Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

[Wirdschowerdn]

Beating suburban niggers dressed up as Orks while having large icons plastered everywhere is latently racist and symptomatic of modern big-budget console trash that I shall not reward with my Draghi-paper.

 

[User was nabbed fit]

It was a fun orc murder simulator. Don't go in expecting Fallout, you edgy little shits.

 

[Ellef]

There is a video on the net of someone killing dozens of orcs with his monitor off, that is how brainless this combat is.
MATRIX SLOWDOWN when you pull out your bow, QTE combat with big FLASHING PRESS BUTTON TO KILL ORC (enabled on by default), the orcs just circle around you waiting politely for their turn while only 1 or 2 orcs attack you at a time, you have immune frames while you do any sort of QTE combat actions, you can't fucking die in this game.


I made the mistake of playing it myself, and if you think this is a fun orc murder simulator you are a drooling moron.

 

[Delterius]

Of course its a fun orc simulator. What you are describing is the LotR movies in a nutshell.

 

[Zombra]

There is a video on the net of someone killing dozens of orcs with his monitor off, that is how brainless this combat is.
MATRIX SLOWDOWN when you pull out your bow, QTE combat with big FLASHING PRESS BUTTON TO KILL ORC (enabled on by default), the orcs just circle around you waiting politely for their turn while only 1 or 2 orcs attack you at a time, you have immune frames while you do any sort of QTE combat actions, you can't fucking die in this game.

He said it was a fun killing simulator, not a fun getting killed simulator. A thing can be fun and difficult, or difficult but not fun, or fun but not difficult, or neither fun nor difficult. It's OK if you hated it, but conflating easy with bad is dumb.

 

[Ellef]

Well clearly i'm saying its neither fun nor difficult, and explained why, what else is there to explain? You can literally turn the monitor off, press left click endlessly and everything will be dead within your area, how is this defensible?

Is there no way to criticise a game because someone can come along and say 'your point is invalid, I found it fun'?

 

[Zombra]

There are plenty of ways to criticize it - but when people say "It's fun", and you say, "You're wrong! It's not fun! It's easy!", your argument doesn't make sense. You have to understand the reason that people find it fun and then discredit that reason.

And don't use the word "literally" when what you are saying is made up. I just watched the video you mentioned, and the guy actually knew how the game works and played accordingly ... meaning he used all available controls. Mashing left click only would not work.

 

[Drakron]

It's better than the Arkham games, though.

Apparently it was to be a Arkham title, it was repurposed into this.

It makes sense if you think about it, the Nemesis System doesnt work on this one because you kill them ... Batman doesnt kill and fighting (being beat by) Batman is kinda of a rite of passage, it would work on a Batman title simply because they would show up later instead of being killed off.

 

[User was nabbed fit]

There is a video on the net of someone killing dozens of orcs with his monitor off, that is how brainless this combat is.
MATRIX SLOWDOWN when you pull out your bow, QTE combat with big FLASHING PRESS BUTTON TO KILL ORC (enabled on by default), the orcs just circle around you waiting politely for their turn while only 1 or 2 orcs attack you at a time, you have immune frames while you do any sort of QTE combat actions, you can't fucking die in this game.


I made the mistake of playing it myself, and if you think this is a fun orc murder simulator you are a drooling moron.

Quit the 'newfag edgelord' routine. We already have a guy called skyway for that, minus the newfag.

The game may be incredibly easy, but Zombra already schooled you regarding that issue.

You also come across captains later in the game who are resistant to numerous attacks, so random button mashing doesn't work forever. This leads you to exploit their weaknesses instead. Not hard, but not mindless either.

 

[Zewp]

The game was genuinely only fun for the first hour, when there was something resembling challenge. After that it falls completely flat because the nemesis system becomes worthless. Instead of offering up enemies that are annoying because they keep killing you, it offers up enemies that are simply annoying because they're cannon fodder. When people are forced to game the primary selling point of your game in order for it to offer up worthwhile enemies, and even those enemies are piss easy, then I think you've failed somewhere.

It's a pity. The game really had promise. If it only retained challenge throughout the story it would have been pretty decent and I would have loved it.

 

[Zombra]

Now THAT is how to criticize a game's lack of difficulty. Nice one Zewp. :D

 

[Tehdagah]

There is a video on the net of someone killing dozens of orcs with his monitor off, that is how brainless this combat is.
MATRIX SLOWDOWN when you pull out your bow, QTE combat with big FLASHING PRESS BUTTON TO KILL ORC (enabled on by default), the orcs just circle around you waiting politely for their turn while only 1 or 2 orcs attack you at a time, you have immune frames while you do any sort of QTE combat actions, you can't fucking die in this game.

He said it was a fun killing simulator, not a fun getting killed simulator. A thing can be fun and difficult, or difficult but not fun, or fun but not difficult, or neither fun nor difficult. It's OK if you hated it, but conflating easy with bad is dumb.

I watched some videos of it... there aren't really too much enemies to kill (especially compared to a Musou game) and you spend most of the time just walking/running or doing automatic platforming. The same problems of Arkham City. It doesn't strike me as a good "orc murder simulator".

 

[Rahdulan]

The game was genuinely only fun for the first hour, when there was something resembling challenge. After that it falls completely flat because the nemesis system becomes worthless. Instead of offering up enemies that are annoying because they keep killing you, it offers up enemies that are simply annoying because they're cannon fodder. When people are forced to game the primary selling point of your game in order for it to offer up worthwhile enemies, and even those enemies are piss easy, then I think you've failed somewhere.

