Middle-earth: Shadow of War

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Cut the arm off an orc in Middle-earth: Shadow of War, and that orc may return later wearing a metal prosthetic and a grudge. This enemy carries the title the Claw. The designers made it an archetype that appears only once per game.

  Monolith Productions developed this 2017 action-adventure, and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment published it as the sequel to 2014's Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. Both games draw on J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium.

  How does a game invent enemies that feel like personal rivals? Why did a team of Tolkien admirers turn the spider Shelob into a woman, and who objected? What made the publisher reverse itself on a memorial add-on within weeks? And why did critics who adored the orcs find so much else to complain about?

  1718454746

• 2. Orcs Who Remember

  ›

  Sauron's armies in Shadow of War begin as procedurally generated cannon fodder, and the game watches for the ones who do something notable. Killing the player counts. So does surviving a fight with him. Those orcs remember Talion, taunt him when they meet again, and sometimes return scarred.

  When the player dies, the orcs responsible rise through the hierarchy and become captains, each with a name, strengths and weaknesses. Interrogating characters called worms yields intelligence about a captain. Once players learn a captain's traits, they can avoid tactics that enrage him and exploit weaknesses that leave him dazed and defenseless. Captains adapt too, because the game learns the player's favorite tactics and builds counters. Ambushes can strike at any moment.

  Celebrimbor's powers let Talion dominate an orc and then choose between three fates: recruit it, kill it, or shame it. Shaming lowers the orc's level significantly. A shamed orc may turn into a maniac, a deranged figure whose level climbs sharply. Talion cannot recruit any orc whose level is higher than his own.

  Recruited captains form an army that Talion can summon into battle. A captain sent to infiltrate a fortress can be made bodyguard to a warchief, which sets up a betrayal in a later mission. When a warchief dies, captains fight each other for the post. That fight unlocks a Nemesis mission in which players help their followers win. The new warchiefs then turn on the overlord during fortress assaults, which eases the siege.

  Other Nemesis missions let Talion avenge a past death or step into quarrels between orcs. Friendly orcs remember too. One may save Talion from a hostile captain, and another may hunt an enemy captain alone. Followers can also enter fight pits, where they battle another orc to the death for gear and levels. They can betray Talion as well.

  Two asynchronous multiplayer modes carry the system to other players. In Online Vendetta missions, a player enters someone else's nemesis system to defeat that player's nemesis. The reward is a loot chest and Spoils of War, the mode's form of experience. Social Conquest lets players invade each other's fortresses. A friendly invasion risks no army, while a ranked one can cost some orc followers permanently.

  Players could even carry their top Nemesis and most loyal follower from Shadow of Mordor into the sequel through a feature called the Nemesis Forge.

  1621232445

• 3. Sieges and Spoils

  ›

  Eight consecutive strikes are enough to fill Talion's might meter and unlock a finisher that massively damages an enemy. A symbol over an attacker's head signals a parry. Red highlights mark unblockable attacks, which must be dodged. Players can also approach targets with stealth.

  Celebrimbor's wraith gives Talion magical options. He can double-jump, use wraith vision to highlight nearby enemies, shoot spirit arrows, wield a spectral glaive, drain an enemy's health, or dominate it. Story quests award points for new skills, and each skill can be upgraded for extra perks.

  A currency called mirian, earned by defeating enemies, buys weaponry, gear and followers in the game's market. Talion carries five kinds of gear: a sword, a dagger, a bow, armor and a cloak. Rarity runs from common through rare and epic to legendary. Gems slotted into gear raise weapon damage, Talion's health, or the mirian he earns. Several low-quality gems combine into one of the next quality. Collecting multiple legendary pieces from the same set grants combat bonuses.

  Talion explores five areas on foot or on tamed beasts. Purifying Haedir towers unlocks fast travel and reveals points of interest. He can also recover lost Gondorian artifacts, solve puzzles to open ithildin doors, collect Shelob's memories, and complete Shadows of the Past quests built on Celebrimbor's memories.

