My nerd cred, painstakingly built up over the last 30 years, is about to take a big hit. Until 2021, I’d never seen The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Until 2026, very recently, I’d never played Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. I’d made attempts, you understand, way back in the wilderness years of the 2010s, but it never really grabbed me. Then, just recently, I gave it another go, and, it really did.
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You step into the half-dead shoes of Talion, a Ranger of Gondor who is just a little bit dead after Sauron’s servants attacked. However, death is not the end, as the wraith of an Elven smith called Celebrimbor takes possession of your body and revives you. This leads to a bit of a Tyler Durden situation, two minds living in just one body, to put a spin on the words of Phil Collins.
Keen-eyed readers will likely recognise Celebrimbor. He’s the smith who forged the Rings of Power in LOTR, and was then fully killed by Sauron. That’s just the biggest of many differences between Shadow of Mordor and the work of Tolkien, with another notable difference being that the Black Gate had been abandoned, uh, 1000 years before the game begins.
Never mind! See what I mean about the LOTR lore not really mattering?
Bye-bye, Uruk-Hai
After being revived, you meet Smeagol (400 years before he was born), and attempt a dual-pronged mission: getting your revenge and also helping Celebrimbor remember his past. Being a wraith is bad for the memory, it seems. Getting revenge is the order of the day, though, and you’ll be getting a lot of it. The big bad may be the Black Hand of Sauron, but you’re going to get revenge in instalments along the way by taking on innumerable numbers of Uruks, which is where the game’s real masterstroke comes into play.
The Nemesis System was a particularly fantastic innovation for the time and one that has yet to be equalled, even 12 years on. Essentially, it’s a way to keep track of the Uruk Captains who command the rank-and-file footsoldiers of Sauron’s hordes. Each one has a personality, fears, and a wide range of character traits.
The best part of all of this is that your interactions with them will affect their personality and physicality. Attack them with fire, and if they survive, they may well develop a fear of fire, for example. Beat them badly, they’ll come back with scars and additional dialogue about how angry they are with you, MANFILTH!
It’s a hell of a tightrope to walk, and one that Shadow of Mordor pulls off near-effortlessly
It’s not just one-sided, however. If a footsoldier has the skill to take you down in battle (looking at you, archers and javelin throwers), they can be promoted into an open captain slot. By killing the captain, you’ve just allowed another enemy to go up the echelons of Uruk society. To quote Civilization 5, itself quoting Aesop, “we often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.”
This means that the game doesn’t really have meaningless fights. As soon as you start mulching your way through the ranks of Sauron’s army, you’ll start creating more captains yourself. They don’t sit still, either: the captains have their own motives, and their own power struggles. They will frequently attempt to level themselves up and become stronger, or kill one another over squabbles. You can sit back, if you like, and watch an Uruk climb the ranks, only to be felled by a young upstart.
The Nemesis System makes the enemies matter. Mooks become potential rivals, and captains become sworn enemies that you have fought several times before and that have become powerful enough that running in with a sword simply won’t do. Now, you need to carefully plan your attack, exploiting their fears and weaknesses to make up for their increased power. It’s a hell of a tightrope to walk, and one that Shadow of Mordor pulls off near-effortlessly.
Patently problematic
The real problem, such as it is, with the Nemesis System is extrinsic. Patent and copyright law have made it so that only Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment can use it until 2036, by which time it will likely have been forgotten. It’s tragic. Genuinely, heartachingly tragic, that this fantastic system, so suited to action games of all calibres, is now locked away in an IP vault.
Even Warner Bros. haven’t touched it since the 2017 sequel, Middle-earth: Shadow of War. There was talk of it being used in Monolith’s Wonder Woman game, but that’s now been canned, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see it used again, at least until after the patent expires.
By then, I suspect that, like Ridge Racer‘s usage of playable games in loading screens, technology will have moved past the need for the Nemesis System, with new approaches to gaming making it redundant. That’s a real shame, a backsliding of gaming’s development, and something that makes Shadow of Mordor well worth your time.
Playing this game gives you a glimpse of an alternate LOTR, sure, and it’s interesting for that. But it also gives you a glimpse of a lost future of games, and that bittersweet beauty is worth more than an entire Silmarillion of backstory could ever be.
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