Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was a pretty straightforward action-adventure game, but it seems its sequel is latching onto pretty much every 2017 triple-A trend in the book. Yesterday we learned Middle-earth: Shadow of War will have loot boxes and microtransactions, and now developer Monolith Productions have revealed the in-game market will require an online connection.
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The information was revealed by Monolith Productions community manager MonolithJared in a Q&A thread on the Middle-earth: Shadow of War messageboard. Several fans asked if they’d be able to trade in currency earned in-game while offline, and the rep replied that, “at the moment, we require an internet connection.”
Now, before you get too worked up, I don’t believe you’ll need an online connection to play Middle-earth: Shadow or War – it’s only required to access the market. That said, you can earn in-game currency offline, so you really should be able to trade it in offline. Hopefully Monolith rethinks this entire system before launch.
Elsewhere in the thread, MonolithJared attempted to justify and explain the decision to include the market and microtransactions in Shadow of War:
“Gold exists for users who want to speed up their army building process. There are people who appreciate having the option. We don’t want to restrict any players from playing our game. So, we have that for those who want a speedy option, and those that choose to avoid it can do so without any negative impact on their game.
The game is balanced so you can play the game without using the Market. As you play the game you’ll have excess Mirian, this gives you an option to use that excess Mirian if you like. Or you can let that Mirian build up as high as you want. Epic and Rare weapons drop with relative frequency, and DON’T need an epic orc to drop. Legendary orcs are rarer. However, the number of legendary orcs you meet increases as you play through the game.
The drop rate of common/epic/legendary orcs has nothing to do with the market. We balanced SoW first, so the drop rates there is set for what our designers and research has shown to be the most interesting. So, if you just do the normal game, the game will be balanced for that.”
Well, that all sounds very reassuring, but of course, we’ve heard similar things from the developers of plenty of other games in the past. Hopefully Monolith aren’t just covering their butts.
Middle-earth: Shadow of War storms onto the PC, Xbox One, and PS4 on October 10.
[via WCCF Tech]
