Did they fix the problems with the nemesis system?

Shadow of Mordor had cool novel ideas. Its nemesis system was pretty neat and could generate some cool unique stories and emergent rivalries. It had 2 major problems though:

1. The game was way too easy and forgiving. Since the nemesis system relied heavily on you dying to ramp up the stakes between you and your personal nemesis (nemesy?), you had to die often for the system to work. I died maybe 5 times in the entire game. So is the new game less reliant on death? Is it harder? Any difficulty settings?
2. There was very little to do with the nemesis system. You could take over the entire orc hierarchy but to what end? You only had to take over a few warchiefs to beat the game and there was nothing more challenging that required a deeper mastery of the system. Do they give you better incentive to play around the nemesis system in the sequel? Any optional content or more complex challenges that reward a completionist approach?

@pyrodactyl: I don't have answers but your second point is something I'd like to know as well. I feel like they made a mistake in the first game by building the Nemesis system directly into the story to tutorialize it, because that just meant you only had to engage with a small portion of it to beat the game. It would have made more sense to have the story missions be much more difficult and have you make your own enemies in the course of the story.

It seems like the second game's solution of having strongholds and sieges gives you more incentive to mess with the Nemesis system, because you'd want to build up your army; I just hope the game is more difficult from the start.

I died plenty times in the first game, and it seems like they have an entire fortress system built around the nemesis stuff judging from what brad showed in UPF. Also seemed like he was fighting 3 or 4 named enemies at a time, so that seems a bit harder than the first from what i remember.

Dying wasn't to ramp up stakes or make anything "more difficult", it's main purpose was to level up the Orc making him rise in the hierarchy so he'd drop better loot once you pop him after feeding him to the highest level.
The first game had its whole loot system hidden behind the nemesis system, you could farm for specific runes by killing Orcs in specifics ways, it basically was and still is "pokemon with orcs", the second game makes it even more so.
Sadly it was a part overlooked/ignored by many people playing the first game, it also wasn't that well explained/surfaced to the player, but it's what pretty much gated all the fun specializations for which the higher level and unique runes allowed.

1. I really don't get the complaints about "difficulty", it's a giant sandbox based on the power fantasy of having "the one ring", it's as difficult as you want it to be. You can charge in there head first, not scouting, not killing any followers, and fight dozens of orcs at once, which is a real challenge early/mid game or you can take your time and make a point out of not killing anybody instead turning everybody to your side. It's mostly your choice of strategy and tactics which dictates the difficulty. I remember the challenge boards also being quite difficult and one of the DLC supposedly also has the reputation of being on the more difficult end.

2. Turning over everybody didn't serve much of a purpose in the first game, but still was tons of fun, now with the second game, it's become an integral part of the gameplay as they allow you to build whole customized armies out of the Orcs you recruit and level. So now you will be forced to decide if you want to pop your good high-level orcs for loot or keep them around for your army. An even more difficult choice considering how much they seem to have expanded on the loot system.

There’s more to the system than them killing you. Them coming back, them interacting with each other, that kinda stuff. It seems like there are more option/opportunities this time around. It also looked like you could easily run into a pretty nasty fight and get smoked on UPF with half a dozen named orcs popping up.

I also didn’t feel the first game was overly easy for the most part. There was some stuff that could make certain encounters easy but you could still put yourself in dangerous situations. I could see them maybe making the stealth a little harder but otherwise it seemed fine. Again, you don’t need to die to interact with the system. It’s one of several ways to do so in the original and the sequel is clearly more complicated on that front.

@nethlem:

1- You're never meant to die on purpose. That would be really dumb and go against the power fantasy the game presents. Dying is clearly a means to have the orc that killed you rise up the ranks so you can develop a relationship with him and possibly face him in the climax of the game. This is why it's called the nemesis system and why orcs talk shit at you constantly. Only problem is, if you don't die much you don't get to develop any relationships with specific orcs and the whole system breaks down.

2-I'm not interested in runes or loot. Sure, in the first game you could exploit the nemesis system to farm runes but was that fun? Why would you want specific runes anyway? It's not like you could do anything interesting with them. The game was a cakewalk without any overpowered runes. Why would I want to make it easier? If the second one has more interesting challenges where you can't just steamroll everything with the stuff you find naturally maybe that will make the nemesis system more meaningful? If you had to really consider your gear, runes and orc army composition but I doubt they designed the game like that. Would love to be proven wrong

@pyrodactyl: 1. Storywise not, but gameplay wise the option is there and the lack of real consequences of dying, for the player, means it's working as intended. Again: It's up to you how you make use of that power, if it's your narrative that you want Orcs to believe they "bested you", just so they can rise up in a more favorable position, when you show them who's the real boss, then that fits neatly in there.

