Completing Shadow of War took a little longer than expected. I promised myself I’d do
it before making this video, now here I am 3 days later having done nothing BUT the game.
It’s gone. It’s over! This game, without any DLC, is still a lot of game. To reach
the end of the campaign and to beat all of the proper missions, it took me 43 hours of
efficiently running between objectives. You see, I’ve had my fill of sidetracking with
Shadow of Mordor already. If I had to describe this game to somebody who hasn’t play it,
this is how I’d do it. Shadow of War doesn’t make any sense. You
play as an undead guy with a ghostly companion and can make friends with orcs. You don’t
take fall damage, you can teleport, parkour and ride all kinds of weird creatures. At
one point you team up with a tree to fight a balrog. It’s an open-ended game, but at
the same time it isn’t. And it’s sort of Lord of the Rings, but not in any of the
ways you’d initially want it to be. And there are orcs, but they’re flamboyant and
often comical characters that don’t belong in the movies.
So, the game doesn’t make sense and isn’t like what you’d expect it to be. Stop asking
questions about why it is the way it is, and just appreciate that what it is WORKS, and
is a hellolalot of fun. It’s a cocktail of all the fun bits from other games with
a nifty nemesis system thrown in to give it all purpose.
Now, the game has had a lot of criticism for its heavy emphasis on DLC and microtransactions.
Among other things, the worry was that these would be shoved in your face at every moment.
That the gameplay would be manipulated to encourage you to spend real money on stuff
to advance the game. And that without these things, the game would feel bare and empty.
I bought the cheapest edition of the game and set out to see if it suffered from this.
Hell, I even disabled any of the DLC that came with it- though I did download the free
4K movies and texture packs, which bloat the installation size to a STONKING 103 GB. But
how big does the game feel? To put it simply: it’s massive. I can only
really compare it to its predecessor, Shadow of Mordor. That game and its 2 world hubs
kept me entertained for over 60 hours. Shadow of War, on the other hand, has 5 hubs, each
as large as the ones from the first game, and each with a very unique feel to them.
Shadow of War is so large that it makes the first game look like a training level. The
minute-by-minute gameplay is similar, but this sequel has added a lot of welcome long-term
features that give your actions purpose long after the first game ran out of steam. You
think you’ve beaten it, then suddenly it zooms out another level and you feel like
a small fish in a big pond again, overwhelmed by a flood of new features and goals, many
of which blur the line between scripted and naturally occurring gameplay.
Procedurally generated missions are something
of a dirty word, especially if you’re used to them from Skyrim. Though with this game
they serve as a welcome excuse to mess about with a particular gameplay element, or simply
to slaughter hundreds of orcs. Plus, they reward you with things that do help to kit
out your character with powerful items. So these missions never feel like wasted time,
more as a focused method to obtain what you would have done some other way otherwise.
In fact, I think this is the game’s recipe for success: its procedurally generated stuff
feels as good as its hand crafted stuff. I still don’t know how they’ve managed the
orc bosses. Each is so unique and memorable and there seem to be literally hundreds of
them, each with hundreds of unique lines. Their names seem procedurally generated but
they soon make sense when you encounter them. The Orc called Goodfink uses long and mensa
words but pronounces them wrong. Ghaul Lover? Yup, he definitely loves them Ghauls. And
so on. They all display so much character and personality that it seems a shame to kill
them. Hang around a hub for long enough and you can’t help but grow fond of some. And
annoyed of others… especially that survivor one who can apparently come back from having
his head lopped off. Oh yes. Heads like to go flying in this game.
Limbs get dismembered and the ragdoll physics are hilariously over the top! I had to talk
about this just to give you guys time to appreciate this wonderful ragdoll montage that I collected
from my time with this game, which by now I’m sure you can tell I’m a fan of. But
while the bulk of my experience was good, there were some niggles both ends of it.
The first impressions actually weren’t too good. I don’t like signing scary looking
TOSes for what will be, for me, a single player experience. Yes, game, you can monitor my
PC every time I use you! Yes, your friends can as well. Yes, I would like to be treated
as a criminal! And so on. Next was the control screen, which is utterly overwhelming. You
think that Arma 3’s bad? This is worse. This is the first time I’ve wished I had
more than 100 keys on my keyboard, since most buttons started serving double, triple or
quadruple functions! You change one and suddenly it causes a chain reaction across the others.
