Upgrading the Nemesis System for Middle-earth: Shadow of War

During PAX West earlier this year, the folks at Gamasutra have managed to talk to Monolith’s design director Bob Roberts about the ways in which the Nemesis system in Middle-earth: Shadow of War will differ from its Shadow of Mordor predecessor. This conversation is now available in a convenient interview format, and as such we get to read all about Monolith’s approach to emergent storytelling and the concept of “embracing chaos.” We also get a few paragraphs that touch on the idea of getting more powerful in The Lord of the Rings setting. A few snippets:

The most immediate design difference is that unlike in Shadow of War, orcs that the player recruits to their side will join the player in the actual siege on the fortress.

According to Roberts, this design choice helps Monolith create systemic storytelling beats for players who aren’t dying to particularly difficult orc enemies (an event that helps spark interactions with different orc characters).

“The people who had the worst time in the [first] game were the people who played the best,” Roberts explains. “Part of that is the Nemesis System. It’s about revenge and antagonism, and if you’re just steamrolling everybody it doesn’t emerge.”

Because of that, Monolith began to think about player relationships that didn’t rely on the character dying. He says this change can get players riled up when one of their new allies betrays them and becomes the official nemesis.

“That’s a knob we can turn,” he says. “[If] you’re doing too well, maybe somebody should piss you off and betray you and give you a revenge target to go after.”

Of course, when you’re a studio as big as Monolith, on a project as big as Shadow of War, how do you engineer specific emergent moments you can test on players?

Roberts says developing these systems-driven games has meant Monolith needs to “embrace letting the chaos happen,” and try to embrace unconventional results from the system instead of treating them like bugs.

For instance, Roberts explains a meeting where, while testing a fortress assault, an orc general walked out and slaughtered a warchief, as though the player had installed him in there. But in this meeting, Monolith hadn’t installed any warchiefs in the fort. “We were like “that…wasn’t supposed to happen,” Roberts says with a bit of a laugh.

“And the writer in the room was like ‘I could write a line of dialogue when you come back, [an orc] on your team could just go ‘yeah we didn’t have a spy in there i think he’s paranoid’ and suddenly that’s one line of dialogue, and it’s a feature.”

[…]

But for Roberts, this mixing of RPG power acquisition with the roots of J.R.R Tolkien’s story is also a unique opportunity to critically examine his own game design history.

As he explains it, “normally in an RPG, you grow in power, and that is just good. that’s good for you, you’re a powerful good guy, power is good. In The Lord of the Rings, power is sinister, it’s fundamentally sinister, and growing in power is a dangerous thing.”

“It is definitely exploring this conflict of game genre tropes with RPG elements, and Tolkien themes with ‘what is this supposed to mean that you’re getting so incredibly strong?’” he says.

Does this mean that traditional RPG design values have an inherent conflict with the setting of Middle-Earth? Roberts hedges his bets here (which may reflect how well Shadow of War reflects these ideas), but he’s able to weave an explanation of what that means to him as a designer.

“We can explore the satisfaction of growing in power, it just has to mean something different. You can’t feel like you’re a pure white knight paladin here. You have to embrace the fact that you’re trying to justify what you’re doing here,” Roberts says

“And I think that’s a relatable experience. If people study history, or have gained any power in their own lives over people around them, then you get that uncomfortable feeling of ‘I don’t know how to think about this, I think I’m doing the right thing and i’m trying to do the right thing,'” he says. “But you have to think many steps ahead and around various dark corners.”