My body is ready.
Sort of.
I mean, I picked up SoM long after the hype and I expected the Nemesis system to be amazing....it was good. The aesthetic details were all nice touches. It produced some pretty entertaining moments.
But mostly I felt frustrated trying to interact with it, and a lot of the novelty of manipulating it quickly got old when you grokked how the formula worked. I actually just put another 20 hours in when the big trailer for Shadow of War dropped. And it's still frustrating sometimes trying to manipulate the Nemesis system. Oh that's a cool orc captain, I'll brand him....DOH, a branded goon just finished him off. Rinse, repeat, pass time.....blargh. The difficulty was definitely an issue, and I lack the care to spend 80 hours building the greatest nemesis ever just so he can be immune to 90% of my attacks.
So Shadow of War.....I'm a leeeeetle skeptical. A lot of that trailer reeked of scripting, from the dragon vs. Graug fight to the sniper ambush to damn near the entire boss fight. I know they're like 'totally unique every time' but I have a hard time believing they've magically perfected procedurally generated boss mechanics. I expect more like 10 or 20 hard coded kinds of boss fights with some palette, setting and dialog swaps. To be honest I'm a little sick of the marketing speak on this. "Every player will face a totally unique boss" in reality is "every player will fight a guy with a random name, some random traits and, if you play long enough, you'll hear the same dialog lines used eventually."
For all that I'm still excited...but the more I watched the trailer, the less impressed I became. The UI looks basic, like a place holder. Even at 1080p playback things looked pretty muddy and the textures on many guys looks way, way simpler than it did in SoM. The detail simply isn't there anymore (maybe because they plan to have 5x as many orcs on the screen as in SoM.) They're recycling a ton of animations from SoM but somehow they look rushed here, rather than exquisite like they were in SoM. The preorders are ridiculous, as usual.
And there's vastly more content than before. You fight in Gondor, various other fortresses....but you know what? SoM was largely compromised of scattered groups of orcs standing around for you to murder, and Assassin's Creed style collectathons and mission prompts was the only true content in the game. Other than the cutscenes and most of the animal/beast shit, very little felt "designed" so much as "sprayed" across the map in SoM. So when they're saying there's going to 10x the amount of shit to see and do as in SoM....part of me questions what quality all of this will be, or if it will be more seriously repetitive content that, story aside, the Nemesis system is the only thing saved SoM from being just "average."
The RPG leveling and gear in SoW will certainly probably get me to play more of it, and the choosing an appropriate difficulty instead of trying to allow a difficulty level to evolve from how you play will probably keep an edge on the game that SoM lacked after just 10 or so hours.
So while I initially got hyped, my hype thrusters are cooling. I'm still debating whether I'll get it at release or put it off for 6 months. I'll probably at least read a few reviews first. I've only put maybe 50 hours into SoM, and that puts it firmly in my "ok" basket of games judging by its playtime. It's a game I remember fondly but one I struggled to make myself come back to.
And I just can't shake the nagging suspicion that they're promising more depth than they're actually going to deliver. The trailer was almost too cinematic and flowing for me to believe that all just naturally occurs.
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Topic: Middle-earth: Shadow of War (Read 76592 times)