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[Rakonas]

The story also falls VERY flat towards the end.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The game basically pulls the same shit as Space Marine, and turns the final fight into 3 quicktime events followed by a cliffhanger. The penultimate Boss is also just "sneak up to the dude 3 times -> win. It feels half assed for an ending, and is a bit too obvious with the whole "There will be DLC!"-thing.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I thought the ending was nearly perfect, the events of Shadow of Mordor explain why Sauron had no material form in LotR despite having been materializing since pre-Hobbit times. Talion and Celebrimbor destroy Sauron's physical form (The Hand) and then you see the Eye for the first time and Orodruin erupts and all that shit. I thought it was fucking fulfilling. The problem with the ending is just that Talion suddenly decides he wants to do more, which is understandable from a business perspective, while the ending would have been 10/10 if they parted ways and the game was a one-off story.

[kaian-a-coel]

The story also falls VERY flat towards the end.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The game basically pulls the same shit as Space Marine, and turns the final fight into 3 quicktime events followed by a cliffhanger. The penultimate Boss is also just "sneak up to the dude 3 times -> win. It feels half assed for an ending, and is a bit too obvious with the whole "There will be DLC!"-thing.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I thought the ending was nearly perfect, the events of Shadow of Mordor explain why Sauron had no material form in LotR despite having been materializing since pre-Hobbit times. Talion and Celebrimbor destroy Sauron's physical form (The Hand) and then you see the Eye for the first time and Orodruin erupts and all that shit. I thought it was fucking fulfilling. The problem with the ending is just that Talion suddenly decides he wants to do more, which is understandable from a business perspective, while the ending would have been 10/10 if they parted ways and the game was a one-off story.

Spoiler: not really a spoiler (click to show/hide)

Except that we already knew when and why sauron lost his physical form: at the end of the second age, when Isildur chopped his finger off. He's immaterial for the whole third age onwards.

[Rakonas]

The story also falls VERY flat towards the end.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The game basically pulls the same shit as Space Marine, and turns the final fight into 3 quicktime events followed by a cliffhanger. The penultimate Boss is also just "sneak up to the dude 3 times -> win. It feels half assed for an ending, and is a bit too obvious with the whole "There will be DLC!"-thing.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I thought the ending was nearly perfect, the events of Shadow of Mordor explain why Sauron had no material form in LotR despite having been materializing since pre-Hobbit times. Talion and Celebrimbor destroy Sauron's physical form (The Hand) and then you see the Eye for the first time and Orodruin erupts and all that shit. I thought it was fucking fulfilling. The problem with the ending is just that Talion suddenly decides he wants to do more, which is understandable from a business perspective, while the ending would have been 10/10 if they parted ways and the game was a one-off story.

Spoiler: not really a spoiler (click to show/hide)

Except that we already knew when and why sauron lost his physical form: at the end of the second age, when Isildur chopped his finger off. He's immaterial for the whole third age onwards.

Spoiler: speuler (click to show/hide)

Materializing. The necromancer at Dol Guldur and all that stuff. The events of LotR take place a full 3000 years later.

[Sordid]

I'm not sure if this was posted before or not, but I'm posting it anyway!

Spoiler: Behold Scrimshaw, Mumak Tusk (click to show/hide)

Someone on the dev team is clearly a long-time DF fan.

[Rolan7]

Haha yeah, I took a screenshot but forgot to post that.  Definite reference 

[Drakale]

Whoever designed the models for these artifacts did a really good job. I actually enjoyed hunting these just to see the very well made models and sometime interesting lore bits.

[Sordid]

They lifted this minigame straight out of Tomb Raider (though it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if TR copied it from somewhere else as well, in fact Skyrim did this same thing with the dragon claws and their associated puzzle doors). Except in TR the thins you were looking for were actually a part of the object, here it's just a glowing blue dot that bears no relation to anything. So in TR you'd find a statuette and Lara would comment on it wondering whether it was an antique dating back to the time of Genghis Khan. Then you'd turn it over to find "Made in China" stamped on the underside, and she'd be like "oh, nevermind then".

On the other hand, the things you found in TR didn't really tell you anything about anything. Here these collectibles give you lore that's actually relevant to the story and characters. I really like that you get a bit of lore in the description, then you get another bit of lore when you find the memory, and then you get yet another bit of lore when Talion and the wraith have a brief discussion of it. Which is another thing. The fact that you have two characters sharing the same body allows the protagonist to comment on things without looking like a total weirdo who talks to himself all the time, as is the case in a lot of other games. The longer I play this game and think about how it's actually put together, the more I'm starting to realize it's really cleverly designed in a lot of ways.

