Shadow of Mordor (Shadow of War)

thomas anderson.

I gave up on it on, just too much grinding.

Cuphead is where its at

Sonics2k

Monolith to remove microtransactions from Shadow of War:

https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/news/middle-earth-shadow-of-war-to-remove-microtransactions-w518676

The official reason given is the way it undermined the Nemesis system, but I suspect they were hit hard by people simply refusing to buy the game, especially when it came out that with pirated copies you could just change you gold value and 'buy' all the orcs.

Will anyone here have a change of mind now this is done? I 'acquired' a copy of the game myself and thought it was okay, but this change does seem to make it a better option, especially with a Steam sale upon us in the next few months.

ERG89

Sonics2k wrote: »

The official reason given is the way it undermined the Nemesis system, but I suspect they were hit hard by people simply refusing to buy the game, especially when it came out that with pirated copies you could just change you gold value and 'buy' all the orcs.

Yeah people were saying it undermined it 6 months ago even before it was released but they refused to listen. I suspect they stopped making money from them & figured more people would buy it without them now than with them. I won't be anyway like Star Wars Battlefront 2 they don't deserve a second chance.

chrislad

I didn't not buy the game because of this, mainly as I just didn't have time to focus on both Assassins Creed Origins and this, so I went for Origins. That said, this smacks of insincerity. The game is months old. The initial rush for in-app loot boxes is probably gone. From what I'm heard, they weren't too necessary or invasive, but this is very much locking the door when the horse has bolted. It's a bit too late. Will I get the game? Sure, as I was planned to eventually, and this wouldn't have made any difference to me either way, if they kept them or not, but this just seems a bit late.

Billy86

I bought it a few weeks ago and just got to Act IV yesterday. It's a fun game, nothing ground breaking and really just an expanded version of the first but it's enjoyable - though I'd imagine if you've played a lot of the Arkham games and their knock offs over the last decade it might get quite boring quite quickly.

To be honest while they are there, I've not noticed any real issue with microtransactions - you can buy 'lesser' versions of those followers etc with in game currency (white currency), and at one point it gave me enough (gold currency) to buy one of the 'gold' boxes... to be honest the bonus compared to the other ones wasn't all that big. More followers, more extra stuff, some higher ranked weapons but nothing crazy. Though I do agree it's a bit odd and disingenuous to make a point of removing them 8 months after release; hopefully it's a sign of lessons learned but I doubt it.

I'd give the game a good 7.5 or 8 out of 10 so far.

Stone Deaf 4evr

I'm coming up to the end of the game, only have a few Carnan quests to do, and the other quest available is the one to bring the story to a close.

I've enjoyed it, but in a somewhat mindless fashion, for all the expanding they did with the fortresses, siege upgrades etc, none of them really seem to have any major impact, beyond looking cool when you make your assault. I'm kind of looking forward to completing the game and moving on to something else. I cant see that I'll be putting in the time to go through the shadow wars thing.

Mickeroo

I didn't bother with the shadow war either, the army/fortress mechanic was a lot of fun I thought but didn't have near enough depth to convince me to keep doing it beyond the main campaign.

Penn

Mickeroo wrote: »

I didn't bother with the shadow war either, the army/fortress mechanic was a lot of fun I thought but didn't have near enough depth to convince me to keep doing it beyond the main campaign.

It was too easy in the main campaign, as all you had to do was control the warchiefs before you attacked. Once that's done, you basically just had to walk your way to the Overlord (though admittedly some of those fights were bastards).

They ruined the Nemesis system by having so many different areas. It meant you had 5 different Nemesis hierarchies which just diluted the whole thing. You never got to use/know/fight any orcs too much or make real enemies out of any of them.

I didn't bother with the Shadow Wars element or any DLC. Once I got to that point I was pretty much bored with the game. A shame considering how great the first one was.

Potential-Monke

Good news. I'll pick this up, but second hand so they don't get any of my money.

Stone Deaf 4evr

Finished it last night, huh, was actually totally caught off guard by how it ended, it actually elevates my opinion of the game as a whole.

I'd always felt that celebrimbor was a bit of an arse, so to see him corrupt eltariel into taking his ring, and then losing the battle / merging with sauron was a cool way to end it, I also loved the idea of Talion taking isildurs ring, then vowing to fight against the dark lord by sowing unrest in mordor. The cutscenes for the Nazgul were great also - helm hammerhand had a genuinely sad story, and Isildurs death & resurrection was also cool

I'm tempted to watch the true ending on youtube now, although I may hold off until the summer as I believe the shadow wars section is also getting revamped as part of stripping out the microtransactions.

dreamers75

Didnt buy because of the loot boxes.