You are focusing way too much on some "emergence story" bulllshit, which is there but can only be as limited as a number of voice lines they are willing to record, as such it's very limited, the main purpose of the nemesis system is to give the player a board of Orcs to play and strategize around with, getting killed by them is one of those tools and can also be the basis of a whole strategy (boosting weakest orcs to the top of the board for easier opposition).

It's a focus on the relationships between the orcs, not between you and individual orcs. The system might be misnamed that way, but "Nemesis system" sounds pretty darn cool, so I understand why they went with that.

2. You didn't "exploit" the system, it was the sole driving force of the system. Just because many players chose to ignore it because they are "not interested in loot" does not mean it didn't exist or didn't serve a purpose, for me it was one of the main reasons for putting 100+ hours into the game.

Imho this seems to be one of the most dividing issues about this game, people expected some amazing story expansion on the LotR universe with "emergence story" when LotR merely served as a story backdrop and the nemesis system as a front for a very mechanics and systems dense game. Even tho I played 100+ hours of the game, I couldn't tell you what happened story-wise, but I'm also not much of a LotR fan.
The story wasn't why I played the game at all, I had way too much fun playing around with orcs like little toy soldiers and all the systems interconnecting them, trying out different builds just to mess around with them, it was some of the most hilarious open world fun I've had in years.

And there it is again, the talk about "too easy" like playing video game always has to be some kind of contest. The game didn't advertise itself as the next Dark Souls, if you feel any game posses not enough challenge for you, then you are always free to think up your own restrictions to increase the challenge, that's how speedrunning started yo!
The game gave the player more than enough opportunities to make it more challenging by giving options in term of how to approach missions and then they added challenge boards for exactly that reason: For people who considered the base game too easy and wanted something more difficult.

I dont know whether anyone has mentioned it but Monolith have said that there is a hard mode so those that dont die thus not engaging in the Nemesis system have a mode that will probably rectify that.

The second point kind of ties into the first point. You get more orcs on your side to make the game easier, you never have to take over everything and the idea of doing so seems kind of tedious. (although i've heard the end game might require that)

Personally i'm burnt out on traditional open world games so i'm going to pass on the game for now but it seems they've been listening to some of the complaints from the original.

@nethlem:To me it feels more like you're placing self-imposed challenges to increase your enjoyment of the game. Every piece of developer walk-through and pr was bout having your own unique nemesis and experience. They were very explicit about what the hook of the game was meant to be. At no point did any tutorial imply a different route. And so I played the game accordingly.

Why allow me to sneak through the game and completely dodge the nemesis system? I sneaked my way and enslaved the entire orc tree. If you're familiar with games that make use of stealth mechanics, then you know that higher difficulties rarely affect those mechanics. How is this not a failure of the system? Why should I impose challenges on my play-style, because the developer failed to foresee their core system/gimmick required a very specific play-style different from the mechanics I chose to engage with?

@aktivity said:

Were you sneaking through the game as a self-imposed challenge? No, you used it as your approach out of many different options the game offered and last time I checked options are always great.
Did you make a conscious effort of doing that, knowing full well that it would make the game easier than direct open combat? Most likely yes, you chose the path of least resistance an optional path.
No offense, but blaming the tutorial on your choice of playstyle, in a game which clearly offered and advertised different playstyles, is a bit childish. Do you really need a tutorial telling you to do what you want and just have fun?

In many ways, SoM was very comparable to MGS5 in terms of difficulty based on the players choice of approach, with Shadow of War they even copied the MGS5 multiplayer system, down to the pay2win microtransactions.

Btw: In the RPS review I read SoW has three different difficulty settings, I guess that should finally settle all these "it's too easy" complaints, at least to a certain degree.

In regards to PR: "Why isn't it exactly like that?", when is the last time any game PR out of an AAA studio/publisher was actually honest to the bone?
The Nemesis system didn't fulfill the lofty promises of "emergence story" and "customized difficulty", but anybody with a little bit of sense for game balance knew this was the most likely outcome.
The Nemesis system, as advertised, would have been way too punishing to the player as the Nemesis Orc would snowball into being way too powerful. If an Orc is already powerful enough to beat the player unbuffed, then giving him a giant strength buff after killing the player would only turn him into an even worse obstacle, which has the potential for immense player frustration by getting them stuck.

