Did you enjoy the orc-laiden romp over the planes of a desolate Mordor brought to you by the folks at Monolith? As expansive as it was, did you know there was even MORE planned for this game originally?
During a recent interview, designer Michael de Plater talked about how the title ballooned out of control during its earliest design phase (which led to a pulling-back on the reigns). “During pre-production, we didn’t have good metrics on our production capacity. This led to the specification of the game being over-ambitious, which, as we started to get a clearer picture of reality, required us to make some pretty big and painful cuts.” He states.
As anyone working in a creative medium will attest, cutting anything is like selling off your own baby. de Plater called their choices a “…double dip of pain. Firstly, there was the lost work on the features that were cut. Secondly, we created quite significant amounts of new work to replace the cut features or content including some large wilderness areas and epic creatures such as the Great Beast.”
Check out CheatCC’s review of Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor right here !