I didn’t know if I was ever going to be able to escape this screen!
The graphics menu is awesome. There are a lot of things to mess about with and it helpfully
tells you what each option does in a deliciously concise manner. I’m disappointed there’s
no FOV. There are moments where I feel it’s a little too zoomed in for me. This game is
the first I’ve had that has a dynamic resolution scaler. This is a miracle feature! It automatically
and instantly lowers your resolution to keep your framerate high and it does an excellent
job. All of this can be customised in the options and you can even disable it, though
I don’t know why you’d want to. I ran at 4K for a crisp clear hud. The game itself
certainly wasn’t at 4K much of the time, occasionally plummeting to 240p for a second
or so if I took a screenshot or alt tabbed out or whatever. But most of the time it hovered
between full HD and 4K and meant I didn’t have to bother much about finetuning the settings
for optimal performance. More games need this. The cutscenes were beautiful in 4K. I tried
watching as much as I could but sadly I do get bored quickly and skip them to get onto
the gameplay, but there’s plenty of stuff to watch if you’re into that kind of thing.
Shadow of Mordor kind of dropped you into the world and you had to find the story, but
with this game I got the impression that it was a lot more story-driven, which I liked
as a tool to progress through the world. I don’t know what it is about Talion but I
don’t like the way he looks as much as in the first game. I think it’s his hair. It’s
too brown. But I can’t fault the voice acting. He sounds like the love-child of Aragorn and
Boromir, he’s in his element when he’s worrying about the death of mankind and ancient
curses and it really got me into the Lord of the Rings mood.
Shelob… not so much. This beautiful spider transforms into a generic seductive boring
old young woman who spends 100% of her screentime waltzing about and groping at your character.
It feels really forced, made me cringe and got me to skip quite a lot of the cutscenes,
so admittedly I don’t really know what was going on there. I don’t care, either. Though
there is a dank bit where Talion gets told off by both his friend and his enemy for doing
the right thing, and ends up sitting there looking sorry for himself.
I’m not a fan of tutorials in games, and in a way the whole of Shadow of War feels
like one since it’s always introducing new elements and telling you what to do. But I
don’t mind it since you’re given quite a bit of freedom to enjoy the gameplay at
any point before having to continue. Give me this over Skyrim’s unskippable intro
any day. Shadow of Mordor felt remarkably alive for
a game world. Shadow of War builds on this further. If you’re old enough to remember
the Playstation 1 era, you’ll know that it was very lonely. You seldom had people
on your side and it was generally you VS the world. Well, this game makes the first one
feel like that. This time I really enjoyed having Gondorian soldiers fighting alongside
me and their cities added a lot of character to the environments, which in the first game
were just bland chunks of Middle Earth. But of course, as nice as the humans are,
the real appeal of this game lies with the orcs, which I’ve already said are awesome.
The variety the devs have come up with is excellent and has caused me to go out of my
way a few times just to see what they’re like! Some can seem silly, but the humour
is right down my street and doesn’t detract from the gameplay at all. It’s somewhat
scary how appealing some of these heartless killers can be.
The stakes are raised as the game progresses, eventually leading to the famed sieges that
I’m sure you’ve all seen by now. They are a joy to behold and better executed than
I could have hoped for. Not since Mount and Blade has a game so successfully blended large-scale
warfare with the intimacy of knowing individuals from both sides- and never before has it been
done with this level of polish and balance. You can spend many happy hours attacking and
defending, as well as choosing the role you wish to play in these battles themselves.
You hold enough power to determine the outcome, but not enough to feel invincible. It’s
masterfully done and combines everything I enjoyed from the first game into something
that, with hindsight, is so obviously a good idea.
BUT even an idea as good as this can be overdone. And it really is. This is my first major criticism
of the game. There comes a point where you have to endure literally DOZENS of these sieges,
each a little bit harder than the last. You HAVE to do this to reach the official ‘end
of the game’ and the repetition WILL get to you long before you reach it. For each
siege you have to grind the level of your followers up in the fighting pits. This puts
one of your prize orcs against a foe, chosen from 3 difficulty levels. Every one of these
arena fights can take up to 3 minutes, and each time your orcs risk DYING and you having
to start over. Oh, and you’re forced to watch them, like a cutscene.