  Four of the five regions each hold a fortress ruled by an overlord. Every fortress has a level that reflects how strong its warchiefs are and how well it is defended. Players send followers to attack, and their combined strength forms an assault force level. When the two levels are close, the fight is even.

  Once an invasion starts, Talion and his followers capture victory points and kill the overlord in the throne room. The player then appoints a follower as the new overlord and buys siege upgrades. Defense missions follow every successful conquest.

  After the campaign, an endgame mode called Shadow Wars asks players to defend their fortresses against hostile attackers 20 times to unlock a bonus ending. It was renamed Epilogue in July 2018. The designers expected only a small percentage of players to reach that ending.

  20681213

• 4. Designing Revenge

  ›

  Lead designer Chris Hoge compared the ideal bond between Talion and an orc to a roller coaster with "ups and downs". The more trouble an orc caused, the sweeter its eventual defeat would feel. That created what he called a "revenge loop", which players break by learning to exploit an orc's weakness.

  A system called "player interaction score" tracks how often the player deals with each individual orc. The orc met most often is the likeliest to cheat death and come back to taunt the player. Hoge said the dialogue and in-game text were written to be "as natural and shareable as possible", so players would trade their personal stories with friends.

  Tribal affiliation shaped each orc's appearance and preferred way of fighting. This made traits more predictable than in Shadow of Mordor and left fewer enemies completely undefeatable. Monolith also expanded Talion's combat skills and added an easy difficulty mode for players who might otherwise grow frustrated.

  The team curated the system as well. They cut boring scenarios and handcrafted certain scenes that they wanted the procedural generation to produce. They did not want players to over-strategize, so the system stayed a "story-generating machine" whose calculations are not fully revealed.

  Shadow of Mordor had a flaw. Skilled players were rarely killed, so they never met the system's best moments. Shadow of War tracks a player's style and sends a particular kind of enemy to counter it. The aim was a nemesis who is "personable" and "memorable" for every kind of player.

  Followers received stories of their own. After recruitment, an orc may rescue Talion in his dying moments, bring him gifts, or betray him. Michael De Plater said this let the system tell stories about "loyalty, betrayal and friendship" without a hostile orc killing anyone. A betrayal also hands the player a fresh target for revenge. Playtests sometimes produced unexpected results, and the team wrote extra dialogue for them instead of correcting them.

  Monolith wanted the orcs to be "genuine characters" with human traits. De Plater called them "soldiers in the trenches" and the "manifestation of what happens to human beings when they get controlled completely by the emotions of hatred and fear". They lack empathy and a moral compass, yet they do not see themselves as villains. Light humor, played against the orcs' thirst for violence, kept the game from feeling "sadistic". Some orcs had to be likeable, because they would soon fight at Talion's side.

  4546264344

• 5. The Ring Reforged

  ›

  At Mount Doom, Talion and the wraith of Celebrimbor forge a new Ring of Power, one free of Sauron's corruption. Once it exists, the spider Shelob abducts Celebrimbor and demands the Ring as ransom. Talion reluctantly hands it over. Shelob calls Sauron their common enemy and uses the Ring to see the future. Her vision sends Talion to Minas Ithil, the last Gondorian stronghold near Mordor.

  Sauron's forces besiege the city for its Palantír, a stone that lets its holder see anything. In Celebrimbor's hands it would be a tool, and in Sauron's a weapon. Inside the walls, the partners disagree. Celebrimbor thinks the city is already lost and that only the Palantír matters. Talion argues that defending Minas Ithil will protect the stone.

  He joins General Castamir, the general's daughter Idril and the lieutenant Baranor. Shelob's visions reveal a human traitor among the defenders. The traitor is Castamir, who lets the orcs breach the gates and gives the Palantír to the Witch-king of Angmar in return for sparing Idril. The Witch-king kills Castamir and renames the city Minas Morgul. Talion escapes with help from Eltariel, an Elven assassin who works for Galadriel.

