Do we actually NOT have a Shadow of Mordor thread?? I went looking, but I didn't see it at all.
In short: This thing is friggin awesome. It's like a melding of the Batman: Arkham games and Assassin's Creed. It's an RPG, though you don't make any plot choices. You're essentially playing a movie, but they don't bog you down with quicktime events or anything like that.
Here's a solid review that goes into lots of detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBPmkfu_zs8
The review points out right that pretty much all you're doing is killing orcs. LOTS of orcs, ALL the time. You're sneaking up on them to kill them, riding warbeasts to kill them, or just kicking in the front door and killing them. Some of the missions have some side objectives and such, but it's not like in Batman where you've got the detective minigames or anything.
What really makes this thing stand out is the Nemesis system. It definitely keeps the endless orc killing from getting too old. Your main objective in all this is destroying Sauron's horde from within. To do this, you're hunting and assassinating his captains and warchiefs.
Each of these guys is randomly generated with specific strengths and weaknesses. Their identities are unknown to you to begin with, and even if you spot one in the wild, you learn his identity, but you won't know anything about his strengths and weaknesses until you find intel. Intel is gained through interrogating specific orcs (called worms), or through grateful slaves that you've liberated, or from reports that you occasionally find in strongholds and camps (or looted from courier bodies).
Once you get the intel, you know everything about them. You get a screen like this:
That plucky little fellow was Mogg the Tainted. He started out as a low level captain who happened to show up as I was battling a much tougher elite captain. While I killed the first captain, Mogg got the drop on me and finished me off.
If an orc kills you, they get a promotion and a big boost in power. Note that he only has two weaknesses. He didn't start that way. He used to have a couple of fears and could be insta-killed by stealth. After his first promotion though, he got that Deadly trait, which SUCKED! He managed to off me twice more, and got a gang, and friggin Quick Shot! So not only will he two-shot you, he's got a bunch of bodyguards and fires three bolts in a row. Plus, he lost a bunch of weaknesses. Every time I saw this fucker I was ready to flip my desk over.
Finally I ended up beating him by using his fear of fire. You eventually get an ability to detonate camp fires and grog barrels. I lured him and his goons near a camp fire, blew it up (killing the goons), and he ran like hell thanks to his fear of burning. He was easy after that.
But all that nonsense came from just one randomly generated orc!
Here's Angry Joe against a nemesis of his. I didn't have quite the trouble with mine that he did, but for a while there I wondered just how the hell I was going to deal with this goon. (Also it's just kind of funny watching Joe lose his shit haha). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmfNQp3f-FI
I wouldn't call the Nemesis system a 'dynamic story generator' or anything quite like that, but it does create some very interesting content, and no two orcs are ever quite the same. And sometimes you get some truly brutal combos of strengths (that deadly/quick shot thing for instance). You have to get a little creative to take these guys out, and that's where a lot of the fun is for me. Hell, I had one guy that was immune to ranged damage and melee damage. I could ONLY injure him from stealth, and he didn't have the insta-death stealth weakness. I had to ambush him, flee, and ambush him again repeatedly, hopefully without his health regenerating too much between ambushes!
To me, I think this kind of dynamic content is a baby step in the right direction for future games. Self-generated content is really what will step us into the next phase. And this thing didn't do a bad job of it! I HATED Mogg! And the bastard just kept showing up! It was like I had my own personal stalker! I've had more than a few highly entertaining situations occur.
Like the Night of a Thousand Captains(which isn't a mission, it's just what I call it), where I had infiltrated one of their strongholds and captain after captain just kept showing up. That came about because I'd gone in to locate an artifact I'd found out about. I saw a captain that I had full intel on, went after him, and his rival showed up to assassinate him, but found me instead. So I finish both, and am about to leave when I spot yet another one, and on and on. That was like a solid hour of playing cat-and-mouse with orc captains in their own fortress. Friggin awesome.
In fact, here's Jesse Cox's playthrough in progress. He doesn't have many vids up, but episode 4 on there was like a miniature version of what happened to me: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFx-KViPXIkHAH9gp95LEumDZ631JtT5P
Obviously a couple of spoilers are in that playthrough, but nothing huge. He's not far into the game at all. Myself, I've got about 30 hours in, and the progression shows me around 60%.
Anyway, that's more than I've written about a game in an age. If I have anything really critical about it, it's that things get a little easy after a while, once you master combat. But, since the combat is fun and fluid, I really don't mind. In fact, I was wondering if I should go looking for the difficulty slider (there isn't one, unfortunately), but then I got the Death Threat ability. You dominate an orc (any orc) and have them issue the death threat to the captain of your choice. That captain instantly gets a huge boost in power and a gang of bodyguards. When you do eventually finish them off, they have a very high chance of dropping epic runes to upgrade your weapons.
In fact, thinking on it, I do have another criticism: it's a little too easy. Dying is actually VERY cool, because that creates these mini-narratives. If you aced the entire game, it'd be a little dull, whereas I will not forget Mogg the Tainted for a loooong time.
