[As the title states, this has been sitting in my drafts since July 2020. I ended up posting it other places but never here. So I’m posting it here as well.]
The year was 2017, I was at home and slowly carving out a meager life for myself. The Clusterf@#k Kickstarter had been successful, the book came out to fairly decent reviews and I was applying to a couple comic conventions. Things were okay. Not great, just okay.
Around this time, I was on YouTube and saw a trailer for a game called Shadow of War. The name sounded familiar but the image caught my attention so I clicked on the video and watched it.
I find that there are things that I will get hyper-focused on and basically get intensely into. Well, this trailer made that thing Shadow of War. I’ve always been a fan of fantasy settings and in games (Dragon Age and Elder Scrolls) and I still loved Lord of the Rings films so that was definitely a big part of it. The whole idea of the Nemesis System was always really intriguing to me and seemed like a unique mechanic that could make everyone’s play through completely different.
I’d remembered wanting Shadow of Mordor when it initially came out in 2014, but I didn’t have a PS4 at the time and kind of forgot about it. This trailer and my intense focus suddenly made me decide that I needed to get my hands on a PS4 and the first game.
A few months later, I was able to get both a PS4 and a previously owned copy of Shadow of Mordor. I remember that I was gearing up for the Indiana Comic Con in Indianapolis so I told myself I’d only play a little bit of the game to wet my whistle and then play it proper when I came back.
Fam, I played the hell out of the game. I was hooked. It just immediately checked all of the right boxes and I just couldn’t stop. It felt like a mix of Assassin’s Creed and the Batman Arkham games set in the Lord of the Rings universe. It was fun climbing up cliff sides and towers to pull archers from their ledges. Or hiding at the top of a ledge to drop down on an unsuspecting enemy. Or fighting upwards of 20 Uruk-Hai (the LotR name for orcs) and somehow managing to pull it out. It was just so fluid, easy to pick up, and entertaining.
And then there was the Nemesis System.
The Nemesis System
For those who haven’t played the game, the Nemesis System was a feature in the game where you could slowly build a rivalry with any uruks in the game that could play out for a long time. Say that you got killed early on by a low-level uruk (a grunt). That grunt would get promoted to captain and level up. He gets stronger and has more abilities that make him like a mini-boss in the game. If you go after him for revenge and he kills you? He levels up again and gets stronger. Say you finally defeat him and kill him with a well-placed headshot. During a mission, he could return sporting a metal eye-patch and swearing revenge.
So suddenly, any of the seemingly generic uruks could become the thorn in your side. They could go from a faceless nobody to the thing that kept you from completing a mission.
I’ll be honest, I spent more time playing with the Nemesis System than I did messing with the story. If anything, I would do the story missions just so I could move to the next stage and continue messing around with the mechanic. As much decent as I thought the story was, I remember being glad that it was over so I could have fun uninterrupted. It just added a great deal of variety to the game. You and your friends would not have the same enemies. It made your playthrough unique. I loved it.
Then I got to the second half of the game which cemented it for me.
Up to this point, you have been fighting the uruks but a new element is introduced where you could bend them to your will by ‘branding’ them and make them work for you. As long as you don’t think about the fact that it is basically mind control and forcing people to do your will, it’s really great.
Now, you could easily brand regular grunts. You could even do it stealthily so the others wouldn’t notice that they were branded. This meant you could climb up and brand an archer then use him to provide fire while you fought. Captains took a little more work and had to be near death before they could be branded and some could actively resist it. It added a new wrinkle to the game play and depth to the already fun Nemesis System.
It also allowed for surprising turns of events that I didn’t expect which made the game that much more fun to me.
Creating The King-Slayer
One such occasion happened when I was on a revenge mission after I was killed by a captain. Actually, I’d been killed by him a couple times and was a bit sick of it. He was pretty strong and each time he killed me, he just got stronger. After killing me one more time, he gained bodyguards that would follow him around and generally make taking him out more difficult. I decided that I would have to use a tactical attack. After slowly and stealthily branding all four of his bodyguards, I finally made my move.
