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Unfinished: Middle-earth: Shadow of War 03/07/2017

Brad, Jeff, and Rorie learn how to make friends and influence orcs.

Sometimes we look at a game before it's done. When that's the case? Well... it must be Unfinished.

Mar. 8 2017

Cast: Jeff, Brad, Matt

Posted by: Jason

In This Episode:

Middle-earth: Shadow of War

174 Comments

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Dray2k

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The gameplay seems neat, but right now I'm not in for newer darker looking game releases. I would love to see some big battles in this game though as the name suggests. I felt that the ending of SoM was a big let down, maybe this game makes it up for it. The potential is there I think.

@vlaphor: Hell yeah, thought the same, I love the voice actress.

@lonelyspacepanda: I do agree, LOTR always had the big bulky armies actually only play a smaller partr while the singular everyday joes played have the largest impact in the story. Its a story about individual heroism after all.

But I still say that the game is interesting. Even if its in the name, I've never seen SoM very much related to LotR. Its just its paint so if you're able to look past its book-license it was not a terrible game.

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49th

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I don't know about this, I feel like the only reason I ever played the first game is because nothing else came out that year. It wasn't a bad game but it just felt one note the entire way through. It was easy and the nemesis system did nothing for me. The nemesis system felt like it was designed to mask how interchangeable the randomly generated enemies were and I never had any attachment to the named guys.

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ObamasAmerica

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I was hoping they'd do something about the boring protagonist. Like let you make your own character or something. The biggest flaw in the first game for me was gravelly voiced generic guy that I was simply not invested in. Considering that we already know how the plot is going to turn out, these games need to be more character driven.

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Solh0und

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While I liked the first game, this seems a bit.... Overwhelming. I'm sure I'll eventually warm up to it but I don't know.

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julesodies

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I thought this was a Total War game. Weird naming

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thornie

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@nodima: I thought the difficulty was inconsistent. At times it was difficult, and for large stretches, especially toward the end it was really easy. If you didn't upgrade all your powers, and essentially min/max the system, you could easily get crushed in many of the areas.

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soulcake

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Is This a MOBA ? also agent 47 ?

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EngineNo9

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So you now play as an evil lord trying to install your own army of shitheels? That...doesn't sound like what I wanted.

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Redic

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Looks really cool!

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big_denim

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Oh shit! Didn't see this coming. Can't wait to watch this later today.

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Hungry

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Is this what all AAA games are going to be now? "Here is a systematic, enclosed series of check marks, you must go into each clearly defined, structured open world area and check all the marks to be the best. How you check the marks is dynamic and full of player expression!"

There is something about the gamey-ness of this fad that is really off-putting to me. Maybe some juxtaposition of the cohesiveness of an open world trying to give a sense of place versus how fucking transparently mechanical the world is.

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splodge

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This loos great.

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Humanity

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@lonelyspacepanda: man I didn't know that enjoying gore, loot and experience points made me a "dudebro" these days. I should probably fire up three separate instances of Virginia on my desktop to balance this out. Although I did really enjoy Fallout and Diablo in 1997 which had all of those elements so I guess I was a proto-dudebro ahead of the times.

I will agree that Shadow of Mordor is one generic-ass looking game, even with the LOTR motif slapped onto it.

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jfunkhouser

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Im ready for more... dor.

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Lanechanger

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Looks neat... yeah.. pretty optimistic... *cuts to black*

I had fun using the powers in the first game so this looks like that turned up to 11 so I'm pretty excite!

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IamTerics

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@hungry: Between this , Horizon, and the new Ghost Recon, there are a lot of gamey open world games. And there's a new Assassins Creed this year. I'd say this looks a bit more dynamic but like more of a (pretty cool) gimmick. It does make the new Zelda real cool.

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WynnDuffy

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Edited By WynnDuffy

Seems so stupid that Brad had to travel somewhere to see a game and then they just gave him the footage he saw to take back anyway.

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citizenjp

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This looks fucking awesome.

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Undeadpool

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It'll always be Shadow of Wardor to me. #NeverForget

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JoeDangerous

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This game looks crazy! Oh man since your allies can become resurrected by the enemy, does that mean your powerful preorder bonus allies could become a legit threat if they bite it?

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fugie7

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looks pretty good so far, would like to see more of it..

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mrbubbles

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Edited By mrbubbles

I was not expecting this so soon after the announcement of it. I loved the first game a whole lot and am real excited for this.

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Humanity

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Edited By Humanity

First impressions:

  • Jeff has some rad shoes on.
  • Combat looks fun although I realize they have like "1 button executions" turned on
  • "Year of the Diablo inspired game" is slowly getting locked in for GOTY 2017
  • Everything about the aesthetic side still seems bland as hell
  • Super clean and minimalistic UI that clashes with the art design of the game continues to be a terrible trend emerging from this console generation
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JDP83

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Hungry

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@iamterics: Yeah I think that is why I am enjoying the new Zelda where most other open world games wouldn't cut the cheese for me. Zelda at least pretends to seem to not care if you even find any of the boxes to check, much less actually check them, so the world feels more organic rather than a bunch of tasks to do in X different regions where you go through the same gameplay loop in all of them with just a different spice to mix it up a little.

