"One does not simply walk into Mordor," grumps Boromir in Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring, chewing Rivendell's sylvan scenery and making Gandalf look like he needs a Tums.
Well, of course one doesn't. Not when it's so much simpler to have your throat cut at Mordor's doorstep, then rise from the grave to haunt Sauron's hearth and home like an undead version of *The Matrix'*s Neo, sowing bedlam-fu through the Dark Lord's mobs of snarling fodder.
That's your plight as ex-Gondorian ranger Talion at the outset of Warner Bros.' Shadow of Mordor, to be released September 30 for consoles and PC: perished before you've so much as tapped a face button or twiddled a thumbstick. The upside: You're pretty much all-powerful.
How do you shoehorn someone in Gandalf the White's league into Middle-Earth's legendarium, without ticking off Tolkien genuflectors? The Oxford don never mentions a doughty super-dude cursed to share personal space with a Nazgûl-ish amnesiac, the pair setting Sauron's machinations back by decades in the lead-up to Lord of the Rings.
You might also like:Destiny Is Great, if You Can Ignore Your LifeThe Japanese Firm Selling Videogames to Women, Using Sex3DS Smash Bros. Is an Exhilarating Return to ExcellenceNo matter, says Michael de Plater, one of *Shadow of Mordor'*s principal designers at Monolith Productions. He says his studio's retconned mid-quel is a plausible Tolkien rethink.
"We absolutely want to stay accurate within the established canon, and we’re not changing anything that’s going to happen within Lord of the Rings," he says. "But there are 80 years between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, so there’s still a lot of scope for you to have played a part in that. There’s so many interesting hints and teases within Lord of the Rings. Eighty years is a long time. Why does it take Sauron that long to build up?"
The answer sounds like another tedious power fantasy, and on a certain level it is. But it's the how that makes Shadow of Mordor into something that feels like stumbling onto the B-side of an overplayed band's top 40 hit single and discovering utter genius.
Think about world-building exercises like Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto V or Assassin's Creed IV. Heavyweight feats, every one. But push their anemic ideas of "emergent" gameplay even a little and the facades collapse, their bipolar civilians restricted to behavioral loops, either obliviously moseying around, running away from or chasing after you. Any sense of progression derives from completing objectives that reboot an area to indicate you did something meaningful, like stagehands rearranging the furniture during intermission.
Shadow of Mordor offers that same sense of fastidiously fabricated sprawl. With its area-unlocking towers and collection checklists, it's probably nearest the Assassin's Creed series. But its hundreds of marauding inhabitants aren't just looping drones: They're pyramid climbers whose aspirations and grievances and strengths and weaknesses evolve with or without your involvement.
It's a system Machiavelli and Heisenberg would understand, a cauldron of roiling relationships prone to entropic spasms. The game's platoons of orcish plebes, subordinate to powerful captains who guard incredibly resilient mini-boss warchiefs, all care as much about deposing each other and clambering up the game's hierarchical ladders as flushing you out.
And the ladders are there for anyone murderous enough to scramble up them: Plebes can become captains, and captains can rise to warchiefs, each a gathering threat to you the game does nothing to mitigate. It's a little like union bumping: Your enemies challenge each other to level up as time passes, or they level up if they whup you in battle.
Orcs can go on hunts, be ambushed by other orcs, stage executions of human prisoners, hold feasts for their followers, run recruiting drives to bolster their ranks, and so on. At any given moment, the map is awash in threats. Allow these "power struggle" events to play out unchallenged, and the world gets a lot less friendly.
Sure, you respawn every time you die. But it's not a reset button. Play poorly (die repeatedly) or negligently (ignore or fail to stop power struggle events), and you're basically cultivating a garden of demigod-like foes.
Monolith's starting point for this thriving society of oppressed and manipulated bestial brooders and backstabbers was the Cirith Ungol scene in The Return of the King, De Plater says. That's the one where Samwise commandeers a fort by turning the orcs against themselves.
