Poll of the Day > There's no way the enemies were this fucking obnoxious in Shadow of Mordor

(+) Yeah! (+)

I enjoyed Shadow of Mordor a lot quite a few years ago as kind of a mindless action game. You were OP as hell but it felt very thematic and engaging.

So I hear they fixed the P2W elements in Shadow of War and I pick this up.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Any major fight ends up with you surrounded by dozens of orcs with very few options in terms of movement. These assholes chuck spears from like a million miles away so you just dodge incessantly and hope you don't accidentally dodge into a troll who throws you on the ground.

I remember in Shadow of Mordor killing captains became obsolete once you could mind control them, but now half the orcs are immune to mind control because they're a higher level, or otherwise you need to spend 30 seconds mind controlling one and hope some asshole in the Shire doesn't chuck a spear at you.

I can have a Captain at 3% health but then oops, I jumped over his head and made him mad so suddenly his crossbow turns into a minigun and I instantly die.

And then when you die all the bad guys level up and I get a battle report telling me all my good orcs were killed on missions raiding the pantry or some shit.

I sent a guy with a poison weapon into a duel with a guy who instantly dies to poison, and he lost.

The entire level up and siege mechanic is incredibly monotonous and it takes ages to go through the menus just to pick random upgrades for everybody. And it seems the entire story has been removed so that I can have this mechanic, there's been no character development in this game since I hit Nurn.

Anyway I think I'm way worse at video games than I was eight years ago.

Also if the Amazon LotR show makes you mad but you're completely fine with the lore of the Shadow of Wardor games, lol, you're a fake fan.

They "rebalanced" the game to encourage you to dump money on microtransactions.



Blightzkrieg posted...

Also if the Amazon LotR show makes you mad but you're completely fine with the lore of the Shadow of Wardor games, lol, you're a fake fan.

Ehhhh.

To be fair, they're both wrong in terms of canon, and they both kind of suck in their own, different ways. But after decades worth of bad adaptation video games, it's almost more acceptable for a video game to fuck up the canon of a setting (see also, stuff like KotOR) than it is for an expensive TV series or films to screw it up. TV and film get held to a higher standard, so they don't get to complain when they get shit on for doing something wrong, even if video games also did it wrong.

That being said, people are a LOT more willing to accept changes if they're fun or justified or make sense in context . If the changes mostly suck, people are more apt to start flinging poo. As an example, people didn't hate the Squeenix Avengers game because it got the canon wrong, but more because it was a steaming hot turd.

There's also the problem that the Shadow games are - for the most part - trying to hide their interpretation of canon between the cracks of the original story, so you could almost call it pseudo-canon. But the Amazon show is flat-out retconning established things and seems to have a bit mediocre acting and writing to boot, so it feels like more of an "insult" than the games do.

In a similar vein, it's kind of why I can forgive the flaws of the 1978 LotR animated film but think the live-action Hobbit films were hot garbage. Different standards, different problems, different response. It's not just a question of purity of canon.

I'm talking less about the canon and more about the vibe of the game feeling more like Warcraft than LotR, and the general fanfic feel of everything (I cringe everytime Gollum says the words "bright master").

That said, Minas Ithil existing at this point is a meteor sized retcon lol.

It was definitely like that in Shadow of Mordor too. It depends. Not every fight was going to be like that, but sometimes youll get into fights that are near impossible to beat. Between running into OP captains, dealing with Orcs who had shields, spear-chuckers, etc.

I can say this with confidence because I just replayed it and definitely got into a few brawls like that x____x

ParanoidObsessive posted...

That being said, people are a LOT more willing to accept changes if they're fun or justified or make sense in context .

Pretty much. Making up new canon/retcons for the sake of having an interesting game to play is more acceptable than making up new canon/retcons in a medium where adhering to the original canon would have been just as possible and interesting.