https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFBJwN6jpR0Hour live stream of a fortress assault (and some q&a.) Thank goodness it's not another hour long Q&A while they play Shadow of Mordor.
It's a pretty comprehensive look at setting up assaults, choosing your body guards, choosing your siege options and the actual game play.
So you can have up to 6 siege options added to your host as the attacker. You start with 3 or 4 slots for them. Each slot has a "type" which offers you one of three siege options in that type to choose from. The types are that they've shown, as I've figured them, are "Gate options", "Troop options", "Siege Weapon Options" and "Beast Options."
Slot #1 Gate Options: What kinds of guys you want to bring to help you deal with the walls and/or gates. You can have sappers run and try to blow up the gates (what I imagine are your baseline option.) You can have a Swarm of Caragor riders, which basically ignore the gates, climb the walls and kill archers/siege weapons on top. Or you can have a pack of Olog-Hai which run in and try to smash the gate down.
Slot #2 Troop Options: What kind of specialized, supplemental troops you want to add to you army. You can have Berzerker Shock Troops, Defenders with Shields to soak more damage or Hunters to seek out and destroy beasts and Olog-Hai at ranged with their spears.
Slot #3 Siege Weapon Options: What kind of ammo you want to add to your siege beasts. Fire, Poison or Cursed artillery.
Slot #4 Beast Options: What kind of special beastie you want to bring along with your army. Choices are a War Graug, a Wild (as in untamed) Drake, or Shelob's Brood, a swarm of spiders which overruns the fortress.
It's unclear if these are all hard-coded choices or if they flow from the traits and makeups of your various captains. They said this is a playthrough from halfway through the game, so based on the fact these Siege Options seem very much about a specific thing (gate bustin, special troops, siege weapons, beasties), I imagine the last slots are focused on some kind of special thing that happens in sieges, based on the story. (Magic Siege Options, Ring-based Siege Options, who knows.) Cue half of the story missions being you meticulously going through each one of these siege options to unlock them for use in game.
Set against your siege options are the traits of the fortress. The fortress has a wall option (so walls can be made of different materials that are easier or harder to destroy.) Gates are an option and similarly are made of materials. And like you Fortresses have a "specialized troop" and "Siege beast" option, in addition I think to whatever weird stuff the fortress type provides. (Or maybe it dictates what kind of things go in these slots, i.e, if it's a Mystic Fortress, its Siege Beasts get Cursed Artillery.) It looks like these are the things you spend Mirrian upgrading when you control a fortress.
So that's all pretty cool. It seems a little cut and dry with these baked in options subdivided into neat groups, but maybe not. Like, I imagine if you completely set up the wrong army to assault a fortress, you will a) get a lot of your captains killed and b) have to do all the heavy lifting of getting inside the fortress and opening the gates yourself while also fighting through an undistracted, at strength fortress. (As opposed to just letting your gate destroyers smash it down or blow it up and you walking right in.)
It also seems like you're going to have a hard time guaranteeing your captain's safety. Seems no matter what you do you're going to have a wide range of weaknesses to try and cover for and in the mayhem of explosions, arrows, beasts, poison, curses, spiders, etc....guys are going to get nailed and you're just going to have to deal with it. Sounds like SoM x4 in terms of losing captains you've been cultivating. On the other hand you now have a chance to rescue captains when they go down in combat, you hold B like you're draining them for a couple seconds and they get back on their feet. Rescuing them might strengthen their bond with you and they might come rescue you some time, or if you let them die they might come back with a grudge ("I served you and you left me to die!") and fight you. The bleedout timer seems pretty generous, and I also watched it reset from 0 to full between the player doing a Last Chance moment. So while you've got chances to save them, it seems like you could spend half a battle babysitting instead of fighting to capture. I assume captains who get hit with their insta-kill weakness can't bleed out and so can't be rescued (along with them getting decapitated or just beaten to death, as happens in the video to one allied captain.)
You can also use Shadow Dominate (which is a Shadow Strike that instantly puts you in domination mode with your target) to jump to your commanders and give them orders. So mid combat you can zip to them when you can see them, almost insta-dominate them and issue orders. You can order them to retreat from the battle, stay and fight or you can shun them and banish them from your army. Maybe shun is a way to power up a captain by making him into an enemy....or get rid of guys you dominated but don't want anymore.