  Through the Palantír, Sauron learns that Shelob holds the Ring and sends the Nazgûl after her. Talion saves her, and she returns the Ring with a warning that the fate of Middle-earth is in his hands.

  With the Ring back, Talion dominates orcs and builds an army. He helps Idril and Baranor rescue Gondorian survivors and aids the nature spirit Carnan against the Balrog Tar Goroth and the necromancer Zog. One of his followers betrays him, and he hunts the Nazgûl alongside Eltariel. Then he assaults Sauron's fortress and meets Isildur, who has been corrupted into a Nazgûl.

  Talion defeats him and sees memories of how the One Ring corrupted him. He chooses to destroy Isildur and free his spirit rather than dominate it. Celebrimbor angrily says Isildur would have been valuable. That reaction shows Talion that the wraith wants to dominate Sauron and take his place. Talion refuses further orders, and Celebrimbor abandons him to possess Eltariel.

  Dying without wraith or Ring, Talion sees Shelob in a vision. She tells him that if he had gone on to fight Sauron, Celebrimbor would have enslaved Sauron and marched on the rest of Middle-earth. She urges Talion to keep the darkness contained within Mordor. He takes the ring Isildur wore to stay alive and uses its power to seize Minas Morgul and defeat the Witch-king.

  From the Palantír, Talion watches Celebrimbor and Eltariel attack Sauron. Celebrimbor tries to dominate his enemy. Sauron cuts off two of Eltariel's fingers, one wearing the Ring of Power, and merges himself with the wraith. They remain trapped in Sauron's tower as a flaming eye, their spirits fighting for control. Knowing he cannot resist the Ring forever, Talion turns Minas Morgul into a fortress to hold Sauron's forces inside Mordor.

  Decades later, Talion succumbs to the corruption of Isildur's Ring and joins the Nazgûl who hunt Frodo and the One Ring. When Sauron and the One Ring are destroyed, Talion dies with the rest of the Nazgûl, and his spirit is freed. He is last seen on the shores of Valinor, discarding his weapons and armor as he walks west.

  3132303536

• 6. Adapting Middle-earth

  ›

  Creative director Michael De Plater described Shadow of Mordor as a learning study in making open world games, one whose scope the team had deliberately limited. With those lessons absorbed, he called Shadow of War the "big, blockbuster version of the ideas we'd begun to explore in the first game", and "kind of our Terminator 2 to Terminator". Monolith upgraded its LithTech engine to one named Firebird, which can support large-scale battles and a more complex nemesis system.

  Those battles were built so that recruited followers manage parts of the fight. The player stays focused on the violence of close-quarter combat. The team wove these moments into the story, giving context to a nemesis system whose ultimate goal was Talion's complete conquest of Mordor.

  De Plater defended the story's departures from Tolkien's books by calling it an "adaptation". The team wanted the spirit of Middle-earth, but it wrote an original tale exploring "the darker side of Tolkien's works". The game takes place in the decades between the end of The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, a stretch the team judged relatively unexplored in fiction. They believed they could fill in missing details without disturbing the wider story. They compared the plan to the film Rogue One, which leads into events audiences already know. Players need not know Shadow of Mordor or Tolkien's work to follow it.

  The narrative follows a three-act structure and gives Talion's story a definitive ending. De Plater said Talion inherited the heroic traits of Boromir but is ultimately an everyman like Samwise Gamgee. Troy Baker returned as his voice and also served as motion capture director for every story sequence. Baker drew on his experience with Naughty Dog on The Last of Us and Uncharted 4: A Thief's End.

  Alastair Duncan returned as Celebrimbor, written as an ambitious "figure of power" who believes he can be better than Sauron once he holds the ring. Laura Bailey joined the cast as Eltariel, and Pollyanna McIntosh voiced Shelob. Fans of the series first reacted with backlash to Shelob appearing as a woman, since the books never describe her that way. Writer Tony Elias answered that the character could be explored in far greater depth in human form, or her role would have to shrink dramatically.

