Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and Monolith productions have today (January 27) released a gameplay trailer of the upcoming next-get The Lord of the Rings game, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor , which shows off to interested gamers and Lord of the Rings fans how the mechanics of the game will work, and what they can expect when playing the game.
What looks like Prince of Persia meets Borderlands / Rage meets, well, The Lord of the Rings , Shadow of Morder takes place a couple of millennia before the events of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, back when the dark lord Sauron was still running amok with his golden ring of power and seemingly endless hordes of orks wrecking up the upholstery. Shadow of Mordor doesn’y seem to be technically part of the Lord of the Rings canon, but story elements will align in someway. According to a press release, Shadow of Mordor’s is its own, set within the gap between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings .
In Shadow of Mordor , you play as Talion, a ranger of Gondor and a guardian of the Black Gates into Mordor. All is going fine, until Sauron shows up and proceeds to deck everyone in the face with his massive mace, killing you and everyone you know and love. Kind of a bummer for an ordinary day, you’d think. Luckily, however, you are resurrected by a mysterious, undying spirit–a wraith. With this new found power and this wraith to help you at your side, you then scurry off to Mordor with an aim to exact revenge.
The gameplay video itself focuses on one feature of Shadow of Mordor : the Nemesis System. The Nemesis System is demonstrated as a system that keeps the open-world of Shadow of Mordor more organic and more personal to you, wherein in every new playthrough the game will generate unique and personal nemeses for you that may alter the course of events in Shadow of Morder , even in minor ways like how said nemesis will react to you, or how their lives within the game alter after encountering you, as is demonstrated in the gameplay video.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor will be available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC later on this year. As someone who used to be really into the Lord of the Rings lore, I’m quite interested in having a go at this time.