Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor GameInformer Details

NeoGAF user Derrick01 has made a quick bullet-point list of the most notable bits of information from GameInformer’s exclusive feature on Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor, which makes it sound like an extremely ambitious title. Let’s hope we’re not dealing with Molyneux style promises:

-Every enemy has a name, rank and memory. If you don’t kill them in an encounter for whatever reason they will remember you later on and change their tactics, not only getting stronger in level but learning new immunities. Enemy dialogue changes because of your previous encounters as well.

-Enemies have their own jobs to do and their AI allows them to do certain things on their own. For example an Orc you have to kill may be dueling another at one point or he may be doing whatever his higher ranking officer assigned him to do. It all progresses in real time with or without your interference.

-If an enemy kills you in battle you don’t “die” in the traditional sense. You do eventually respawn but time in the world passed (they didn’t say how long). During this time the enemy that killed you was likely promoted because of him killing you or he could have been killed somehow (like losing one of the duels I mentioned above).

-If your objective is to kill a high ranking warlord you can do it in several ways. One way would be chipping away at everyone under his rank and either killing them or making them become “agents” for you which will enable you to launch ambushes on their base or possibly even assassinate the warlord by making his 2nd in command your agent. However it’s not guaranteed, the 2nd in command can fail and be killed but he may have partial success as well which takes a chunk of the warlord’s health away to make your battle easier.

-The combat seems like it takes cues from the Batman games. They mentioned there was a rhythm to it and you get to keep a combo multiplier going.

-It’s fully open world so it has all of the stuff you’d expect. XP, skills, sidequests, random events (hell the whole game is basically a random event with that nemesis system and the AI working on their own even when enemies aren’t on screen).

-You get to use normal melee combat, stealth with a dagger or ranged with a bow. How you level those up depends on what you took the target out with. A stealth kill will get you a special rune to use on stealth skills, direct combat will get you a melee rune and so on.