  John Howe, principal artist of the Lord of the Rings films, was recruited to design the ringwraiths. The Olog-Hai, a group of smart trolls created specifically for the game, drew their look from the super-soldiers of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine.

  The team also wanted to take players beyond Mordor. Locations drew on the landscapes of eastern Washington, Alaska and Iceland. Each region was larger and more varied than in Shadow of Mordor, and more colorful than its gritty art style. Minas Ithil was the first place Talion visits. Its design mixed Minas Tirith from the films with Roman architecture, and the team consulted the illustrator and architect Ted Nasmith. From the start they planned for the city to fall to the Nazgûl and become Minas Morgul.

  Seregost is a snowy region with changes in elevation not seen in the first game. Cirith Ungol is a massive cave complex holding remnants of an ancient civilization. Núrn returns as a tropical island, where orcs strip the lush forest for war supplies, a way to explore the destruction of nature. Gorgoroth was described as a "hellscape", and "the culmination of all of these iconic locations and structures that everybody knows and loves from the lore made real". Its industry of factories and engines of war shows the orcs preparing for conflict. Even the environments change with the tribe of the overlord who holds each fortress.

  2627303337

• 7. Delays and Backlash

  ›

  Monolith Productions and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment announced Shadow of War in March 2017, aiming for an August release. In June, the publisher pushed the date back by two months, saying the game needed to meet "the highest quality experience" for players. The versions for PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One arrived on the 10th of October 2017.

  On the 28th of September 2017, a free-to-play mobile companion for iOS and Android came first, built by IUGO Mobile Entertainment. It plays as a top-down real-time strategy role-playing game with small-scale battles. Players can recruit characters from the main game, its predecessor and The Lord of the Rings film trilogy to fight Sauron's forces.

  Monolith's executive producer, Michael David Forgey, died of cancer on the 3rd of March 2016. To commemorate him, Monolith and Warner Bros. announced a downloadable add-on called Forthog Orc-Slayer, priced at $5. Warner Bros. promised to donate $3.50 from each sale in the majority of U.S. states to the Forgey family through the 31st of December 2019. Critics accused the publisher of trying to cash in on his death.

  Following the public backlash, the add-on became free on the 27th of September 2017 for everyone who bought the game. Those who had already paid were refunded. Warner Bros. chose instead to make a lump sum donation to the Forgey family.

  An expansion pass launched with the game. Slaughter Tribe Nemesis arrived in November 2017 and The Outlaw Tribe Nemesis in December, adding new orc tribes and gear. In February 2018 came Blade of Galadriel, a story expansion starring Eltariel. Galadriel orders her to hunt the remaining Nazgûl, including Talion. Eltariel reluctantly confronts him, and he persuades her that they can keep Sauron contained within Mordor together.

  A pair of rogue Nazgûl then reveal themselves as the leaders of a vast new orc army. Eltariel defeats both of them. Talion begins to give in to Isildur's Ring, which forces her to fight him, and he warns that Sauron will resurrect him. She keeps battling Mordor's forces until she sees the One Ring destroyed and Celebrimbor's spirit freed, and she decides to track him down.

  In May 2018, the expansion Desolation of Mordor put players in the role of Baranor, captain of Minas Ithil. He hires mercenaries to help seize the fortress of Shindram and is rescued from wyrms by the dwarf Torvin, who supplies a grappling hook and a glider. The mercenary camp turns out to be led by his estranged older brother Jagai, who now calls himself Serka. After a betrayal by the mercenary Zhoja, the brothers take Shindram by destroying its overlord, Takra. They leave a trap for the orcs sent to retake it and set their sights on Gorgoroth.