Your guys can seemingly climb the walls during the assault pretty easily. In order to advance the assault you have to capture two or three points in the fortress, represented by a big glowing circle that while your guys are standing in it they're capturing. In the video a decent number of the player's troops are inside the circle within the first 30 or 40 seconds of the battle and already capturing before the gate is even down. If I didn't know any better, I'd say it looked like they almost teleported inside.
Last Chance looks like it's changed. Now it looks like a timed button tap when they're about to strike the killing blow, no more fiddling with the joystick (I hope.)
I was wrong about the evade roll stun being gone. It's still in. Hard to know between videos what they do and don't have unlocked, or if they've unlocked that modifier for an ability. (More on that below.)
Unlocking an upgrade or trait on a piece of equipment dropped from a slain Orc now, apparently, unlocks a quote from them as well. Something to help you remember infamous or beloved Orcs who went down. It's interesting they'd unlock a quote from a guy....makes you wonder how many unique quotes they believe they have to make that pan out. There was plenty of reused dialog in SoM but I always found that first captain speech or encounter was generally very unique. It's a cute feature, at any rate.
On that note I haven't yet seen a "Motivation" line for captains. The thing in SoM that said what they were thinking and feeling at the moment. Kind of sad about that, I liked that bit of flavor.
Mounted combat looks so much better with the Wraith Glaive-thing. No more running through a crowd of guys slashing like crazy and only hitting stuff at your flanks. You can do executions while mounted and other abilities. Nice. Also you have to kill an enemy captain's mount before you can fight them propa.
You can actually take out the Wraith Glaive on foot and start swinging it around. Looks like it's a crowd clearing tool unlike anything you got in SoM except for Wraith Flash and Burn. Of course, in the video, the player is just constantly getting reamed by ranged attacks while they do it. War, war never changes. Not even Shadow of War.
With everything going on they've kinda changed how you're notified about small things. Like when you get vault-broken or an enemy has an immunity, it shows up on the screen briefly if you ran into it, to remind you of the important bits affecting the fight. Compared to SoM where you just had to keep track of it. Makes sense given how many captains you're going to run in to in a given fortress assault.
Shooting arrows in focus mode while sliding across the floor.....damn it's so edgy it hurts!
Executions and special abilities are now usable differently than in SoM. In that, it's no longer when your combo meter is "red." Now you have a Might Bar, above your life and other stat bars. When it's filled up 50% you can do an execution or stuff like Wraith Light. When it's filled up 100%, I think you can do 2 of those back to back ala SoM. Your combo count is still there and may still predict how hard some abilities hit (Wraith Flash and Burn in SoM got crazy huge and did a ton of damage when your combo bar was up in the 60s or 70s.) So for resources you now have Health, Elven Wrath (for doing fancy Celebrimbro moves), Might, Focus, the Combo Counter and Elf Shot. Dats a lot of resources.
You get a significant amount of space to fight the Overlord in their chamber. Ledges to get up on, archers to drain and dominate. The Overlord seems rather happy to just chill in the middle and wait for you to come back down. Seems like a significant hole in boss fights, especially against guys who are weak to ranged.
You can set which captains you want as your bodyguards, and this seems to mean choosing who you want to be able to summon in for fighting the Overlord (they've implied you can summon them at other times too. With how much moving around Talion does I'm guessing they couldn't make them walking around with you all the time work.) During battles your bodyguards just seem to fight as normal orcs do....and if they get killed during the battle, you can't summon them during the Overlord fight.
Warchiefs promoted to Overlord at the end of a fortress assault no longer give a post-victory speech like they did in the first reveal trailer. The speech is now by Talion/Celebrimbro instead (i.e what was there before was a placeholder of some other orc's victory speech, and now it's all about the Bright Lord and the story.) And that speech sounds.....a lot more like Celebrimbro than it does Talion. He's not fucking around. He doesn't just want to defeat Sauron and take revenge...he wants to be Lord of Mordor. Anyways, the devs implied that Talion/Celebrimbro speeches happen when you capture a fortress. But if you were to promote a new overlord at a fortress, then maybe that Overlord would give a speech. That'd be nice for such a momentous event.