[Rolan7]

Same here.  I was expecting to get a decent horde-brawler like Space Marine, with an enjoyable grind in killing/enslaving the minibosses.  To my surprise it's overcoming my expectations nicely.  The wraith character and mechanics particularly, the way he appears when we do elfy things.  It reminds me a bit of tag-team combos in marvel vs capcom, except more fluid and natural.

The first time we countered two attacks at once - that was flipping awesome.

[umiman]

Heh, wait till you see the teleporting super chain executions.

When I discovered that the teleporting jump didn't have an actual range limit, I laughed my bloody arse off.

[Karkov]

Heh, wait till you see the teleporting super chain executions.

When I discovered that the teleporting jump didn't have an actual range limit, I laughed my bloody arse off.

Well, there sort of is.  After about 500m out the enemies don't highlight themselves in wraith vision, disallowing you to jump that far.

Everything below that is fair game however.

[Sinlessmoon]

Heh, wait till you see the teleporting super chain executions.

When I discovered that the teleporting jump didn't have an actual range limit, I laughed my bloody arse off.

Its OP as fuuuuuuuuck.

... But also rather awesome.

[Sordid]

Oh yeah, you do become absurdly powerful towards the end. It even feels like the game needlessly throws away a perfectly good bit of depth and gameplay when it comes to riding animals. You spend like an hour learning how to hunt and ride these creatures, and you do it in different ways. With caragors you have to either jump on top of them from above or counter their attack to stun them, and you can't counter just any attack, it has to be a charge, so you have to put a bit of distance between you and the caragor because otherwise it'll just bite and you can't counter that. And with graugs you have to shoot it in the head, then shoot it in the head again while its disoriented to make it sit down, then run up to it and jump up, and then it's like a series of QTEs as you climb up the huge thing... Just getting a creature to ride is a pretty involved process, that is until you take the instant-mount-teleport-at-any-range skill. At that point the game just throws its hands up and goes "oh fuck it, just point at the bloody thing and press a button, that'll do".

[Karkov]

Speaking of the teleport-to-mount skill, I actually used that on the Dire Caragor that your dwarf buddy makes you ride before the fight with the Graug.  It was fun because off to the side he stops in mid sentence and just goes:

"Huh, well that was... Odd."

Good to see that someone thought to put that contingency in the game.

Also, on the whole "You're overpowered as hell," I think it's sort of expected.  I mean you are attached to Celebrimbor after all, guy who made the rings.  Sauron can't materialize without the power of the rings or the shade of Celebrimbor.  It stands to reason that you'll become pretty damned powerful when you're tag-teaming with a guy that important.

[Drakale]

I got 200 something hit combo in a never ending stronghold alert heh. Kinda abusing the system with knife throw and wraith flash/wraith finisher combo.

[Rolan7]

Karkov that sort of the might be considered a spoiler...

Not that I care, I completed the main quest a couple hours ago.  Pretty sweet!  Since then I've been screwing around with my slaves.  I wish I could have them fight each other, heh.

I was leveling my pet warchief Orush (?) the Blue for a while, having him challenge lesser chiefs and then killing them for him.  He wasn't actually that effective of an orc, really.  Yeah, wasn't... He got himself killed while I was distracted chasing down the captain he'd been "fighting".  It's weird, we were in an alerted stronghold, but he just seemed to be standing there.  I didn't think the reinforcements were even targeting him, in fact I could have sworn he had high health a few seconds before death.  I think his only weakness was to stealth...  Ah well, I needed to take a break anyway.

I don't even remember what he dropped.  I kinda stopped upgrading my equipment halfway through the game, and I have a ton of unused skill points.  I rarely die as it is, the only really challenging thing is berserkers.  Grr... auto-hit me just for attacking, huh?  They're the main reason I spam spacebar to vault-over-and-stun.  Seriously, I use that way too much.

While the nemesis system is great, it doesn't scale up the challenge as you succeed.  Only as you fail.  I'd like the new captains to start at much higher level (maybe as an option, or some in-universe thing like writing Sauron nasty letters by crow) and to appear in packs more.

When the army shows a little skull totem instead of a corpse, does that mean the captain is going to come back for vengeance?