Shadow of Mordor To Last Over 30 Hours
In less than two weeks, Warner Bros and Monolith Productions will release Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, which has all the hallmarks of a great game as I found out during Gamescom. The developers celebrated the upcoming launch with a Reddit AMA, and we’ve compiled all the information on topics that needed clarifying, starting with the longevity - being a fully single player game, this was pretty important and it was confirmed that an average playthrough should last somewhere around 30 hours.
We are averaging 30+ hours playing through the game. There’s quite a few side quests. 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.
It was also explained that Shadow of Mordor isn’t fully open world like Skyrim or The Witcher 3, but rather it has big open world zones, similarly to Dragon Age: Inquisition.
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.
One user asked about the character limit during combat scenes, and a developer responded saying that they nailed it down to about 60 NPCs.
We spent a lot of time playtesting and found that at above 60 NPCS at once, 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.
The name of the first DLC has been revealed as well; apparently, it will feature new fierce beasts that Talion will be able to ride and lead into battle.
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.
One of the doubts many had (myself included) on the game was related to the difficulty, which seemed fairly easy in the demonstrations. The devs confirmed that Shadow of Mordor was made easier on purpose during these occasions, and there will be several ways to raise the challenge should you want to.
As you gain upgrades Talion 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.
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. 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.
Finally, a few questions had risen on the PC version of the game; gamers have been burned too many times by mediocre ports, but Monolith reiterated that their heritage has always been about developing on PC and users won’t be disappointed this time either.
Monolith’s history is with developing on the PC and we are all huge PC fans here. We feel great about our PC version and spent a lot of time making sure we created the best experience for that platform. We take each platform very seriously and feel the PC is at a high quality. The framerate is capped at 100 fps due to internal engine settings.
Have you preordered Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and if so, which version? Tell us below.