Defending your fortresses is very much a thing. You can lose them and have to retake them. When asked if your fortresses could defect on you due to the Nemesis system, they effectively said yes but not really. (Which makes me think a fortress betraying you might be in the story somewhere.)
Fortress upgrades: Sounds like the only real thing you do here is upgrade the # of "garrisons" the fortress has, which lets you station more warchiefs there, which in turn gives you more Siege Options during an attack. More garrisons actually physically appear on the fortress as more bastions and stuff, increasing its size and awesomeness. You can have up to 6 on a fortress. As a side note, I saw that under commanding your Orcs at a fortress there's a "Training Orders" or something like that. Sounds like you can dictate to your garrisoned Orcs what they do with their time. It'd be pretty cool to dictate what traits you want them to get rid of or learn and kind of guide their growth. Hope they talk about that more. What it also means, though, is no more ssuuuupppppeeeeeerrr tedious hunting down of your captains to issue them orders like in SoM. It may have been more realistic to have to do that in SoM. But with a Ring of Power in hand, now, you can just telepathically command an orc to ambush another one. And that's great.
The look of Legendary gear changes over time as you unlock stuff for it, I guess? "It will evolve even more in terms of how it looks and fits in with the set." I sort of don't like how the coolest abilities are tied to using gear as sets (you explode the area around you randomly as you're on fire?!) but they're doing a good job of giving you reasons to stay with a gear set instead of mix and match, or upgrade past it.
The unlock challenges on gear is metered around gameplay progression. So like the basic unlock kind of says where you should be at in game to use it. (As an example, their legendary dagger wants them to dominate a level 40 or higher orc. The highest level orc they fought in the assault was 27. So as they'd progress and grow their army, that dagger would get its chance to unlock its traits right around the time it'd be balanced to use said traits. I dunno. Kind of translates to "here's a thing you won't get to enjoy for a while", to me. But goals, I suppose. They said that some? weapons can continue to upgrade in level the whole game, like the Sword of Dominion which I think is a DLC/preorder thing.
I'm still not quite sure how your army really works. Every time they look at the Fortress screen, there are unturned captains mixed in with your dominated ones, unrevealed orcs in the crowd, and then the dudes on the wall. It's starting to look like you don't have a traveling army of Orcs with you all the time, you basically have bodyguards to summon and that's pretty much it, otherwise you interact with the orc population at the fortress level in all things. I wonder if that means you can have undominated Orcs in your captured fortress army, and that's the grist for time-passing events for your orcs at each fort. Like the SoM simulation constantly playing out at each fort even after you've dominated it.
There are "pitched battles out in the open" that don't take place inside a fortress.
This kind of speaks to something I noticed. Generally there are more orcs on the screen than SoM by a good number, but I felt like there were distinctly less on display here in that first, what I now think of as, cinematic trailer. I was actually kind of underwhelmed by the numbers of guys I saw in this video, I had to rewind a couple times and take a good look at some of the long shots. I'm not expecting some Helm's Deep shit and this seems like modern development reality but overall things look more like SoM on this front now that they're only a couple months away from release. I'm trying to be gentle with the criticism here, because there is definitely more going on here than in SoM by several degrees. But I feel like that first trailer had everything dialed to 11, and was scripted, and actual gameplay has been a couple steps back from that since. Just my feels. I imagine with their pitched battles they'll maybe have more room to add in more guys since there's not all the fortress geometry to deal with.
Fanatical gangs that all enrage when their warchief is attacked, legendary trait. Vunderbar.
Example of how bad ass an Ork captain can be in SoW: A Legendary Maurader-tribe Commander. Calls reinforcements, has a fanatical gang, orders his guys to plant his banner which drives his troops into a rage, rides an armored caragor, shoots a hail of bolts, has the Epic Trait Great Strength so he does a ton of damage.
So there's like, modifiers to orc captain makeup beyond just Tribe/Class. Cursed and Dark keep getting appended to it as well. So you can have a Cursed Marauder Beastmaster or Dark Mystic Destroyer. These add traits for sure. There's also a difference between classes and advanced classes, apparently. Like orcs have a small class tree that they upgrade through by, I imagine, training while garrisoned at a fortress. My oh my.