Much like the sieges themselves, this system isn’t a bad idea. The fights themselves
are entertaining to watch. It’s only spoiled by being NECESSARY to do! There is no skipping
these sequences. You’re talking maybe up to half an hour of watching combat before
every siege. Not even playing! Just watching what can be a frustratingly slow and long-winded
process. For a game that has packed so much gameplay into every hour leading up to this
point, this change in pace is jarring and very out of character.
And the game expects even more from you than that. You could level up as many orcs as you
want but they might still not be able to take part in a siege because they’re off hunting
or something instead. I KID YOU NOT. You have to run across the world to find them, help
them beat whatever they’re doing and then get everybody ready for the siege before another
runs off. I mean, you could skip time instead, but there’s always a chance that they’ll
DIE without your help doing whatever it is they’re doing. And some times, after ALL
of this, if your orcs are a high enough level then they may decide that they don’t need
you, leaving your army completely and by backstabbing you at some inconvenient moment. Early on
in the game, this kind of stuff is cool. But later on, when there’s so much work to be
done, this kind of micromanagement simply isn’t welcome or fun.
The saddest thing is how easy these things would have been to fix! Have a button that
skips the arena fights, to bulk-sell items you don’t need, to fast travel to aide your
followers, or a way to shorten the orc intro cinematics. I do love these, but you may see
over a dozen of them in a single siege! There comes a point where you stop caring about
individual orcs and just want to get on with the sieges. In fact, why not make these sieges
optional as well by putting them AFTER the game’s end?
I know that, technically, this would change nothing- the content would remain the same.
It would just bring the official ‘end of the game’ forward a bit. But psychologically,
having a pop-up telling me that I’ve beaten the campaign and am now free to play sieges
as I please is a thousand times better than turning these fun features into necessary
chores for those who want to beat the game. Surely the devs must have thought of this
when making the game? While we’re on it, they should have done
something similar with the Return of the King movie. Have it fade to black after the coronation
scene, show the word EPILOGUE and THEN move onto all of the other endings! Once again,
no real difference to what is actually there, but psychologically it would make a difference
and helps distance this boring closure stuff from the rest of the movie, which was AWESOME.
Oh, and WHAT’S THIS, Shadow of War? How is this a YES/NO option? One leads to a menu
screen, the other… ALMOST CERTAIN PERIL! This time I chose the wrong option. Luckily
I was able to beat it still, but later on these battles do get hard and it’s nice
to have orcs on your team who can go toe-to-toe with the enemies without keeling over almost
instantly and requiring you to heal them before they bleed out and die forever.
Which brings me to perhaps the most frustrating thing I’ve ever encountered in a computer
game, ever! And I’ve played CS:GO matchmaking. You see, to target somebody to take control
of or to HEAL, you look in their general direction and press a button. Talion then takes a second
or so to perform this action before it’s complete. Problem is, in a hectic siege he
always targets the wrong person. And by the time he finally gets the right one, no doubt
the action will be interrupted by somebody coming over and stabbing him. And then you
miss your chance and your teammate bleeds out or whatever. It’s butt-clenchingly,
eye-wateringly, mouth… cursingly annoying! This extends to general gameplay as well.
There are too many interactive ledges - you’ll try to guide Talion to one place and he’ll
unexpectedly leap the other way. I’d say this happens about 3-4 times a minute and
it does my head in, especially when he chooses to jump into a crowd of orcs or to fail the
mission for you in some way. I’m in a shared house. I shout and swear
and then feel really embarrassed about it because people outside my room can hear. I’ve
tried replacing naughty words with made up ones but then I just sound silly. Over time
these made up words have evolved and- mostly thanks to this game- I now have a whole made-up
language for swearing. I’m sure some language teacher somewhere would be fascinated by this
creation of mine. A lot of these made-up swear words sound awfully like politicians I don’t
like. It’s a shame that this game suffers from
these problems because it gets so much right- and shows it can, too! Early on in the game
I was frustrated by how I had to manually pick up each item of loot dropped by enemies.
But then my character got an upgrade that did this instantly and automatically! The
developers have shown that they care about this stuff, which makes the absence of other
features even more odd. If only there was a way of skipping the micromanaged orc sidequests!
If only I could get powerful followers without the grind! If only my team could be taken
care of for me so that I can focus on the fighting.
