Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Previews
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A few hands-on previews have been released for Monolith's upcoming Tolkien-based action-RPG, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. As per usual, we've rounded them up for our readers' convenience, starting from this Destructoid piece:
I started out by trying to take out one of the bodyguards of a captain that I wanted to control. Hunting him down could have been easy, but he was completely surrounded in an orc camp, and one mistake could have the entire camp coming down on me. Using fast travel, I got close to the camp's gate, letting me use some of my Wraith powers to scan through walls to find my target and mark him. Going in, I used stealth to sneak around the walls of the camp, staying close to the leftmost mountains, moving as slowly as possible. Hidden in the grass, I happened upon a platform where my mark just happened to be taking a break, urinating against a camp wall. I thought it would be a perfect time to take him out. I used stealth to sneak up behind him but my takedown attempt was unsuccessful, which had him sounding the camp alarm to warn of an intruder.
Suddenly I was running for my life, using Shadow of Mordor's free traversal to get as far away from the camp as possible. I had several on my tail, so I took advantage of verticality to hop over the camp walls, scramble up in the mountains, and let my health uncover. Eventually I got back in and found the target mostly alone. Instead of sticking to my original plan of capturing him, I killed him on the spot. That felt good.
I picked another bodyguard from the army screen with the hopes of taking over his mind with Wraith powers to use him against his boss. This hunt was a bit easier, and it let me try out Shadow of Mordor's Batman-like combat system. Hard hits, combos, blocks, and parries are all here, but the Wraith powers add another dimension with ranged and psychic attacks. All of this at your disposal makes Talion feel like a walking army. It's no problem for him to take a small group of orcs out on his own, and with careful approaches and proper use of the Wraith powers, he could probably take out a sizable unit alone.
My brief time with Shadow of Mordor was encouraging, but what's unclear, and admittedly difficult to convey in the context of a half-hour demo, is how the game's early, middle, and late game will differ, if much at all. What happens after you install four warchiefs? Do new sections of the world unlock over time? When I asked Monolith about what the game's ultimate win state is, all I got back was this cloudy comment from the game's director of design, Michael de Plater: (The Initial Goals are to discover why Talion was denied death after he was sacrificed on the Black Gate, and to discover the identity of the Wraith. The ultimate goal is something we want players to experience, but it does include realizing the full power of the Wraith.) And on progression: (We aren't revealing everything now, but there is more to come. Other weapon upgrades include unlocking Weapon Powers (special rechargeable abilities), earning experience to unlock Abilities (on separate Wraith and Ranger Trees).)
Monolith's Nemesis system is a fascinating direction for a big-budget game, but if Shadow amounts to simply seeking out camps, assassinating or mind-controlling leaders, and repeating this process ad nauseum through Mordor until your weapons are fully upgraded, I'm worried that the appeal will evaporate after a few hours. What I'm hoping for are that some truly unique, massive-scale scripted moments will be in the game alongside the enjoyable, but potentially repetitive sandboxy stuff. I'm told that the mission types will range from (story missions, side missions, power struggles, artifacts and collectibles opportunities, and hunting and survival challenges to name some,) but it's unclear whether these encounters will be fundamentally different.
Kothug had taken up residence in a ruined fort. Climbing up a wall, I drew my bow (you always carry this, a sword for face-to-face combat and a dagger for stealth kills) and fired an arrow into his foot, pinning him to the ground. When he saw me, he shouted, stupidly, about thinking I'd be too scared to face him again. Grabbing him and using my Domination ability, I bent him to my will. Kothug was mine. Revenge had been served, cold and delicious.
I left, thinking I'd continue with the mission proper, but Kothug wasn't done. While I squeezed information about a warchief out of another captain - every named enemy has a list of hates, fears, strengths and weaknesses that can be exploited in and out of combat - I found out that Kothug had gone straight to my target without me asking, killing one of the leader's bodyguards and earning himself a seat on the warlord's inner circle. An instanced encounter appeared on my map, and I headed over to help.
I found Kothug staring down a caged Caragor - one of Mordor's more vicious fauna - a baying mob of Uruk-Hai watching on. I drew my bow, but before I had a chance to assist, Kothug had killed the thing in a single stroke. I took a quick look at his personality traits - 'Monster Slayer'. He earned himself another title by becoming the warlord's personal bodyguard, "The Fool". Hey, any title's cool, right?
The work-in-progress PlayStation 4 version of the game that I played is visually impressive, if not exactly graphically groundbreaking, but the really interesting stuff happens in the game's strategic layer - something refreshingly different from most action titles.
While Monolith wouldn't divulge Talion's ultimate goal, it involves him working his way up Sauron's chain of command and carefully hunting down targets based on their connections to other, higher-ranking orcs. Dominate a foe and have him turn against his captain, kill two lower-ranking orcs who act as bodyguards for a valuable lieutenant, assassinate a powerful enemy by exploiting an unusual weakness, engineer a duel between two captains and pick off the survivor. there's a huge variety of ways to bend the orcs' minds while also cleaving their skulls, and it makes the game much smarter than it might look at first glance.
The Nemesis system is best encapsulated in a menu screen within the game that shows you the warchiefs in the area and which captains are under their command. If you've picked up earned via interrogations or through scraps you find in the world on any of the enemies here, you'll see it listed out in terms of that orcs' strengths and weaknesses, info on their personality (and thus ways in which they might be exploited), and the rewards you'll get if you take them down. There's a lot of information to scour, but the screen is easy to navigate and understand.
Back out in the world, you can make a beeline for your objective using the info from the Nemesis system's enemies screen outlined above. Or you can just do whatever you want. I did a little of both. In my pursuit to dominate and turn a particular captain against his warchief so I could eventually control and take over his army, I was killed. The result was the scrub who knifed me moved up the chain of command and became a captain he also made my list of things to do for the day. Watching him get promoted in the Nemesis screen, I felt a weird sense of pride that I'd somehow helped a regular Joe orc make something of himself in this horrible world.
Tracking down this newly made orc captain led me to a heavily fortified garrison that I had to sneak around. I ended up stealth killing some guards, possessing and riding caragors (large, warg-like felines), and eventually getting my revenge. It was a fun excursion that showed how dynamic events in the game can be apart from the main objective at hand. I could have spent hours clearing out that fort if I wanted to.
At one point during our hands-on, a mistimed counter attack at low health sees us stabbed in the back by a lowly Uruk, who then goes on to gain strength and rise up the ranks for defeating the man responsible for slaughtering so many of his kind. We swear revenge against the little shit who killed us, as we're returned to life at one of the game's fast travel/respawn towers.
Identifying an orc under the five warchiefs within the zone (the whole of Mordor is infested with orcs and warchiefs) is a simple case of opening the army screen, which lays out the region's orc hierarchy. All known orcs are available to peruse at your leisure, with their stats and traits conveniently listed for you to take advantage of.
You can exploit weaknesses and fears, while marching into battle with an awareness of their strengths and invulnerabilities. One orc might be frightened of Caragors, so bounding into battle on the back of one of the tamed beasts will instantly cause him to flee at the very sight. Others might be scared of fire, meaning you can shoot arrows from Talion's bow, Azkâr, and ignite bonfires or explode grog barrels, causing them to let their guard down.
