Comments on: Thoughts: Shadow of Mordor

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 29 Mar 2015 01:54:00 +0000

Hork the Poisoner was always coming back for me and I like how they (at least it did for me) sent him after me as one of sourions head chiefs at the right before final battle you have with “The Tower”

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 08:37:26 +0000

God, yes, I’d actually forgotten about the SimCity debacle. They’ve done the odd good feature (like the one on the troubled development of the Bureau) but their reviews are terrible.

By: Ninja Foodstuff

Ninja Foodstuff — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 17:07:22 +0000

Well they gave this a 9.5 which seems to indicate that it’s pretty much the perfect game, which it sounds like it is for the first few hours only.

As for their other scores, my favourite was when they reviewed SimCity and actually reduced the scores progressively over a few days, once they realised how out of touch their opinion was…

By: Darren

Darren — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 12:25:43 +0000

The blue wizard thing is basically just a nod to fans. The Lord of the Rings is so beloved that creators tend to throw in little Easter eggs like that even when they don’t have the rights.

Two that leap to my mind are Gimli’s battle cry–Baruk Khazad! Khazad ai-menu!–is lifted from the books for EA’s The Two Towers, and a First Age Dwarven dragon mask is a piece of equipment in EA’s The Third Age, despite EA not having anything other than film rights when those two games were made.

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 08:52:46 +0000

What’s up with Polygon stuff? I’m not versed in Polygon history and lore.

By: Ninja Foodstuff

Ninja Foodstuff — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 08:47:10 +0000

So definitely worth a look, although, yet again, I have to wonder what the staff at Polygon are thinking.

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 22:17:01 +0000

It also did the same thing as Hobbit did: it mentions two blue mages but nobody remembers their name which is clever way to evade copyrights problems. Still dunno why were they mentioned in the movie.

Warner Brothers distribute the Hobbit so it seems unlikely they have rights for Gollum and orcs but not Trolls. I think trolls were too smart and too sun hating to be used in the game.

By: Darren

Darren — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 18:00:21 +0000

Interesting theory; do you really think the rights are so scattered that they can’t use the troll design? Certainly the concept of a troll isn’t trademarked.

I kind of thought that they were saving some of the creatures for DLC and/or sequels. Notably, one of the in-game lore entries clearly shows an orc riding a warg, so I assumed that there was some other reason to not use the design.

By: Darren

Darren — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 17:57:11 +0000

Much of the game’s plotting requires at least some knowledge of the greater Tolkien canon to fully appreciate (such as the Morgoth statuette, which I thought featured a very nicely done vignette). I haven’t beaten the game yet–didn’t even know there was a second map–but so far I’ve not been as offended as some fans were by the lore.

By: Janek

Janek — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 17:49:55 +0000

Yeah, difficulty in the early game was bang on for me. Generally makes you feel powerful, but if you’re not careful you can get in over your head with a large group of orcs and one or more captains, making it a real fight for survival.

Perhaps putting in a time increment for Fast Travel would work for freshening the later game – I suspect it’s heavily-enough used that it would keep things interesting. Also an increase in power if they force you to flee? Plenty of times when I’ve been hunting someone, then suddenly two more captains turn up and it’s a mad panic to get the hell out. They should be “rewarded” for that.

My personal dream is for a superhero game to use the Nemesis mechanic. Hell, it’s already using the Arkham engine – imagine a Batman game with a fully dynamic rogues gallery! Each picking up more and more bizarre quirks, gadgets and powers in response to their run-ins with the bat.