Non the less the Nemesis system still served an important function in a game mechanics sense by regulating the orc hierarchy (which you even interact with when you enslave them all) and thus the loot, which is actually something some people enjoy about games.
Some people had immense fun with that part of the game, playing puppeteer with a chessboard of orcs, and Monolith seems to have expanded on this quite a bit with SoW by giving the player more chessboards and more options to mess around with the orcs. In SoM I used to build my own Orc armies, even tho they didn't serve any purpose, now with SoW they serve a purpose, in that regard Monolith has expanded on exactly the right things, at least for some people.

But I doubt the Nemesis system in SoW is gonna deliver any really fancy "emergence story" like some people fantasized about getting in SoM. That train already has left a while ago, when people realized they had the wrong expectations about how much actual story you can get out of a bunch of procedurally generated Orcs, who gameplaywise mostly served as walking loot pinatas.

Hey @brad, any input on this since you probably put a lot of time into the game over the weekend? I'm particularly interested if the much talked about end game rewards a mastery of the nemesis system or only requires you to grind a bunch.

@nethlem: I'm not blaming the tutorial, just pointing out it doesn't encourage or back-up the play-style you argue is the "true" purpose of the system (neither did the developer walk-throughs). I'm merely pointing out the games core mechanic doesn't take the different play-styles it offers into account. And as mentioned extra difficulties rarely affect stealth mechanics, since they mostly tend to affect stats that have no influence on stealth. It just so happens that I enjoy stealth games and has nothing to do with the path of least resistance.

I'm not arguing for any fancy "emergence story", just that the game lives up to it's basic premise of the nemesis system working across the board for all players. The system would only have been punishing to players if it's only trigger required player death due to high combat difficulty, thankfully they seem to have realized this and added other triggers in SoW. That's what some of us disappointed with SoM wanted, ways to engage with the nemesis system that supported all offered play-styles and player skill levels.

@aktivity: @pyrodactyl: Brad would probably talk about how the nemesis system is way more than you dying to orcs. Watch the QL it does a decent job of showing off what he nemesis system actually is. Anything to do with the orc traits, progression, relationships to orca and the player? That’s he nemesis system. It isn’t just when an orc kills you.

You’re supposed to play with it not the other way around. If you aren’t interested in playing with the different parts to see what happens it isn’t a bad system it just isn’t for you. And No, games don’t need to cater to every play style or skill level. If they did hey would be either incredibly hard to make or boring and generic and never have any flair.

I feel the same way about the nemesis system as I do about he destruction in that first Red Faction reboot. If you expect it to always be in your face begging you to interact with it, you’ll be disappointed. When you go out of your way to play with it in different ways, poke at it, etc it becomes a total blast to monkey with.

@opusofthemagnum: My point is you shouldn't need to go out of your way to engage with the core mechanic of a game. It's not like I chose an obscure play-style. I played the game with one of the advertised play-styles I enjoy and ended up with a lesser experience as a result. There was little sense of progression or relationships to the orcs, both in no small part tied to player death. An issue they seemed to have addressed in the sequel by introducing multiple triggers for the nemesis system. You're right games shouldn't cater to every play-style, but they should endeavor to better incorporate the play-styles they themselves choose to offer in their game.

Well I just finished my third main fort capture (plus a couple of online ones) and frankly I am already starting to get very burned out on the Nemesis system. For as much new bells and whistles as they added you are still essentially repeating the exact same basic actions over and over, except now there is like 10 times as much of that repetition set to do compared to the first game. Eventually you've seen all the main moving parts and it just becomes kind of a boring grind.

@tennmuerti: Considering there's no impressions thread I'll put this here, but ye I feel like they failed at making the system more engaging. They tried to expand it with the fortresses, but if you ask me it just presents the worst parts about the game. Maybe I've just been unlucky, but being stuck in a completely "naked" arena with an Overlord that's resistant to basically everything but stealth, and having infinite orcs respawning over and over isn't exactly what I call a good time. When you're doing the open-world stuff (like the outposts) at least there's some variety to the scenario due to the environments, and you might stumble into unexpected Chiefs (or get ambushed) creating a much more dynamic and interesting experience.

@aktivity: I don’t know anyone who thinks playing with the systems is going out of their way. That is literally what the marketing and everything leading up to that game and the buzz surrounding it’s launch was all about. If you missed it or if it doesn’t click, it doesn’t reflect on the game. You wouldn’t say Far Cry 3 was boring because all you did was sit and snipe every enemy in the head from a distance with the same rifle the entire game instead of toying with all the ways you can create havoc would you? It would be fair to say it isn’t as fun for your play style but that doesn’t mean the game failed to show you what you can do, Shadow pretty clearly tells you what you can do. You can choose to interact with the systems or not. If you don’t want to then it’s probably just not for you duder.