"They start off fighting over Frodo’s mithril shirt, and that quickly erupts into mutual slaughter, and later Frodo speaks to the point that that’s the spirit of Mordor," says De Plater. "He tells Sam it’s only that they hate us more than each other that we can’t leave them to completely destroy themselves."
Every encounter is personal: How you behave in battle endures, like a scarlet letter hung round your neck. If you flee from battling an enemy captain, you'll hear about your "cowardice" the next time the two of you tango. If you're defeated by one, you'll really get raked over the coals at a followup clash. The orcs are unfazed by your undead-ness, and take special pleasure in pointing out how many times they'll re-kill you.
It sounds superficial, but for me it was a tipping point that triggered a cascade of psychological responses. When I saw the orc who'd just killed me leveling up and huzzahing in the game's army overview, I couldn't wait to come off the ropes and hunt the gloating bastard down.
Put it this way: I'm not sure I've ever felt this hostile and obsessive toward a bunch of glorified computer algorithms.
Cutting across all of this is a familiar, seasoned counter- and combo-driven combat system ripped unapologetically from Warner's recent Batman games.
De Plater owns it: "From the controls standpoint, absolutely [the] starting point was Arkham," he says. But Arkham's combat is about power-leveling Batman, whereas Monolith's vamp gets fractal by pulling the bad guys into that mix.
Enemies in Shadow of Mordor are clusters of random abilities. Each is a panoply of unique motives, weaknesses and strengths. They could be good with a weapon (inflicting greater damage), or good at blocking vaults (nullifying your jump-over-them maneuver), or a fast runner (making them almost impossible to catch if they flee mid-battle), or can heal rapidly (requiring you to employ a stealth kill), or can't be taken out with stealth kills at all.
Charging into battle without mapping that stuff out, no matter how adept you are at Arkham-style combat, is suicide.
Enemies are tactical puzzles first, punching bags second. You'll study them before you engage, tiptoeing around the perimeters of structures and isolating stray orcs to seize and divest of "intel."
You need intel to see, for instance, that while an enemy has the "battle-hardened" trait (very hard to kill), he's afraid of Caragors (a massive dog-like beast you can ride in the game). If you want to turn the tables in that crazy-hard matchup, you'll want to scout the area first, locate a Caragor cage, then loose the terror-sowing beast with a well-placed arrow.
"Our system’s much more like a sports game... where it is very much about the systems first," De Plater says. "It’s not trying to make systems interact with a branching narrative, which becomes explosively complicated and impossible. The whole system relies on the fact that your enemies can level up, they can have growth, they can challenge you, and it can be really difficult and evolve."
Having logged dozens of hours in Shadow, I can vouch for De Plater's claims. My favorite thing about the system is just how flexible it is, even when you try to break it. In other games that play the "emergent gameplay" card, it's relatively easy to find the repetition seams or behavior loops. But in Shadow of Mordor, the more you poke the game, the more idiosyncratic and expansive it feels.
"The more you play it, the bigger people perceive the possibility space to be," De Platter says, giving an example of something I still haven't tried, but can't wait to: "It's people saying, 'What happens if I try to take this guy all the way to the top, or if I make every single captain in the world be the bodyguard of this one particular leader?' That’s the joy of it not being a branching story but an actual system."
My only complaint about the game---no, really, the only one---is that I long ago lost whatever enthusiasm I once felt for Tolkien's world.
Shadow of Mordor's source material is scrupulously siphoned from a sprawling fantasy world, but one that's been so thoroughly flogged and publicly flayed that it's difficult to muster even half-hearted enthusiasm for the game's brick-by-brick unmasking of your uncanny ghostly companion.
If you're a Tolkien fan, Shadow of Mordor seems as reverent and deep and serious a story treatment as you're likely to get. If you're not, then I'd say it's testament to the incredible game Monolith's made that the story doesn't matter, one way or another.
