Middle-earth: Shadow of War’s Side Content Has Much Stronger Stories; Ambusher System Revealed

Alessio Palumbo
Shadow of War

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is inching closer to its release by the day. The game will be out in less than a month on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and Monolith's vice president of creative Michael de Plater was featured in an interview published on Game's Informer October 2017 magazine (issue #294).

In the article, de Plater revealed that Monolith put much more care while crafting side content in Shadow of War compared to Shadow of Mordor.

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Side missions were more of a template last time. Now we've given them the same sort of attention we've given to all of our story missions. They all have cinematics.

Each of our side mission arcs is around one of our main side characters, like Carnán or Eltariel. They have much stronger stories running through them and they're also much more crafted in terms of the objectives and gameplay.

The Nemesis system, unanimously praised in Shadow of Mordor, also has new tricks that should make the emergent stories of Talion and his enemies/followers more compelling.

One of the new things is the ambusher system. The game is keeping track of what you're doing moment to moment, and how you're playing. Your playstyle will determine when a particular enemy or follower appears in the world, in response to your actions.

They appear in the world in more relevant contexts. And they earn titles in response to things they achieve in the world, whether it's the Ranger killer, the drake slayer, or the conqueror if they take a fortress.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War recently made the news twice for controversial subjects. The first time around, lots of fans went into an uproar after the single player game revealed its microtransactions based Market system.

More recently, Warner Bros. and Monolith announced the Forthog Orc-Slayer DLC to commemorate the game's deceased Executive Producer Mike Forgey and funnel the proceeds to his family. It was later discovered that only proceeds from select U.S. states will be donated to the developer's family, though Warner Bros. clarified with a note that it won't be profiting from any of the revenue coming made from this DLC.

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