Just bought it.

dreamers75

84........GB

80 ****ing 4!!!!!

Billy86

Finished the game the other day, it was good fun but I definitely see what people meant about the last 'Shadow Wars' stage being a big grind - it might have worked if they interspersed it with the story or just made it 5 stages or something, but it got immensely tedious. I think I spent close to a month at that stage, just tipping away a bit at a time. The last 2-3 stages definitely did feel more like work than fun, though.

That said, I never even felt a remote need to use loot boxes beyond the ones bought with in-game currency, though I did play the game 'wide' and went about dominating more or less every captain on each area more or less as soon as I got there as that was possibly my favourite aspect of the first game. One thing I also did routinely was scrap any and all non-legendary equipment I was not using (and later, legendary stuff too) which gave me tonnes of currency to continue to buy more and more orcs/follower training thingies and keep on top of things.

---

TIPS FOR SHADOW WARS SIEGES: Have all captains on the map dominated and assigned evenly to others as bodyguards... blow up the closest siege warfare graug with arrows immediately which sets others on fire and gets your hit bar thingy up full, shadow strike into a huge crowd of them, do the punch-the-ground thing to spread loads of poison, take a siege beast and use it to blow up another, summon some goons and a graug to kill as many as possibly and to try and stop them from breaking the front gate... Stick to the roofs a good bit and try some hit and run techniques... dominate enemy captains as soon as you get the chance and have them fight for you which quickly turns the tables... absolutely do all you can to avoid 'no chance' captains for obvious reasons. Also make sure to not run out of arrows as shadow strike from the rooftops is a really handy was of jumping huge distances quickly if your orcs are bleeding out.

Get ready to get frustrated at accidentally trying to dominate a random archer 20ft away rather than the broken captain (or your own bleeding out captain) all of 2-3 feet from you, that you're facing right at. A few times Talion's hand literally went through the guy I wanted to dominate while this happened, which was immensely frustrating. At times some areas became too crowded and chaotic to make any sense, like when 6+ captains all with gangs somehow all descend on one single checkpoint at the exact same time. I'm just grateful the cringey, woeful 30+ second epic monologues from opposing captains seemed to disappear a good bit before this point... one early in the game went on so long I actually got up to put the kettle on and he was still yapping away when I came back. That aspect was f***ing painful.

And pray there are no spiders. I found nothing else mattered much in terms of the siege stuff I was facing, except for spiders. You cannot see them at all which is irritating, they seem to scuttle past everyone else and go directly for you at all times, it also makes little sense that spiders are against you because of what happens just before the Shadow Wars chapter begins. A very, very tedious aspect.

To be honest, apart from 1-2 very close shaves early in the Shadow Wars almost all of mine were massacres that lasted 5-10 minutes. I think only two checkpoints were taken out of all of the sieges from about stages 3-10.

---

I would give it about a 7/10, if someone were new to them I would definitely say to pick up Shadow of Mordor for a fraction of the cost instead.

irishman86

dreamers75 wrote: »

84........GB

80 ****ing 4!!!!!

I feel im having this reaction more and more these days

Billy86

84, like a level 84 captain? I thought it was capped at 65, saw a bunch at that level near the end but never above it.

Or did I completely miss something?

Jacovs

Billy86 wrote: »

84, like a level 84 captain? I thought it was capped at 65, saw a bunch at that level near the end but never above it.

Or did I completely miss something?

84GB size of the game.

Billy86

Ah, that makes sense! I was trying to figure out what the GB was for and remember the levels in one of the pit fight areas being broken so wasn't sure if that was it, or what the craic was! I never actually noticed it was that big, and while it's a fairly big game in terms of in-game stuff that's a strangely high number.

Mind you I just checked and the first which struck me as a reasonably short game (though I played it coming off the back of MGSV and Witcher 3) was 44GB.

RedRochey

Late to the party but I'll be starting this game probably next week (don't know it's taken me this long), what are people's general opinion on it or any comments?

Kiith

I enjoyed it at launch, but the microtransactions were pretty bad. They've mostly been removed now, or at least massively reduced from what i've heard, so that would definitely help. Might give it another go myself, as i never got that far into it.

Mickeroo

StockTwat29 wrote: »

Late to the party but I'll be starting this game probably next week (don't know it's taken me this long), what are people's general opinion on it or any comments?