  At launch, the marketplace sold reward chests. Loot Chests held gear and consumables, War chests unlocked followers and training orders, and Spoils of War Chests unlocked high-level followers. In April 2018, Monolith announced that it would remove all microtransactions and the marketplace, saying they "compromise" the game by undermining the nemesis system. Buyers could shortcut the work of building an army. Everything came out in July 2018.

  Free updates added an infinite Shadow War mode and Online Fight Pits. In August 2018, WB Games bundled the expansion pass with the base game as the Definitive Edition. A Steam demo that month let players complete every mission in the Núrn region. Critics, however, had judged the game with those chests still inside it.

  4849515259

• 8. Critics and Sales

  ›

  Review aggregator Metacritic rated Shadow of War "generally favorable", a reception more mixed than its predecessor's. Critics noted its ambitious scope and its large expansion of the nemesis system, but faulted the story and the bloated size. The microtransactions and war chests drew wide criticism. The game earned a nomination for Role-Playing Game of the Year at the 21st Annual D.I.C.E. Awards.

  Matt Miller of Game Informer called the game "a playground of intense and emergent action scenes" and admired the variety of orcs he met. He wrote that nemesis missions deepened engagement with the world. Leon Hurley of GamesRadar liked how each orc encounter could grow into a unique story shaped by player decisions. Dan Stapleton of IGN praised the colorful adversaries, each with a voice and look of its own, and the surprise they added.

  Andy Kelly of PC Gamer named the nemesis system the "best part", noting that tribes made orcs feel like distinct, original characters. Christian Donlan of Eurogamer said it made the world feel "wonderfully, comically, teeteringly alive". Several critics did question the morality of building an army by brainwashing and enslaving orcs.

  Combat won acclaim. Miller praised its diverse skills as a "potent power fantasy" and enjoyed a progression system that kept a long game fresh. Hurley said the upgrades deepened the "simple" yet "effective" counter-based fighting, and that each orc's traits forced players to improvise. Stapleton called Talion's traversal "quick and fun".

  Fortress assaults impressed reviewers with their scale, though Stapleton missed planning and strategy in them. Johnny Chiodini of Eurogamer felt buried in upgrade points and skills, which made the game relatively easy. That undermined the nemesis system for him, because no nemesis ever gave him serious trouble or killed him repeatedly.

  The story fared worst. Hurley found the tone incoherent and cited Shelob's change from spider to woman as a disappointment. Stapleton said the game played "fast and loose" with the lore and called the dialogue "clunky" and "derivative". Kelly found the tone "overly-serious". Chiodini called the story "dreadful", "self-indulgent" and "bombastic nonsense". He wrote that "the lore had been thrown out the window for the sake of a couple of schlocky and unnecessary reveals".

  Chris Carter of Destructoid thought Talion "bland" and the story "nonsensical", full of "rings upon rings and comical retcons". Phillip Kollar of Polygon predicted that Tolkien fans would find the twists "distasteful". Justin Haywald of GameSpot enjoyed the stories of side characters and orc companions but lamented that those quests end abruptly.

  The game's scale divided opinion. Miller called the locations a "visual treat", while Kelly found the environments uninspiring and the look "sludgy, muted". Kelly said the game was "constantly screaming at players to do things" and called its side activities a "fantasy to-do list". Carter found systems like gear overly convoluted. Andrew Webster of The Verge argued that Monolith's push for more backfired, burying great moments under filler missions and map markers.

  Commercially, Shadow of War was the best-selling video game in the United States in October 2017, with sales 20% above its predecessor's. It topped the charts in Australia, New Zealand and Japan in its release week, selling 23,000 copies in Japan, up 39% on Shadow of Mordor. In the United Kingdom it ranked second in its first week, behind FIFA 18.

  MCVUK reported that the UK launch could disappoint the publisher. Despite promising pre-orders and one of the company's most expensive marketing campaigns, the game sold fewer units than its predecessor. Shadow of War was the last game Monolith developed before the studio was shut down in February 2025.

  6668697077