There’s nothing that we enjoy more than playing through a worthwhile adventure game, only to have a truly challenging boss waiting for us at the end, to put us to the test after everything we had been through over the course of our journey. And it sounds like the forthcoming Middle-Earth: Shadow of War will have this in spades.
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After learning their lesson from the less-than-spectacular closing battle for Shadow of Mordor a few years back, design director Bob Roberts, speaking with Destructoid, explained that this won’t be the case this time around. In fact, the final boss battle this time around will be epic. Maybe a little too epic.
“I think people will be really happy with this ending,” he explained. “Well, maybe they’ll hate it for being too epic.”
We’ve seen epic boss fights before, like with Ninja Gaiden II, where you faced off against a behemoth much larger than you, but still cut it down to size like it was an oak tree. For that matter, God of War has some amazing boss fights as well, going for scope and range along with thrills with each new battle Kratos went into.
The thing is, though, the team had to tread carefully with Shadow of War, maintaining the lore that we’ve come to expect from both the Lord of the Rings books and films, while at the same time striking out on its own chord, so that it was original and not necessarily taking someone else’s idea. So that means Sauron is out. However, there’s still plenty of Orc blood to spill, and Monolith probably has a nice big bad in mind waiting for us at the end.
We’ll have to wait a little while longer to see how the boss fight plays out, but the developer has been pouring a great deal of effort into the follow-up, so fans of Lord of the Rings should feel right at home with what the sequel will have to offer. We certainly can’t wait to check it out – especially if that means more riding on a dragon.
Middle-Earth: Shadow of War arrives on October 10th for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.