When the fight began, I activated the bodyguards which turned the five on one in my favor. He was still pretty tough but I slowly managed to chip away at his health. Unfortunately, he had also managed to take out his former bodyguards one by one until there was only one left. I fought and used a stun attack to keep him from killing the last one because I needed every advantage I could get. At one point, my health was incredibly low and I knew that he was about to add another notch in his belt. But, to my surprise, the final bodyguard managed to get in the killing blow. I had hoped to get the kill, but I was happy to just have gotten rid of a pain in my side.
But here’s where the game surprised me.
Whenever you die or manually advance the game from day to night, it shows you a quick view of what happened with all of the captains during that period. Who leveled up, who died, who fled in battle, and so on. During this period, a new captain showed up that was already branded which confused me. Up to that point, every captain that I’d branded were ones that I had fought. I had no idea who this new captain was.
I hadn’t realized that when grunts killed captains, they leveled up to become captains themselves. So, that final bodyguard who got the killing blow not only saved me, but also got promoted to a captain and gained the name King-Slayer.
[Note: I will admit that I didn’t initially get the reference despite watching Game of Thrones.]
Now, I had my favorites when it came to the captains that I controlled. The ones that were really strong, the ones with unique skills, the ones that took forever to finally brand, or just the ones that looked really cool. But King-Slayer was different. There was no big fight, there was no rivalry, there was no back and forth. He got promoted because he saved my skin. It just wasn’t something I expected or even knew could happen.
After that, I tried to see if I could replicate it (having a branded grunt kill a captain) with varying degrees of success. It gave me a whole new element to experiment within the system.
And it made me love the game even more.
After I beat the main story and the DLC stories, I continued to play the game. I don’t remember how many hours the game is supposed to last but I put at least 300 hours into it. Just fighting uruks, fighting captains, purposefully allowing myself to be killed just to see all of the different possible captains. And if there were ones that I thought were cool, I would brand them and make them mine. I’d help my captains on missions to level them up. It was like a game of Pokemon, only with less ambiguity on whether the fighting was hurting them. I think I made the joke that I treated it like an oversized Chao Garden from Sonic Adventure 2, but that was fairly close to what I was doing. Sending them in missions, helping them level up, and doing my damnedest to make sure they didn’t die.
And don’t even get me started on photo mode. I took some pictures that I think would have made great promotional stills for the game. I probably spent around half the time I was messing around trying to get good shots of the uruks. Honestly, a good photo mode will always get some extra hours of game play out of me.
The Nemesis Forge
Needless to say, this all got me very excited for Shadow of War. I remember the developers putting together streams to talk about the game and what to expect which got me even more excited. By all means, the sequel was going to have all of the things I liked but bigger and better. Then they announced something called the Nemesis Forge that took your top followers and nemeses so they could be transferred over to the next game. Of course, I knew I had to put my guy King-Slayer in it but I didn’t have a nemesis because I’d either killed or branded all of them.
I set out to make a nemesis to take into the next game. After finding a couple different ones that ultimately didn’t work out, I ended up coming across a guy that was a beast. Otha the Brander.
This dude was smaller than other uruks, but was crazy strong. He also had a trait where he would go berserk and slowly heal if injured. On top of that, going berserk made him stronger than before so he could kill most grunts and captains fairly easily. What made him incredibly difficult to fight was a trait called no chance that cancelled any last ditch saves you had from a killing blow. He was pretty powerful and I felt satisfied with him, I saved him as my nemesis.
I still messed around with SoM while waiting for Shadow of War, but was ready for the next game. Then, after months of waiting and an additional two-month delay, the sequel was mine.
Finally Shadow of War Arrives
The game was good… but.
Early on, I could tell that it wasn’t going to be the same experience. Remember the Nemesis Forge? How I built up the Brander for the sequel. Well, you get to fight him at the very beginning of the game in an early stage boss battle. Once you kill him, that’s it. He’s dead. No comeback later in the game to get revenge. He just shows up, references the first game, and then you fight him. It was cool and was challenging as hell, but it didn’t feel as big as they’d made it seem.
Let me reiterate that that game wasn’t bad. The core game was solid, the fighting and stealth were still great, the new siege battles felt epic, and I actually dug being able to change armor and weapons. The photo mode was once again on point.
The problem was that a lot of unnecessary stuff was added that just made it feel like too much. It didn’t feel as focused as the first game. It just felt like they crammed in as much as they could because the sequel was supposed to be bigger. But there came a point where it was too big.