Oh wait, there is one. You can use the in-game market to buy powerful items and orcs to help
you to bypass the grind! You can literally pay them more money to experience less of
the game. Of course, I didn’t do this. I would hate to reward such greedy… OBVIOUS
behaviour. I mean, I looked at the market out of curiosity. Just to see how much they
want to extort you for this ‘privilege’. I felt dirty just for looking, honestly. It’s
a feature that has been met with a LOT of criticism. And I’m going to add to this
in my own, controversial way. I like to deal in absolutes. To sith through
the evidence and to come up with a conclusion that can’t be contested. And yet, I can’t
do this with microtransactions. I can list my many reasons for hating them; they’re
greedy, obvious and lazy money-grabs, they prey on the vulnerable, they commercialise
an art-form I support and I’ve known of an era before they were a thing.
BUT, at the same time, I know they’re here to stay and that they were never intended
for players like me in the first place. They will feature microtransactions because it’s
cheap and easy to do so and because SOME PEOPLE DO BUY THEM. Sadly, all of my favourite games
now sport microtransactions. What do I do? Do I give up gaming despite the enjoyment
I get from it? No! I find a way of justifying my purchases.
With Shadow of War it’s easy. DESPITE the company’s moral bankruptcy and how launch
day DLC shows that bits were lopped off to be sold as extras, what I am getting is still
a ‘game’s worth’. A very decent product, provided I remain ignorant to what I’m missing
out on. The base game is unquestionably larger and better than the first game. For the price
of what I used to pay for a Playstation 1 game I’m getting a lot more for my money
with Shadow of War. If you genuinely would have bought this game
were it not for the DLC, then good for you. I respect that. But to all those people who
had no intention of buying it who want to take the highground and justify being a dick
to me in the comments section? Grow up and go away. I was a HUGE fan of Shadow of Mordor
and I’ll be damned if I miss out on what is my most anticipated game of the year, especially
since it’s turned out to be worth the wait. BUT. I do worry about microtransactions and
the bearing they have on our games. I’ll give it to this one; they weren’t intrusive.
As in like, it’s not directly popping up to remind you that they exist. And the developers
SAY the game was designed and balanced without microtransactions in mind. I like to imagine
the team behind Shadow of War are just as annoyed as we are when DLC is shoe-horned
in, disrupting the balance of their well-crafted game. And yet I can’t help but question
some of the sloppy design decisions in later stages when the first half got it all so perfect.
How can we know what impact microtransactions have had when the very foundations of this
game seem so perfectly designed for their use?
The line between game and gambling is getting more blurred by the year. I got free drops
in this game that required me to access the market to open. I haven’t and don’t even
know what I’d have gotten if I did because this kind of oversteps the boundary that I
am happy with. I would hate to be tempted. But I know as well as anyone that a good game
is addictive by nature. It’s a prime candidate for this kind of stuff!
But at the same time, it goes directly against the point of the game in the first place!
Being a fan of Final Fantasy, I’ve done my share of grinding. And done correctly,
it adds a lot to the experience! You have time to anticipate what’s coming next. You
can justify ‘just one more go’, knowing it will help your game in the long-run. Gradually
honing your levelling method is a thing to be proud of and is usually the memory of the
game that sticks with me the longest- why would you pay money to skip this? What reason
would developers have for adding this, if not greed?
Completing a game used to be an achievement. A thing to be proud of, and a testament to
your skill as a gamer. Now it seems you can bypass all this and just pay to win. Paying
for this kind of stuff is pretty much you telling the devs that you’re incompetent,
lazy or just disinterested in playing the game. And that is why I won’t be doing it.
Shadow of War is an excellent game, marred by stupid politics and greed. It’s a modern
game in every sense of the word. I’ve enjoyed it, but it does leave me with some worrying
questions regarding the future of the industry. I’ll end this video on completely relevant
story. I once went to a theme park that was giving away a free CD for anybody who rode
all of the rides and got them stamped off on a ticket. The problem was, one of those
rides got you super wet. But I wanted that CD. I rode it, got soaked, then went off to
stamp my ticket. My Dad simply walked around the exit barrier and got his stamped too without
going on the ride. We both got the CD. The same CD. The difference was what we did to
get there. My Dad cheated and didn’t deserve it, and I, having done it right, spent the
day walking around in wet pants.