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dasakamov

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It's funny how dismissive Brad was towards Rorie's story questions. I don't give a shit about LoTR or any lore that much, so it's always a kick to watch diehards freak out or be forced to swallow their disapproval of a reimagining of their beloved worlds.

Er, did you watch the three Shadow of Mordor quicklooks that already exist on this site? If you did, you'd know that Brad is super, SUPER into the lore of Middle-Earth. Brad was being "dismissive" because the Warner Brothers people themselves didn't divulge much in terms of story while he was visting.

That said, this looks it's going for a "Look ma, I'm playing a movie!" feel -- which can be really cool if done right. I'm a bit leery of the "let's get high and gush about Lord of the Rings" path the storyline seems to have taken, but I guess if Peter Jackson can do it...

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hassun

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Edited By hassun

My interest in the game nosedived (nosedove?) as soon as I heard "Diablo" and "colour-coded loot".

Once again I am left wishing for a new Mercenaries game that is the combination of Shadow of Mordor, Just Cause, Ghost Recon and Mercenaries 1.

It's a bummer to see Monolith being held back by the LotR license. Gotta have the brand to sell/get funding I guess...

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JDP83

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Edited By JDP83

Also, I want to know:

Can I find and recruit a Balrog for my army?
Can I find and recruit a Balrog for my army?
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ZemaVieira

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@nodima: I'm with you, I found the first 10 hours or so of the first game to be incredibly tense and quite a bit challenging. The combination of a captain/warchief along with a mob of uruk was very difficult to overcome and there were actual stakes in dying or surviving.

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big_denim

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@nodima said:

Man, it's crazy some people had such an easy time with Mordor. Maybe I'm just too ambitious, don't know when to run away or am just quite mediocre at video games (I suppose a lot of people on GB's forums do play these action games on their hardest difficulties whereas I find normal sufficiently challenging) but I died over and over and over in Mordor, especially in the first 15-20 hours when I didn't have many powers maxed out. By the end I was quite unstoppable but I felt like I'd earned it and I really wanted to unleash my fury on certain orcs who'd been bugging me and ruining my fort raids from the very beginning. There was one orc in particular that had leveled up so many times and earned nearly every defense buff in the game by constantly storming in on fights, shifting the tide of them and killing me in two or three hits that I was becoming quite sure I'd never kill him. It was so satisfying when I finally did.

Actually, scratch that woe-is-me shit at the start. If anything, I'm glad I'm not great at (most) action games so I could have that experience some people apparently didn't.

In some ways, this game can be luck of the draw in the difficulty level. I can steamroll through a bunch of dudes, and then suddenly run into that one bugger that has anti-vault, poison weapon, no-shits-given traits and I just get annihilated by him.

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zombievac

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I'm still very confused as how NO ONE has copied the awesome Nemesis system - it was great, and has huge potential for improvement/variation too. It also would fit nicely into almost ANY game that isn't completely linear or at least in other open-world games or RPGs.

Would Horizon Zero Dawn not be even MORE awesome if there was a nemesis-type system in place for the various "special" human and robot enemies?

I just don't get it - people copy these types of new features ALL THE TIME in games, using others' ideas is probably 90% of the game design process for many AAA games these days. Yet, the first truly unique, awesome, dynamic, and highly improvable feature from a game that has countless GoTY awards, one that would fit in tons of types of other games, has not been attempted at all yet. It's been over 3-4 years now, right?

We should have seen other copycats by now, given that the sequel to Middle Earth: SoM is comign soon already. Where are they? Is it just too complex of a system for most developers to attempt, at least until someone releases a "Nemesis system middleware" type of thing maybe?

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Gaminggumper

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For the @jeff and crew. Love the new "Unfinished" approach. don't just post the vids the publishers release but get the team's take that we all love so much. Thank you for adapting to the times.

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cikame

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My least favorite part of the first game was the nemesis system, but that was obviously going to return as everyone seemed to love it.
The combat being shown here seems like 100% ability spam, i have no sense of what the combat might actually be like... unless it's like this, which looks stripped down and simple, the constant Orc introduction cutscenes in the first game got annoying fast, but it seems like they've quadrupled their frequency here which sucks, new animations for the sequel arn't as good as they were in the original game, they stick out as some of those original animations are still being used, main character still has a primate face.

So far, this game is a miss (for me).

