Shadow Of War’s Creative Discusses Game’s Content

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War isn't too far off from release, and promises even more crazy Orc killing and Mordor exploring than the original Shadow of Mordor. That said, GameSpot recently conducted an interview with Michael de Plater, the vice president of creative for the development team at Monolith, to discuss different aspects of the game's content.

First off, he discussed how Shadow of War isn't even close to being as scaled back as the original Mordor, meaning a much bigger place to explore. "Not as much [needed to be scaled back] as last time," he explained. "Again, with Shadow of Mordor, it was Monolith and my first experience in this genre and this type of game, so we really didn't have a very strong idea of how to scope it. We were massively ambitious and the result of that was that we had to cap things very significantly, in particular, basically the last half of the story. This time, we had a much better idea of what we could do. I think actually, when we go back and we look at the original scope and the original goals in terms of the scale of it, I think we hit those pretty well. We didn't grind or cut anything dramatic, it was just harder than we thought."

But he did admit that some things needed to be changed with the original, and one of the weaker aspects of Mordor actually came with its story. "Last time, the finale and the end of the story was not as satisfying because we basically had to cut off a lot of that. We wanted to have the big iconic villains. We wanted to face Sauron and face Nazgul and explore all of that. We had to cut all that. The scale and variety of the world as well, so really making a significant open-world game."

The fights in Shadow of War will be "meaningfully different," and present something where the "types of stories and the breadth of stories" surrounding the game's enhanced Nemesis system won't be so affected this time around. In other words, a better game's a-comin', Orc hunters.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War will release on August 22th for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.