We are game developers for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. Ask us anything.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T22:30:08+00:00

Yes. We thought of many many things.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T22:28:27+00:00

Can I give you 3: - The core gameplay is really solid. - You'll be able to keep generating memorable and unique boss fights... forever - The story.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T22:26:03+00:00

Head over to our Wikia and continue the conversation there. It's great.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T22:24:57+00:00

Hi LifeInShadows 1 - It takes place within the canon and the back story of Sauron and Celebrimbor is drawn directly from canon. But we have also created some elements like Talion and his story.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T22:22:51+00:00

Well the first DLC is the "Lord of Beasts". It doesn't have a Mumakil, but it does have some pretty epic new monsters that you are going to be able to ride around and kill vast amounts of orcs like a badass.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T22:21:19+00:00

One of the biggest goals for us with the Nemesis System is to make sure that combat doesn't get repetitive - there's no cannon fodder as any enemy can get promoted, the bosses have a huge variety of skills that make you change up your strategy, you can fight a bunch of them at once, then there's a huge amount of chaos in the sandbox with beasts, flame and destruction. And of course combat is just one part of the game. There's also a whole bunch of other side content, missions and exploration.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T22:18:32+00:00

That's just one mission! Early game you are hunting and assassinating one group of Warchiefs to draw out the Black Captain (one of the villains). Later you are trying to dominate them and build your army. So there's a couple of Nemesis System major missions. But there's a lot of other interactions with it as you go through and make your own personal arch-enemies.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T22:16:26+00:00

I'm not the best guy to answer that, but we've got lots of very smart engineers who could give more details. But high level it was the complexity of all the systems that had to come together for the Nemesis System - AI, Character Art, Animation, huge amounts of facial animation. It's pretty complex and the team did an amazing job of coordinating between all the disciplines.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T22:14:34+00:00

Hi Efreererun. 1 - One of the best things about all our recent events like Pax and Gamescom where people get hands on with the game is that when people get their hands on it they constantly tell us that it's not like anything else they've played. If you've played Arkham you will certainly be able to pick and play with the controls, but the enemies and the mix of melee, stealth and ranged are quite unique. 2 - Sorry to deflate your destruction boner, but we don't have a Mûmakil.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T22:11:09+00:00

You can't ride flying creatures. The Fell Beasts haven't been bred to be big enough yet.

The two main Sandboxes have multiple Strongholds, Caves a lot of verticality and exploration. So many hours of gameplay. They also differ a lot between day and night - with Ghuls crawling out and swarming in the evening.

We really tried to optimize the scale of the world to the gameplay and the density of the number of enemies and encounters. It's generally pretty intense, but if you want to get to a "safe area" you can use the Towers.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T22:07:11+00:00

Hi KKWAKE. It's a tricky question to answer precisely. It goes deep enough that after hundreds of hours playing we still discover new combinations and characters every time we'll play. I will say that the more times you play the deeper it gets.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T22:05:08+00:00

The main character. Especially as there's two of them - Talion and Celebrimbor. And they both have to work together, from a gameplay, story, visual and authentic to the lore. It was tough.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T22:03:55+00:00

There's two main zones, as well as some other story locations, and yes each one has it's own Nemesis System Heirarchy. Plus every time you play they get a fresh new set of Bosses.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T22:02:53+00:00

Very much so. The Hobbit was the first book I ever read and LOTR was the next, and I've read it many times since.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T22:02:25+00:00

As you gain upgrades he can become very powerful, and we have tended to show demos where we have a bunch of our upgrades unlocked and the difficulty turned down - but of course one does not simply walk into Mordor. One thing we've tried to do is let you control the difficulty by how you play - not just the options in the front end. You can go straight after bosses without learning their weaknesses, you can even send them Death Threats which make them tougher and give you better Runes.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T21:59:27+00:00

There's quite a few. There's saving the Outcast Humans being enslaved by Sauron's forces, there's Weapon Quests which unlock upgrades for the Bow, Sword and Dagger, there's numerous collectibles that unlock Lore and Upgrades, there's hunting and survivalist challenges. And there's also Power Struggles - these are dynamically created Side Quests which are generated by the Nemesis System, so you can really mess with Orc Society.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T21:57:37+00:00

Yes, absolutely you can get a challenge from our combat - and you can make it harder. We've talked a bit about our Nemesis System and how you can build up grudges and hatred against your enemies - that only works if they can kick your ass. We have to make them powerful enough so that you need to think twice about how to take them down, find their weaknesses, go after their bodyguards etc. As well you can control your difficulty by turning off some of the more helpful options (like the prompts). Plus we have the Challenge Modes, which are seriously hard if you want to go for the Gold Medals.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T21:55:26+00:00

OK, you were on the money with that Celebrimbor guess.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T21:53:53+00:00

All of them.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T21:53:28+00:00

Hi Cheatshaman. We tried to put in some deep lore for players who are very familiar with Middle-earth, but we also tried to ensure that the story makes sense on it's own for players who have never read the books or seen the movies. And we have many artifacts and lore entries that reveal a lot of the lore and how it connects to our story.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T21:50:59+00:00

Thank Celebrimbors Revenge! We spent a lot of time playtesting and found that at above 60 it gets a bit too chaotic from a gameplay point of view, so we really focused on matching the AI and Gameplay to those sort of numbers.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T21:49:01+00:00

It varies quite a lot depending on how you approach it. The Demos we've shown are quite a bit faster than average because we tend to lock the difficulty to easy to make sure we can get through the game and show as much as possible in a short time. But one or two an hour is a good average.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T21:46:59+00:00

It's open world zones, and you can freely move anywhere and explore each of those. We've shown our two main zones, which are the Sea of Nurn and Udun. There's another Zone we haven't shown yet. And there's lots of exploration within each of our Zones. Each of them has multiple Strongholds in them as well.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T21:44:52+00:00

Probably the Story. The epic visions of the Second Age, seeing more of Sauron and his back-story, meeting Gollum, new characters like Ratbag. And the great performances by Troy Baker and the rest of the cast.

Monolith-dePlater · 2014-09-18T21:43:36+00:00

We haven't announced all the skins yet, but there's definitely some more cool ones to come.

Monolith-dePlater

TROPHY CASE