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Zevvion

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Edited By Zevvion

@nodima: I died 4 times in my 15+ hours with Mordor. Three of them self-inflicted just so I could see what would happen with that Nemesis system. Turns out, not much. Some fancy cinematic played, but it had practically no effect on the world or gameplay itself.

I will remain with my opinion that I had then: I'm almost confident that people who played the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of that game would have virtually no different experience than anyone else.

@zombievac There have definitely been minor implements of a Nemesis-like system, just on much smaller scale. It has not even been 2,5 years since Mordor released. Creating a proper game takes 3+ years if it isn't a sequel. Lately, it has been more like 4+. Not to mention the amount of planning and ideas pitched that go into creating a game.

I'm not surprised at all. To be honest, the call for having the following year be full of Nemesis-games was never a realistic one.

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masterofchaz

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Edited By masterofchaz

Create your own Helm's Deep. That'll do for me!

It's still so overly violent and overly macho in it's man on orc fighting. As Cara Ellison said, it is the top gun of video games.

Can't wait.

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masterofchaz

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mach_go_go_go

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As Cara Ellison said, it is the top gun of video games.

Sold!

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Aegon

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There's something low-key anime about having this gauntlet of self-introducing gatekeepers and it's speaking to me.

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BabyChooChoo

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What the fuck is this game even?!?! It seems fucking neat, but what the shit?

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stryker1121

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Edited By stryker1121

Lots going on here, and I'm interested to see how some of these systems play out in real time and without Talion being kitted with every power in the book. But the nemesis expansion is the big sale here - as much as I enjoyed the first game, the Nemesis system seemed like a different game from the open-world exploration I was engaging. Actually having an orc army on call is pretty much where I wanted the sequel to go.

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Cluter

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@turboman said:
@lawgamer said:

Shadow of War . . . Dor?

Shadow of MoreWar > Shadow of WarDor

Shadow of MorWarDor

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zombievac

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This series is the dumb macho crap I'm tired of in AAA gaming. So much emphasis on gore, loot and watching bars tick up like a mobile game. It's the "dudebro" of fantasy games. I didn't like the first at all though, so I guess it's just not for me. I love LOTR but this aspect of them is one I never go into (the generic look of the orcs and Mordor).

Sounds like more of a set of complaints from someone who didn't play it much, or has one of those limiting, stereotyped rulesets where they refuse to play "any open world games" or any "violent games"! You're totally entitled to your opinion, but every thing you mentioned is not something I could even see someone mistaking for being a good descriptor of the original game.

I have no idea where this would be related to "dudebro" anything! ... except if your definition of dudebro is "cartoon violence against fictional monsters". There was also, as far as I remember, almost no loot, except runes. Certainly not a "loot game" that you played for the loot, just to buy better loot, rinse and repeat - like WoW or Diablo.

And what bars ticking up are you referring to? This was average or even pretty minimal in that stuff as far as I remember, when compared to any games that need to show you health, mana, etc. Certainly nothing close to a mobile tapper/"numbers-go-higher" type mobile game you compared it to...

The Orc designs were the least generic humanoid designs I can think of! They were randomized, yet completely varied and unique and fantastic in terms of graphics and art-design - even compared to today, 3+ years later. They would show and react to old wounds you gave them even. Each had not only a unique voice, but a unique way of speaking (poems, silence, gestures, grunts, etc)... and thinking, reacting, complaining or threatening as well.

It had similar violence to any Teen or M rated game, and it was actually well done and realistic. It was mechanically very similar to the Batman Arkham games, so if you played & liked those I couldn't imagine this one wouldn't be even more enjoyable - sure, the story was pretty generic (as is LoTR in general, with credit to that being partially because so many things are based on it and just incrementally improved over time).

The stories in the Rocksteady made Batman games are not particularly great either, they were ok but not worth playing for alone, but they were so fun in mechanics and gameplay that it barely mattered to me. This is as fun as those, but with the fantastic Nemesis system on top of it, IMO.

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Ninja_Welshman

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Huh, didn't think I wanted another one of these but that look pretty cool.

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Ravelle

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I put about a hundred hours in to the first one and 100% it and almost got the platinum for it. Can't wait to dump some more time in to it.

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imrachers

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I wonder if you can assign those scripted looking moments in you planning stage. For example: If "big bad guy" has me in a x position (low health, or even just one of those triggered dialogues) , then "friendly warlord" comes to the rescue. Same with the dragon. When our attack reaches x stage, bring in dragon.

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machinerebel

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Edited By machinerebel

I actually really enjoy these "Watch trailers and make comments" videos. Should be a weekly series with trailers from that week :)

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mrsmiley

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This looks incredible. Obviously they adjusted things for the demo, but holy crap the game world is HUGE. Can't wait to explore areas outside of Mordor!

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NewfieBullet

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Edited By NewfieBullet

I actually really enjoy these "Watch trailers and make comments" videos. Should be a weekly series with trailers from that week :)

Yes.