If you liked the first one you'll probably like this. I haven't played it since they changed the end game/loot box stuff so after I beat the last boss I just looked up the full ending on youtube.

RedRochey

What was the problem with the loot boxes?

Loved the first one so I'd say I'll be happy with this

Penn

Generally a fun game, especially if you liked the first one. Lootbox stuff seems to have been removed so that's a plus. My main issue was having so many different maps in the game. It spread out the Nemesis system too much that there were too many warchiefs etc. Like Mickeroo, I beat the main story but when the lootboxes were part of the game the endgame content was supposedly a huge grind to get to the true ending that I just watched the true ending on Youtube.

Worth playing if you liked the first one and are getting this one reasonably cheap.

Penn

StockTwat29 wrote: »

What was the problem with the loot boxes?

It meant that rather than having to rely on finding good orcs/uruks or whatever to dominate, you could simply buy chests which unlocked ones to use, defeating the whole purpose of the Nemesis system which was the unique selling point of the game. It wasn't that big a deal in the main bulk of the game, but when it came to endgame content to unlock the true ending, it supposedly made it a huge grind to get through without buying lootboxes, to the point where they had to rebalance the whole thing once they removed the lootboxes.

Potential-Monke

I picked it up not too long ago, as I thoroughly enjoyed the first one, with the Nemesis system being the stand out feature. But I knew it was full of MT's and the end game being ruined by it, so I waited (and forgot) until I heard they removed them and purchased then (for like €10 on sale). I played about 3 hours of it, but I lost interest. There were too many enemies around, making going from A to B a pain. I may go back to it one day, but my unplayed PS4 games are starting to rival my unplayed Steam games now...

Niska

Got it a while back and wa enjoying it but then - nope no longer any fun.

hard to exactly pinpoint the issue, but the combat got a bit samey, traversal was a pain, too large an area, too many icons on the map - indeed it was one of the most wearisome open world implementation I remember, and any time you actually began to enjoy it and get a rhythm going, you're interrupted by an Orc that needs to give a 2 minute Oscar acceptance speech, completely pulling you out again.

Penn

Niska wrote: »

you're interrupted by an Orc that needs to give a 2 minute Oscar acceptance speech, completely pulling you out again.

And that was part of the problem with having five different maps and five separate Nemesis hierarchies; in the first game when an orc did that, your response is "U'loc the Scumlord... you've come back for me, eh?!". This time it's just a load of "Who's this f*cker?"

Stone Deaf 4evr

Niska wrote: »

Got it a while back and wa enjoying it but then - nope no longer any fun.

hard to exactly pinpoint the issue, but the combat got a bit samey, traversal was a pain, too large an area, too many icons on the map - indeed it was one of the most wearisome open world implementation I remember, and any time you actually began to enjoy it and get a rhythm going, you're interrupted by an Orc that needs to give a 2 minute Oscar acceptance speech, completely pulling you out again.

It made the common sequel mistake of just getting bigger for the sake of it. The gameplay was still fun, but as Penn said, too much of a good thing (nemesis) isn't ideal either.
I do think that the way the story ended was ultimately worth the time involved though.

Mark Hamill

Kiith wrote: »

I enjoyed it at launch, but the microtransactions were pretty bad. They've mostly been removed now, or at least massively reduced from what i've heard, so that would definitely help. Might give it another go myself, as i never got that far into it.

What's the grind like after the mtx's were removed? Was that rebalanced too?

Kingp35

This game is on PS Now until February. I just completed the main story and I enjoyed it a lot. I completed the first two Shadow Wars stages but I was burned out at that stage so didn't bother with the rest of them.

The game does have a few problems though, the monologues when you encounter a Captain are beyond tedious and the fact you can't skip them is a ridiculous decision. I find the Nemesis System isn't as interesting as it's made out to be, especially since each in game Region has it's own hierarchy. It's definitely worth playing up to the Shadow Wars section but the end game is not engaging enough to keep playing.

Penn

Kingp35 wrote: »

The game does have a few problems though, the monologues when you encounter a Captain are beyond tedious and the fact you can't skip them is a ridiculous decision. I find the Nemesis System isn't as interesting as it's made out to be, especially since each in game Region has it's own hierarchy.

Yeah that was one of my biggest issues with the game. In the first game, the Nemesis system was an absolute joy. Here though, it's segmented far too much between the different maps and more hierarchies in each map that you can barely remember any of the orcs. Which also makes their monologues when some of them show up redundant as it can be hard to tell if they're new or someone you've fought before.