Rather than straight up assaulting a fortress you can go after the warchiefs in charge and undermine sections of the defense by completing the mission. So like, kill this warchief guarding this bastion and the first outer gate is destroyed, making your eventual assault easier to prosecute. This is closer to your standard SoM infiltration/solo bad-assery action. I'm guessing you can't just casually go in and start killing warchiefs, you probably have to lure the out with a mission just like in SoM. But you can at least thin the herd of Captains you might meet.
The three little bars above some captains' heads in the fortress screen represent their time to complete their current mission. Just like SoM they're holding feasts and hunting and executing, but these missions take more time to resolve automatically. So a mission might take several passings of time to complete.
About timing passing between regions: it happens asynchronously. Passing time in one region does not cause time to pass in another region, and orks don't resolve missions in any region other than the one you're in. However if you leave a region and go to another one, if you return to the previous region, time will have passed and orcs will have leveled up (perhaps according to the training orders you have given) and some Nemesis system stuff might happen.
You have to assault a fortress to get the Overlord to show. You can't just walk in to the fort and find him walking around. I assume the central keeps doors are just closed unless you're assaulting and have captured all the points.
I'm just gonna link a pic of the Ability screen that, judging by their reaction, they didn't want to show:
Looks like each ability has different modifiers you can unlock and equip. They've already said as much talking about the Hammer Stun and it doing ice. Some of the abilities are in yellow. I wonder if they require spehsul things to unlock. I like how there is a group just called "Story." Maybe now I won't waste 3 hours failing to shadow mount a caragor because I hadn't played through the story enough.
Summoned body guards just "pop in" right on top of you. It's pretty alpha looking. They can only be summoned when you're in combat.
Some bugs on display, I think. On dominating a War Chief during a mission in the fort, every captain within sight became terrified and ran. Terrified as in, I think they could just be dominated at that point. Face animations not playing while guys were talking. The time passing feature is also clearly not finished as the text bugged out and you couldn't read captain names and it wasn't really clear what happened as far as promotions and what not. (Very little happened. The guy that killed the player died (along with his mount) then popped back up in his place immediately afterward. Then he disappeared just leaving his caragor standing there. Promote that Caragor asap!) At one point they attacked the Overlord, he retreated from the battle, hide behind his throne and the player was unable to kill them due to striking objects in the way. The player rather procedurally went "Ok, I'm going to die" as though she'd run into this issue before. Clearly still some work to do.
Some Captains and Warchiefs have unbreakable wills which means they cannot be dominated.
When you run into multiple ork captains and they all need to introduce themselves, their intro speeches seem to blend together nicely and one usually says something to the effect of "Don't talk, kill him!" Love that little touch.
If you die when facing the Overlord, there is a mission available called Unfinished Business where you can go straight back to the Overlord fight without reassaulting the fortress. If enough time passes however, the mission goes away, new warchiefs are promoted, stuff gets repaired, etc...
Allied orcs can cheat death, and maybe come back to fight again or come back as a foe.
You can apparently attack and betray your own guys. Which is interesting because you couldn't really do that in SoM. They don't really dig into it other than to say you can.
They talk a wee bit more about training and leveling up guys. They level up from combat (not clear how that works unless they mean killing other warchiefs or Talion.) You can send them on various missions to attack other orcs, basically like issuing commands from SoM. You can send them to the fighting pits to fight other orcs 1v1 and level up from that. Or you can give them training orders which, as I kinda guessed, is about awarding specific traits or upgrading them to legendary or epic.
Death threats are still in, and take the form of missions with optional objectives to, perhaps, level up a guy even further before you dominate them.
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All in all....phew, a lot of new stuff.
+I'm loving the layers and layers and layers in the Nemesis system now. Depending on how these traits change and upgrade over time, this could be a sandbox to return to year after year. PokeOrc!