@opusofthemagnum: I don’t know anyone who thinks playing with the systems is going out of their way. That is literally what the marketing and everything leading up to that game and the buzz surrounding it’s launch was all about.

That's my entire point. It wasn't some weird stay in the bushes with a sniper, rather it was a common way to play shown to me by the game(and developers in trailers/walk-throughs) itself in which I used all offered tools. It told me I could make use of stealth mechanics and then proceeded to punish the offered play-style by not letting it engage properly with the nemesis system. And clearly to some degree the developers felt nemesis could be improved by being made more broad in it's application in SoW.

Your anology with Far Cry 3 simply isn't valid to this situation, because you argue I simply chose to passively sit in some bush killing orcs with my bow. As if I went out of my way to game the enemy AI. And even then it wouldn't be an issue with that game because the core of Far Cry 3 wouldn't in any way punish/discourage that play-style. It lacked any system that required a specific play-style.
I just don't think we will see eye to eye on this duder, because I simply don't see how having a lesser experience by playing the game in one of the routes both it and it's creators presented isn't a shortcoming.

@aktivity: Not everything is for everybody, that isn't a specific shortcoming of anything. With SoM it was pretty obvious that people either loved it or hated it, the same seems to hold true for SoW.
This applies to so many things like the "grind". Some people really hate it, I love it because I just couldn't get enough from SoM so in that regard SoW is like "Give me more of that good stuff and make it extra large!".

After 16 hours of playing, I'm like 3 story missions deep on the second map, not very far along, still having a blast.
Tho I have to agree with Brad that the story missions are probably among the most boring content in the game, the side-objectives also ain't especially thrilling. Those spider memory collectibles gotta be the laziest/most obvious copying of Assassins Creed minigames I've ever seen, complete with unlocking utterly pointless 1 second long CGI clips.

Sure as hell would have preferred it if instead would have added more mini story-side missions involving Orcs because they know how to write those to make them fun.

To answer the original question, I think they've done a better job at making the nemesis system tell emergent stories in general, even if you aren't dying or attempting to make your own stories. Even if you never die, you'll have orcs that will come back at you stronger, often affected by how you won your previous battle against them. You'll have orcs that will ambush you and track you down to take revenge. You'll have partnerships among the orcs where they react to what you're doing. And overall they have more personality and more dialogue.

In the short time I've been playing I took down an orc using poison, then had him ambush me now melted and coated in poison while I was fighting his brother, resulting in a crazy battle against both. I've had one guy kill me, took revenge against him, and then had him come back 4 separate times (each time more disfigured) making fun of me and attempting to repeat his earlier glory. I've ended up in a nonsense four-captain battle based on partners and ambushes coming along, requiring me to use basically everything in the environment to take them all down and stay alive.

If you don't like the system at all, I don't think this will change your mind, but they certainly opened up more avenues for the game to tell stories as you're just messing around in the world. And otherwise, the goal is pretty much the same. Dominate and take down captains, take down warchiefs, take out the overlord. There's a lot more going on in terms of systems, assaulting the overlord's fort, or building up your army, but it's essentially the same thing you did in the previous game.

You can advance time without dying at all warp points.

I don't mind repetition, but what I do mind is repetition if the game is not challenging in any way shape or form. Since you've clearly played the game a bit I'd like your input on how challenging this new one is. It's not necessarily that I want to die all the time, but I want the game to demand my full attention and skills. For example, I can and have finished Dark Souls games without dying more than once, yet I couldn't possibly argue it is an extremely easy game. My hands were sweating on quite a few occasions.

When I played the first game, not only did I barely die, I did it while just having conversations with people, often just taking my eyes off the screen. It was such a casual non-engaging experience it made me mad. How does Shadow of War rate here in your experience?

@zevvion: there is a hard setting that is much harder than shadow of mordor. You have a lot of tools at your disposal but most of them can be countered by captains. If you rely on one trick too much in a fight a captain will just become immune to it.

On nemesis difficulty there is no more "do this thing and you win every time". At least for some of the high level orcs. It is much more challenging and rewarding than shadow of mordor. There might be too much of it though. Nemesis difficulty makes the game way more interesting but it does slow your progression quite a lot. Meaning I may need like 60-100 hours to beat this game instead of the shorter amount of time some reviews said was already too long. Hopefully the stiffer challenge keeps the gameplay interesting for longer than it did for people playing on normal.

