Middle-earth: Shadow of War Postmortem Interview

Monolith’s Middle-earth games are famous for their Nemesis system, however, apart from an open world to explore and Orc tribes to conquer in a dynamically evolving fashion, these games also have stories that can probably be considered the most professional and expensive Tolkien fan-fiction ever.

And to help us understand why some things in Shadow of War may seem out of place to those closely familiar with the source material, this recent VentureBeat interview with Monolith’s creative director Michael de Plater goes deep into what the folks at Monolith have done with the story in their games, how they see it fitting in with the established Tolkien lore, and where they can take it next. And then, there are also some questions that touch on the Nemesis system and the game’s approach to microtransactions.

The interview is actually surprisingly informative and positively filled with story spoilers, which is a rarity in this day and age. A snip:

GamesBeat: I’m very happy to be able to interview now after I know what the story is about. I’ve seen the ending, and the true ending as well. Can you talk more about what sort of story you wanted to tell?

de Plater: There were a few goals with the story. One was to hit upon and evoke some of the most iconic and epic elements of the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. We thought about Helm’s Deep, or meeting Galadriel. We wanted to resonate with some of those iconic moments from the books and the films, and find a way to weave those in authentically with the nemesis system and the setting in Mordor and Talion and Celebrimbor’s story.

We knew we wanted the player’s goal within the nemesis system to be the conquest of Mordor. We needed to find a story and context and characters that bordered that. The nemesis system didn’t feel as detached from what we call the golden path, the main story.

Something that happened with Shadow of Mordor—we felt some people missed the themes or intention of the game, what we were trying to say about Talion and Celebrimbor’s use of power and the dangers of that. It was sometimes interpreted as a mindless hack and slash, like we’d failed to communicate that we were presenting the stakes and the risks and the dangers of what they were doing. We made a lot more effort to be coherent and consistent in communicating what those themes were – death, undeath, domination, and Sauron’s goals.

One thing that did feel successful in Shadow of Mordor was showing Sauron from another point of view, and his relationship with Celebrimbor. We wanted to show that the villains in Lord of the Rings were the result of some sort of fall. Everyone sets out with positive intentions, but they can be twisted by the pursuit of power, even power over death itself.

GamesBeat: Should people think of this as an alternate universe or one that’s consistent with the rest of the lore? Did you make some decisions about whether to completely follow the lore or to modify it in some ways?

de Plater: People should think of it as an adaptation. There are things we do relative to the timelines in the books, for example. We brought up the fall of Minas Ithil. We wanted to use Helm Hammerhand. In the books he’s a spirit of vengeance, and we wanted to tie that to the narratives of the Ringwraiths – someone whose story of pursuing revenge and falling and becoming a Nazgul resonated with Talion. We were taking the intention, the spirit, and the themes of the books, but adapting them to fit within a slightly different timeline and story.

It’s an adaptation, basically. If you see almost any film or TV show or other work coming from a canon book or other original property, that’s often the best way to approach that. We’re as faithful as we can and as true as we can to everything we love and feel is in the spirit of Middle-Earth, but it’s certainly our version of a lot of those elements. It has that focus on, perhaps, the darker side of Tolkien’s works. It’s exploring the areas where there is more ambiguity.

It’s a kind of what-if in some ways. When you read Lord of the Rings, the big question that gets posed more than any other is what would happen if someone with power took up the One Ring. Gandalf is tempted. Galadriel is tempted. Boromir is tempted. Celebrimbor is our answer, in some ways, to what would have happened if Galadriel had taken the Ring and become a dark queen in place of a dark lord. Or what would it have looked like if Saruman had taken the One Ring and used his army of Uruk-Hai to challenge Sauron? Talion is a bit more like if Boromir had gotten the Ring.

We’re trying to be very authentic to the spirit of the books, but as I say, it does deviate somewhat from the timeline and the canon. So do the movies. They have deviations that are in some ways quite significant, like removing the scouring of the Shire. That’s quite a big change. So these are all different timelines in some ways.