For instance, the first game had fairly large areas that you could travel between. They were visually distinct but not too large. Shadow of War had five areas to travel between. At first, I was excited about it but eventually it just got tedious bouncing around all of those places.
Also, each map had about 20 – 25 captains to fight brand and interact with and you can see how massive things felt. Suddenly, you go from 40 or so captains and war chiefs in the first game to 120 captains, war chiefs, and overlords. And there were so many guys to fight that it became much less memorable than the first game. There were so many fights that you didn’t even get to enjoy because you were fighting a new guy every few minutes.
Then there’s the market.
The Market
Anyone who plays these games will tell you that the uruks and the Nemesis System are the defining part of the game. That’s what separated the series from any other AAA sandbox game with stealth and action. But what made it work in the first game was the way you built relationships with your nemeses and your followers, such as my story about King-Slayer. That was an integral part of the game.
That was why making a market where you could just buy uruk loot boxes (with real money) seemed to miss the point. The market itself wasn’t a bad idea. There were interesting upgrades you could give your uruks and special orders where you could send them to other areas (which came in handy if you had someone who could be better used elsewhere). But to make the uruks high-tier loot that could be just purchased kind of took away the uniqueness of them.
It became very clear that this was something the people who made the game were told to put in to make money, but they said that it wasn’t necessary to play the game and you could get your captains the old-fashioned way. This was mostly true.
Until you get to a segment called the Shadow Wars.
The Shadow Wars
The Shadow Wars section was, to put it lightly, complete bullshit. After you’ve beaten the story and fought all the way to Sauron’s tower, you are treated to the ‘bad ending’. You then are forced to fight in 10 unnecessary stages of siege battles that get harder and take forever to get through in order to get the ‘true ending’. And near the end, the captains assaulting your tower are at a higher level than your captains can reach. The whole thing takes hours and is probably the most frustrating point of the game.
What made it really foul was that I grinded really hard to level up all of my captains in order to get through it without needing to buy uruks. But remember how I said that in later parts they got to higher levels than my guys could get? Well, that ended up getting a ton of my guys slaughtered. Several of which I’d spent hours leveling up. But what happens when you win this stage, but at least half of your guys is dead and you’ll have to come back to this area for another, much harder battle?
That’s right, you probably had to buy some uruks.
I think I had some in-game credit for pre-ordering the game so I never used my own real money, but I quickly began to see why they added this last segment. I’m curious to find out how much money they made off of that one part alone.
But I finally beat the last segment and what do I get? A three-minute video that was not worth the hours that came before. I’ll be honest, I didn’t feel satisfaction when the main game was over. I felt disappointed.
There was a ton of great stuff in the game. I did feel a little happy when King-Slayer showed up later on in the game.
However, that last part felt like such a slap in the face that it sucked the enthusiasm out of me. I played for a little while longer, but I eventually dropped it and moved on. I didn’t even bother with the DLC.
And on a more personal level, while they added some new aspects to the Nemesis System that was really cool (betrayals, your followers returning from apparent death, loyal allies saving you from killing blows), there were some aspects that were removed. The one that I was most disappointed with was the fact that grunts no longer got promoted if they killed a captain. I found out after watching a grunt kill a captain with a brutal take-down only to find he didn’t get leveled up. While I can understand why (the game was way too big for it keep track of all of them), it removed an aspect that I found so interesting.
I had hoped that Monolith would make a third game that reigned it in a bit, was more focused, and combined the best of the previous games while removing the unnecessary stuff. I’d love to play that game and even have an idea on how they could bring the whole series full circle, but I’m pretty sure they’ve moved on to working on an original IP. I’d have liked to see them get to do one final game to clean things up.
It’s a shame that they felt like they had to add all of that stuff because it tainted a lot of praise the game was getting. Even after they fixed the problems and removed certain elements, the damage was done. It’s a shame because the Nemesis System was so unique and fun to play with that they didn’t need to do too much for the game to be a hit.
But as it stands, I recommend the first game easily but have to add a caveat for the second. I’m still curious to see what they put out next. I’ll have to fill my time imagining all the other games that would benefit from a nemesis system.