-Assaults are cool and all but they seemed trivially easy. Shoot some siege beasts on the wall first thing, ride a graug, stand in the capture point, maybe rescue a downed captain or two, repeat. If carefully arranging your fight in SoM was largely a waste of time due to using abilities and just basic game competency, SoW Fortress Assaults seem largely the same. Sure, you can spend 10 hours dominating every captain, turning every warchief, setting spies and leveling dudes up....but it is all almost entirely for your entertainment, the game does not seem to require that at all. You can probably mostly sack a fortress with zero captains dominated and zero defenses broken down just by sheer grit and persistence. Then again, there can be tons of of orc captains during an assault and up to 6 warchiefs, as I imagine all the captains wandering the region are called in for an assault. Something like 40 orc captains. That's a lot of guys to have to fight single handedly. As I watched through the different assaults they did, I couldn't help but wonder if any of it really matters from anything other than a narrative angle. When the people making the game are like "Yeah siege beasts die almost immediately" (and they did) it begs the question if it's there because it does something or because it checks a box and looks cool. Does breaking down a gate really matter when half your army is already inside the walls trying to capture the point before it's been breached? Does ANYTHING matter when you're sitting on a drake shooting fireballs at stuff? People already say SoW is hard....but SoM seemed hard for the first 10 or so hours until you learned what you were doing.
=Fortress management seems pretty barebones. Buy up garrisons, promote warchiefs, set training options, faff around doing their missions if you want to level them up, buy up fortress defense options, call it good. I guess for many of these being new systems though I can't really complain. So much is still unclear, like if the fortress type provides anything besides region bonuses and visual aesthetics and extra beasts ans shit hanging around.
+I like the new combat moves, they've really filled in the gaps between move functionality and expansion. Also for being halfway through the game (as they pegged their character advancedment) they still seemed pretty limited in how much focus they had, elfshot, etc...They certainly got their ass kicked plenty by singular attacks from even normal orcs.
=Not so wild about the obligatory elemental effects. But at least SoW has a variety of elemental type things going on, and not just fire/ice/electricity but also bleeding/poison/curse/balefire and maybe some others.
=I don't really know what to make of Overlord fights yet. So far that seems to be one place where the first trailer has delivered way more than they've shown. They're definitely not QTEs as feared but they're....weird. They show none of the dynamic cutscene stuff from the first trailer. Especially body guards showing up. Every time they did they were instantly killed (so the devs say. I didn't even see them, the most I saw were their caragor mounts left behind after they went down, there were no messages or cutscenes or any of that.)
+I really like how each fortress is its own sandbox. I just kinda worry that you'll spend a lot of time playing in each sandbox only to find they don't really tie together very much. Reminds me of a japanese RPG where you have 80 characters but maybe only 12 of them will be in your final battle.
+I'm a sucker for a good grind and they seem like they've really dove into that with SoW. There are tons of currency sinks everywhere. Abilities and modifiers to unlock. Various gear sets to find and complete, legendary weapons, runes, gear and gems to farm off of enemies. Slots to unlock on gear. Gems and equipment and rune abilities to unlock via challenges. Fortresses to upgrade. Collectibles to collect. The fate of possibly hundreds of orcs to deliberate over, determine, fret over and possibly ruin. Mechanically SoW will remain relevant far longer than SoM did and I can't find fault with that.
Overall the game is doing what I love: taking what works in the old and actually, truly expanding on them in the sequel. Lots of games just marginally iterate on previous ideas for sequels while changing very little. But SoW is expanding and deepening most game systems, with stuff that is actually new and in the end, experimental. Most of fortress assault seems to be a big experiment in "does this all actually fit together." You can't have played much of SoM and not see all the additional work that has gone into SoW, like how narrative scenes blend together better or the vast tiers of traits that come together to arrive at the gameplay whole.
On a final note, as I think on it, I think SoW is outdoing what Assassin's Creed should have been about from Day 1. AC was supposed to be about your target having personality, requiring planning, having depth as more than just a cardboard cut out villain. AC focused on the writing to give their villains purpose but missed how you create an interesting narrative. (They were also doing the whole "People from history!" bit.) SoW lends depth and personality and details to everything that gives the kill context and meaning for the player. If Assassin's Creed wasn't already in a well dug rut, I'd say it could learn a lot from SoW about how to give a sandbox game like this life beyond just filling the streets with 300 peasants. If AC game villains had a fraction of the depth of SoW Orcs, the series would be a knock out.
I think I'll definitely be taking the day off when this releases.
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Topic: Middle-earth: Shadow of War (Read 76541 times)