@zevvion:Just for reference I am currently somewhere in the "endgame" last (4th) act, haven't quite finished the game yet.

In regards to the challenge. It is for sure a more difficult, or rather a better designed balance wise game then Shadow of Mordor was, not even an argument. On that front they've done much better. The biggest factor in this is that they have nerfed Talion a whole bunch, compared to the first game. Even fully leveled up and geared out you are nowhere near the godlike level of power you were before.

Specifically the main change is that they broke up the mobius loop of chaining multiple shadow strikes into executes into super, into drains into more shadow strikes and more executes and so on into infinity. First of all executions (and all other skills that use the same meter) build up much much slower, no longer you need only like 5 hits (if that with crits) to start spamming executes, it takes way more investment then that. Secondly you can only do about 3-4 shadow strike kills tops before going empty on focus, and it now costs 2 arrows each do do that move plus focus. Which nicely flows into the third factor that you are also more limited in those resources focus+arrows and there are only a couple of places you can use to get them back on your build/gear that are sometimes even mutually exclusive with other stuff (like say drain giving 1 arrow back is on the same perk option as drain dominating) so there is no longer that effect of you just getting all your arrows and focus back super fast and easy ala in the first game when you had just a few good runes on your weapons. So essentially you actually have to do some proper fighting now instead of just being able to spam instakill moves forever. (also super builds slower too and captains have more HP in general too)

That's not to say that the whole game is some kind of amazing challenge. Far from it. 95-99% of the time you are still in no danger or in any real threat. Spamming dodge roll still provides the same invulnerability it did before. And frankly you stalking a single orc in the open world while knowing his weaknesses is still easy kills all day (with one or two exceptions maybe). The challenging parts of the game generally come when shit hits the fan and clusterfucks happen, like having to fight 2-4 orc captains in a fortress with and alarm going for example and the challange becomes parsing the mess that's going on and getting far enough away to get some jabs in after. But the game also does do a better job of providing those clusterfucks to the player not just at the start of the game but through ought, with betrayals, ambushes, and warchiefs. There are also like @pyrodactyl mentioned occasional real dicky orc trait combinations that are a right pain in the ass to deal with, stuff like savage damage being able to 1-2 shot you, humiliation/nochance, adaptability, and that's generally a good thing imo, it adds that much needed occasional sense of danger, I even had an orc unexpectedly humiliate me a couple times in the last act when I got super complacent, it was a nice "huh ok i'll take you seriously guy" moment. Speaking of deaths, I still only really died a few times in the first third of the game, which is why like I said at the start most of the time you are in very little threat at the end of the day.

Keep in mind, remember the 2 nemesis trees from the first game? Now imagine going through each of those at least 10 times. There may be twice the variety now to the orcs and an ocasional challenge, but it is stretched out over like five times the busywork.

And the grind is real man. Especially that last act. There is a very good reason that there exists a timed 100% xp booster in that marketplace. Anyone thinks they did not design deliberately with that shit in mind is delusional. The first 20 levels of the game the leveling pace feels nice and brisk you are getting new skills quickly and the world is rosy. (level cap is 60). Levels 20-40, the later bulk of the game's main narative starts to drag more and more. And by the time you get to 40-60 of act 4 (by the way there is no credit roll at that point, the game just flows right into it, so imo it's still 100% part of the game proper) the grind is abasically a cliff wall. For example. It takes somewhere of 100,000-200,000 xp per level (levels still matter later on by the way because your orcs are limited to your level max) to level up, once. You get about 2000-4000 xp per level appropriate orc nemesis mission plus kill. Rough numbers, but do the math, that's 50+ orc captain missions and kills, per 1 level up. There's 20+ of those. Unless I am missing some other major way to get xp way way faster, fuck that. I play games a lot but even I don't have that kind of time to go kill over a thousand samey orc captains, there are other games to play. Eventually I said fuck it and just used cheatengine to fast forward the XP grind.

@nethlem: to the game's credit, completing all of the Shelob "memories" puts all the clips together plus some to make a cool little back story cut scene, but its still love it or leave it (I liked it, but I'm a fan)

@tennmuerti: Are you commenting on normal or hard difficulty?

@pyrodactyl: I'm playing on normal. I'm also occasionally watching a stream of a nemesis playthrough and not really seeing any significant differences that jump out outside of maybe stuff doing more dmg to you.