Shadow of Mordor

[RoJoHen]

Anybody pick this up yet? I got it last night, and so far it's incredibly fun. The gameplay is basically Arkham City meets Assassin's Creed, but you happen to be a Ranger in Middle Earth.

I haven't played much so far, but I'm having a good time, and I think it's only going to get better.

 

[Reverend]

Everything I've seen looks good. the nemesis system seems especially novel. I'd probably get it if Dragon Age weren't coming out in a month or so and if I didn't have a sizeable backlog of steam sale games I've yet to play.

 

[SPCTRE]

I will play it at some point, too busy at the moment. The nemesis mechanics combined with the setting and the fact that I'm not burned out on Arkham style combat practically guarantee a good time for me.

 

[Skywalker]

To be honest I'd kind of written the game off simply because of how badly it mucks up the lore, but out of curiosity I watched some streams of it being played and it actually looked like a lot of fun, so I'll probably check it out at some point.

 

[RoJoHen]

I can't really speak to how it affects the lore. So far in the story it hasn't done anything to contradict The Hobbit or LOTR, but I don't know how it affects other aspects of Tolkein's world.

 

[Pindar]

When I first killed the Orc who had already killed me 5 times I achieved immense satisfaction.

The nemesis system makes hunting down Orcs who have already done you in quite addictive.

As a game it's great fun, but yes it has nothing to do with the Lore of Middle Earth.

 

[BillJ]

Picked this up for my wife. I've put a couple hours in just running around killing things.

 

[RoJoHen]

Picked this up for my wife. I've put a couple hours in just running around killing things.

It's so easy to get distracted by that! This is one of the few open world games I've played where I didn't just plow through the story. It has actually encouraged me to wander around, explore, and get into random battles.

 

[Reverend]

Picked up Shadow of Mordor on sale a while back (took forever to download!) and have been playing it for for the best part of a week.

Very good game, only slightly let down by the story being a little too shallow and the ending felt somewhat anticlimactic. I expecting some much more challenging battles than what we ended up with. Part of that is probably my own fault in making sure I'd done everything before finishing the last story missions and so I was pretty overpowered by the end.

Haven't dug into the DLC yet, but I'm having fun running around as the pirate woman/reble leader. In a way I think the game might have been more interesting with someone like her bound to the wraith instead of the Aragorn surrogate. Not that I disliked Talion. Indeed I was surprised that I didn't find him at all insufferable as I generally do with these rugged, broody types who aren't called Bruce Wayne.

Though I'm far from well read on the subject (never could get through The Silmarillion) but I thought they made interesting use of the lore and I'm sure Tolkien purists would have a fit over some of what went on (particularly the last line before the credits rolled.)

One thing I'm not 100% sure about is why all the orc in the game are called Uruks. I was under the impression that the Uruks were the really big bastards that lead the armies, where the game makes it look like even the snivelling little ones are of the same breed.

Very good game though and I hope they get a sequel that builds on this.

 

[SPCTRE]

Uruk is just a word for orc I think, as in Uruk-hai.

 

[Reverend]

^ I guess I just assumed that Uruk was short for Uruk-hai. Are they interchangeable terms or is there meant to be a distinction?

 

[SPCTRE]

Uruk-hai is a compound word, hai means people/folk (I think, my Tolkien/linguistics geekdom was ages ago ).

 

[Brendan Moody]

Uruk-hai literally just means "Orc-folk," but in Tolkien's source material it (and "Uruks," which is used interchangeably) only applies to a particular strain/breed of soldier orcs that are large and powerful, with black skin and slanted eyes. The movies also distinguish between Uruks and regular orcs. There would certainly have been non-Uruk orcs in Mordor in the game's timeframe, so the way the term is used in the game is iffy from a standpoint of strict accuracy.