Middle-Earth: Shadow Of War Sees A Slight Delay Into October

The Shadow of War is nearly upon us, and it's about damn time. But it won't be coming quite as soon as most people are expecting.

This long-awaited sequel, which originally had a release date of August 25th, has been delayed, but only because the development team at Monolith wants to make sure that Shadow of War has the utmost quality – just like the original Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor before it.

The team noted in a statement, "Middle-earth: Shadow of War expands gameplay in every dimension, including the massive open world, the story, the RPG systems, and personal player stories of the Nemesis System. As with Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Monolith is committed to delivering the highest quality experience. In order to do this, we have made the difficult decision to move our launch date to ensure that Middle-earth: Shadow of War will deliver on that promise.

"We understand that it might be disappointing to have to wait a little longer for the release and are sorry for the delay, but we are working hard to make an amazing game. We're excited to show more at E3."

The game now has a worldwide release date of October 10th, and while that puts Shadow of War more into the thick of this year's holiday releases, it should be a much better game in the long run – and that's good news for those that ran through Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and split open their fair share of Orcs like rotted fruit.

Shadow of War has seen a fundamental amount of progress since its abrupt announcement earlier this year, with video diaries highlighting the many changes that the developers were putting into the sequel, including an improved Nemesis system, better visuals and those awesome Orc-killing moves. It should definitely be something that lives up to the franchise when it arrives in just a few months.

We'll let you know what the team has ready to announce at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in a couple of weeks.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War arrives on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC on October 10th. A slight wait, sure, but worth it.