In short: This thing is friggin awesome. It's like a melding of the Batman: Arkham games and Assassin's Creed. It's an RPG, though you don't make any plot choices. You're essentially playing a movie, but they don't bog you down with quicktime events or anything like that.
Here's a solid review that goes into lots of detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBPmkfu_zs8
The review points out right that pretty much all you're doing is killing orcs. LOTS of orcs, ALL the time. You're sneaking up on them to kill them, riding warbeasts to kill them, or just kicking in the front door and killing them. Some of the missions have some side objectives and such, but it's not like in Batman where you've got the detective minigames or anything.
What really makes this thing stand out is the Nemesis system. It definitely keeps the endless orc killing from getting too old. Your main objective in all this is destroying Sauron's horde from within. To do this, you're hunting and assassinating his captains and warchiefs.
Each of these guys is randomly generated with specific strengths and weaknesses. Their identities are unknown to you to begin with, and even if you spot one in the wild, you learn his identity, but you won't know anything about his strengths and weaknesses until you find intel. Intel is gained through interrogating specific orcs (called worms), or through grateful slaves that you've liberated, or from reports that you occasionally find in strongholds and camps (or looted from courier bodies).
Once you get the intel, you know everything about them. You get a screen like this:
That plucky little fellow was Mogg the Tainted. He started out as a low level captain who happened to show up as I was battling a much tougher elite captain. While I killed the first captain, Mogg got the drop on me and finished me off.
If an orc kills you, they get a promotion and a big boost in power. Note that he only has two weaknesses. He didn't start that way. He used to have a couple of fears and could be insta-killed by stealth. After his first promotion though, he got that Deadly trait, which SUCKED! He managed to off me twice more, and got a gang, and friggin Quick Shot! So not only will he two-shot you, he's got a bunch of bodyguards and fires three bolts in a row. Plus, he lost a bunch of weaknesses. Every time I saw this fucker I was ready to flip my desk over.
Finally I ended up beating him by using his fear of fire. You eventually get an ability to detonate camp fires and grog barrels. I lured him and his goons near a camp fire, blew it up (killing the goons), and he ran like hell thanks to his fear of burning. He was easy after that.
But all that nonsense came from just one randomly generated orc!
Here's Angry Joe against a nemesis of his. I didn't have quite the trouble with mine that he did, but for a while there I wondered just how the hell I was going to deal with this goon. (Also it's just kind of funny watching Joe lose his shit haha). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmfNQp3f-FI
I wouldn't call the Nemesis system a 'dynamic story generator' or anything quite like that, but it does create some very interesting content, and no two orcs are ever quite the same. And sometimes you get some truly brutal combos of strengths (that deadly/quick shot thing for instance). You have to get a little creative to take these guys out, and that's where a lot of the fun is for me. Hell, I had one guy that was immune to ranged damage and melee damage. I could ONLY injure him from stealth, and he didn't have the insta-death stealth weakness. I had to ambush him, flee, and ambush him again repeatedly, hopefully without his health regenerating too much between ambushes!
To me, I think this kind of dynamic content is a baby step in the right direction for future games. Self-generated content is really what will step us into the next phase. And this thing didn't do a bad job of it! I HATED Mogg! And the bastard just kept showing up! It was like I had my own personal stalker! I've had more than a few highly entertaining situations occur.
Like the Night of a Thousand Captains(which isn't a mission, it's just what I call it), where I had infiltrated one of their strongholds and captain after captain just kept showing up. That came about because I'd gone in to locate an artifact I'd found out about. I saw a captain that I had full intel on, went after him, and his rival showed up to assassinate him, but found me instead. So I finish both, and am about to leave when I spot yet another one, and on and on. That was like a solid hour of playing cat-and-mouse with orc captains in their own fortress. Friggin awesome.
In fact, here's Jesse Cox's playthrough in progress. He doesn't have many vids up, but episode 4 on there was like a miniature version of what happened to me: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFx-KViPXIkHAH9gp95LEumDZ631JtT5P
Obviously a couple of spoilers are in that playthrough, but nothing huge. He's not far into the game at all. Myself, I've got about 30 hours in, and the progression shows me around 60%.
Anyway, that's more than I've written about a game in an age. If I have anything really critical about it, it's that things get a little easy after a while, once you master combat. But, since the combat is fun and fluid, I really don't mind. In fact, I was wondering if I should go looking for the difficulty slider (there isn't one, unfortunately), but then I got the Death Threat ability. You dominate an orc (any orc) and have them issue the death threat to the captain of your choice. That captain instantly gets a huge boost in power and a gang of bodyguards. When you do eventually finish them off, they have a very high chance of dropping epic runes to upgrade your weapons.
In fact, thinking on it, I do have another criticism: it's a little too easy. Dying is actually VERY cool, because that creates these mini-narratives. If you aced the entire game, it'd be a little dull, whereas I will not forget Mogg the Tainted for a loooong time.