[Video Game] Shadow of Mordor

[HotSnow50]

I see the campaign mode as leading me to level up my character and glean some lore that I didn't know about beforehand.

My main aim is to get skills for the ladder competitions.

As for trying to make the game more difficult... Try this... For 3 hours yesterday I decided that I would go back to the starting area and murder captains until I could brand a full group of crossbow/spear-throwing orcs and advance them. To do this you have to let them kill you a few times which means you have to plan a lot so they don't auto-murder eachother in the time-elapse phase between your deaths. Best to advance one at a time so your orcs are branded and made safer from intra-struggles. At which point, you have a fighting force that can, when you enter the beck and call missions, that will thoroughly annihilate any opposition save range-immune named Uruks.

Hope this adds a fun little side game that is, surprisingly, quite intricate and tricky!

[Glorelendil]

Oh god I want to play it now.

But I just packed my gaming PC into the attic. Between work, baby, TOR, biking, and other time-sinks I decided I just can't spend any time on video games for now.

[shipwreck]

there are a lot of little details to keep us lore monkeys happy. All these small, personal stories connected to the artifacts you find show how much effort the designers have put into their research for the game.

I completely agree. It really takes the sting out of the parts you just have to 'get over'.

[Ferretz]

I have the game on my PC, and I've gone through the story. I think the gameplay is very nice, and it looks amazing. But the story lacks a whole lot, in my opinion.

But it made me think about a comment from one of my players in TOR. He said something like (not long after having been introduced to TOR): "I'm starting to get used to the way TOR forces you to roleplay in a certain way...". What he meant was that the game kind of shoehorns you into certain cliches, and that, combined with inspiration from Shadow of Mordor, made me wish for a certain kind of book from our dear Cubicle 7:

Let's call it *drumroll* "The Book of Shadows".

In it you would have your monsters and ways to really give them more detail, and maybe customize them more. But more importantly, you would have rules for playing "darker" characters, even evil ones.

The Lord of the Rings Online does something very interesting with this concept: for those of you who haven't played it, it allows "monster play" and "session play". Monster Play is the regular "player vs player" gameplay, but here some players log in as orcs, and even wargs and spiders, and they fight other players with their regular characters in the Ettenmoors. In "session play", players will take on different roles for a short time, often evil ones, to give the story a different perspective, and this would be a great way to spice up a TOR campaign, I think.

Anyway, it might be wishful thinking, but the game Shadow of Mordor reminded me that characters in TOR can be on the "dark side" and still have very interesting playable stories.

Eirik

[Morgoth]

An Elf Ghost?! Is there anything in the source material that can help support that?

History of Middle Earth X (Morgoth's Ring), pg 223

The fea (spirit) is single, and in the last impregnable. It cannot be brought to Mandos. It is summoned; and the summons proceeds from just authority, and is imperative; yet it may be refused. Among those who refused the summons (or rather invitation) of the Valar to Aman in the first years of the Elves, refusal of the summons to Mandos and the Halls of Waiting is, the Eldar say, frequent. It was less frequent, however, in ancient days, while Morgoth was in Arda, or his servant Sauron after him; for then the fea unbodied would flee in terror of the Shadow to any refuge - unless it were already committed to the Darkness and passed then into its dominion. In like manner even of the Eldar some who had become corrupted refused the summons, and then had little power to resist the countersummons of Morgoth.
But it would seem that in these after-days more and more of the Elves, be they of the Eldalie in origin or be they of other kinds, who linger in Middle-earth now refuse the summons of Mandos, and wander houseless in the world, unwilling to leave it and unable to inhabit it, haunting trees or springs or hidden places that once they knew.

Because also, as has been said, though all that die are summoned to Mandos, it is within the power of the fear of the Elves to refuse the summons, and doubtless many of the most unhappy, or most corrupted spirits (especially those of the Dark-elves) do refuse, and so come to worse evil, or at best wander unhoused and unhealed, without hope of return.

[Faire]

Yep, it seems that elven fear were even capable of dominating living creatures.

[Corvo]

Thank you Morgoth (cringe at the name) for these informations: I was skeptic about elven ghosts

[Majestic]

Three of my players got this game right away, though some are playing more than others. My son (one of those three) told me last night he's pretty much done everything possible with the game already; all he's looking forward to now is new DLC (downloadable content).

[Ferretz]

They have changed too much of the "canon" in my opinion, and often for no good reason. But again, the game itself is very well done and a joy to play.

E.

[Woodclaw]

My opinion on the game is based mostly on what I could see in online playthroughs. The general impression is that the game plays and feel more like an Assassins' Creed clone with a layer of Middle Earth paint on it. While I noticed a few nice touches, mostly in the form of objects and their associated stories, the overall feeling is that the ME lore is stretched way too thin and that the game doesn't really fit.
I'm not too keen on the main character's gimmick (the elf-ghost thing) mostly because it clashes violently with my perception of the Middle Earth as a place where magic is mostly subtle. Here we have several abilities that aren't subtle at all (the light bow being the most obvious), I can't shake the feeling that this game is Middle Earth in name only.