to from time to time.  That's frustrating but ultimately okay.  The other thing that normally drives me crazy but makes perfect sense here are the QTEs.  Quick Time Events are typically when I uninstall, but they actually work.  How else are you supposed to fight a hundred orcs in a circle if you never get a prompt that someone is attacking you?  If you took out the QTEs then you'd have to simplify the combat experience... which is the far worse option in my humble opinion.

I can't say enough good things about the game at this point and I'm happy to finally see some tangible innovation that goes beyond the look or the scope of the game.  What I figured would be a quick single player experienced turned into a fully alive world with a real sandbox feel.  Skipping this game would be a bad idea.  But then again, you'll see traces of this game's DNA all over the gaming world once other developers get their hands on this nemesis system.  Nemesis is to RPG as Perks are to shooters.  Remember when Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out and then every other shooter had to have perks and progression?  I'm calling it now that this is where we're going with the nemesis system.

NOTE:

So far I've played 10 hours and have not seen all that much of the "end game" skills/runes.  I cannot use the "Brand" ability yet which gives you the ability to flip a captain to your side.  I cannot speak to that portion of the game yet.