Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis System Signals the True Beginning of This Generation

Destructoid’s Nic Rowen has penned an editorial piece in which he argues that Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis system signals the true beginning of the new generation of console hardware and videogames, paving the way for an era where the canned choices of Alpha Protocol and Mass Effect are replaced by more dynamic and seamless story alterations. Here’s a snippet:

But as cool as those games and the choices they offered were, they were always fairly obvious. They came from dialog trees, binary choices, or obvious piss-off moments (“Hum, is the battle nun in my party going to be upset when I desecrate the holy grail with dragon blood? Nah.”). I’d love to see games take the groundwork built with the Nemesis system and run with it (and please, lets find a better name for it before we’re referring to every game with a similar system as “Mordor-like”). It would be great if next year’s games all found a way to neatly fold more relationship- and history-building moments into the gameplay itself, and feature fewer blatant “MAKE YOUR CHOICE” cues.

Granted, the system at work under the hood in Mordor is fairly simple. You burn a guy, he’s gonna show up later with burn scars and an attitude. If you chicken out and run from a Warchief? You can be sure he’ll remind you of your cowardice next time you see him. It’s pretty easy to peel back the layers of how the system works after spending some time with the game, and to be fair, orcs aren’t the most nuanced bunch to begin with. But imagine what more iteration and a different setting could do for a mechanic like the Nemesis system like that. Mordor is only the first step, and while I’m totally in love with what it is laying down now, I can’t wait to see the games that will be coming out two or three years from now that will expand on that system.

Imagine an espionage game like Alpha Protocol that lets you threaten other agents and goons into giving you information or sabotaging a target. Missions that could be randomly interrupted by an enemy you made on a previous job, or a mysterious ally lending a hand in exchange for a favor. Or how about you transplant the orcs social power struggle system into a game like Bully, where no-name punk kids could climb to power one atomic wedgie at a time? (It isn’t a huge jump to make, high schoolers are basically orcs when you think about it.)

I’m all in favor of more dynamic and seamless choice and consequences in games, and I’m thrilled about the idea of underlying systems rather than scripts driving at least some of them, but I would be really surprised if we saw massive changes and advancements in this “generation”. That said, I’m certainly hoping to be surprised.