It's a pity. The game really had promise. If it only retained challenge throughout the story it would have been pretty decent and I would have loved it.

Inherent problem with the entire Nemesis system is that if you're even half-competent a lot of it will be lost on you because changes to Orc hierarchy, events kicking off, etc are designed to trigger when you die which developers obviously expected you to keep doing. If you don't die left and right you'll have to constantly remind yourself to manually advance time at Forge Towers to achieve the same effect without croaking.

I would love to see some other game's take on Nemesis system, though.

 

[Drax]

If you fags are going to play this fanfiction at least be decent and pirate it.
Behead those that insult The Lore.

 

[Ellef]

If QTE combat (press X to never get hit!) , bullettime archery, 1 button spam, vaulting over enemies for endless immune frames, auto locking on to enemies, playing the game blindfolded etc aren't good enough reasons to criticise a game, then I don't know what to say. This thread hurts the brain; I'll shitpost on games I care about in future.

 

[Multidirectional]

If you fags are going to play this fanfiction at least be decent and pirate it.
Behead those that insult The Lore.

Giving a shit about LOTR lore is for fags.

 

[polo]

I don't see how can you die in this game unless you get overrun by 100 orcs and lots of ranged captains/chiefs. Or maybe a graug.

Inherent problem with the entire Nemesis system is that if you're even half-competent a lot of it will be lost on you because changes to Orc hierarchy, events kicking off, etc are designed to trigger when you die which developers obviously expected you to keep doing. If you don't die left and right you'll have to constantly remind yourself to manually advance time at Forge Towers to achieve the same effect without croaking.

Yeah, unless you advance time you can have an almost empty "Sauron's Army" screen lol.

 

[Drax]

If you fags are going to play this fanfiction at least be decent and pirate it.
Behead those that insult The Lore.

Giving a shit about LOTR lore is for fags.

 

[Multidirectional]

Fag.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

<---- proud lorefag

 

[User was nabbed fit]

The game was genuinely only fun for the first hour, when there was something resembling challenge. After that it falls completely flat because the nemesis system becomes worthless. Instead of offering up enemies that are annoying because they keep killing you, it offers up enemies that are simply annoying because they're cannon fodder. When people are forced to game the primary selling point of your game in order for it to offer up worthwhile enemies, and even those enemies are piss easy, then I think you've failed somewhere.

It's a pity. The game really had promise. If it only retained challenge throughout the story it would have been pretty decent and I would have loved it.

It's true. It does get piss easy at the end (even if you can't randomly button-mash all the captains) because you get pretty OP abilities. I still 'finished' it, as it offered very convenient pick up & play mechanics and it doesn't exactly have a very long main quest. Didn't bother with the other stuff and probably won't bother with any DLC though.

Ignoring the lack of challenge, there was still some fun to be had by turning it into a 'how fast can I massacre all these orcs' thing. I've played worse things during short downtime breaks. The horror... You weren't there, man, you weren't there...

 

[Zombra]

Didn't bother with the other stuff and probably won't bother with any DLC though.

I enjoyed SOM and might have picked up some DLC, if Monolith hadn't done it all in the dumbest way possible: refusing to add more toys to the sandbox or expand on the Nemesis system, instead choosing to tack on standalone scenarios completely isolated from the main game.

 

[Talby]

The "new" campaign even recycles one of the maps from the main game. This is one of the worst kinds of DLC, recycling content already in the base game and selling it as something new. I don't mind remixing existing content to add replayablity, but in that case it should be free. For instance, in Resident Evil Revelations 2, Raid Mode recycles the maps, weapons, characters etc. from the main campaign to add replayability, but it's included in the cost of the game and isn't something you need to pay extra for.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

The game was genuinely only fun for the first hour, when there was something resembling challenge. After that it falls completely flat because the nemesis system becomes worthless. Instead of offering up enemies that are annoying because they keep killing you, it offers up enemies that are simply annoying because they're cannon fodder. When people are forced to game the primary selling point of your game in order for it to offer up worthwhile enemies, and even those enemies are piss easy, then I think you've failed somewhere.

It's a pity. The game really had promise. If it only retained challenge throughout the story it would have been pretty decent and I would have loved it.

It's true. It does get piss easy at the end (even if you can't randomly button-mash all the captains) because you get pretty OP abilities. I still 'finished' it, as it offered very convenient pick up & play mechanics and it doesn't exactly have a very long main quest. Didn't bother with the other stuff and probably won't bother with any DLC though.

Ignoring the lack of challenge, there was still some fun to be had by turning it into a 'how fast can I massacre all these orcs' thing. I've played worse things during short downtime breaks. The horror... You weren't there, man, you weren't there...

I found that if I branded every single orc I could just sit back through the first ending 'boss' battle. The second 'boss' battle was basically stealth takedowns. The third was QTE. Yeah, the ending was pretty bad. But the game never reached excellence for me, it was always quite average.

 

[Ebonsword]

I picked this up at a recent Steam sale and have been playing it a bit.

It seems like a 6/10 game that could have been 10/10 if it had a better combat system (I'm thinking of something like the one from Dragon's Dogma).

Sneaking around looking for hidden items while stealth-killing orcs is pretty fun, but I give a sigh of despair every time the game forces you into combat with a large group--those large fights get monotonous really fast. (The one I did last night where I had to clear out an entire fortress full of orc recruits at once is a perfect example.)


It does look pretty, though, and there's something about it that keeps drawing me back even though I find it frustrating at times (usually due to an annoying QTE).