melmer

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

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The hunters were random entry-level enemies--not even captains. I tried to disrupt and murder them all, but as the captain I was attempting to brand ran off, I got mobbed by an endless number of Uruk.

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Combat brand!

They seem to shrug this off, for whatever reason. I wait until their life bar turns green, but I still can't seem to brand them while being a badass.

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Oh I meant combat branding the other orcs, great crowd control. Captains/chiefs you just have to drain them per usual. Granted combat branding can get the warchief killed, which is why I mostly ended up getting captains promoted instead

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Yeah, too many blue dudes means that the captain or warchief is dead before I can grab him. Had this issue while riding a graug earlier today.

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Apparently I was like two missions from the end for about six months, so when I finally finished the game it was about as anticlimactic as it gets.

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I bought this game cheap the other day. I don't think I'm a huge fan of it, but oh my god I cannot stop playing it what is wrong with me

I think I know what you mean. I beat it a few months ago and wasn't entirely sure how I felt about it and yet I knew I had a great time. I think part of it was getting caught up several times killing warchiefs to unlock more abilities. It started to feel repetitive although that stale feeling went away once I started progressing and unlocking the deeper aspects of the nemesis system.

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I kind of agree as well.  The reason for me is I think the nemesis system has promise, but they don't really go far enough with it.  Branding random orcs or even a chief never really felt like it had all that significant of an impact to me apart from a very short set of circumstances.  It's a good start and there's definitely potential but it seemed like Mordor stops short of being really interesting.  Also in the months leading up to Mordor's release I got very proficient at the Arkham-series style combat so Mordor combat was a breeze for me.

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I kind of agree as well.  The reason for me is I think the nemesis system has promise, but they don't really go far enough with it.

 

I don't understand the point of the Nemesis system. Like, why is it supposed to be good? I didn't have much engagement with it, because almost all the chiefs I faced died the first time around, but whenever a chief survived and leveled up, it didn't feel that significant because I didn't tend to think of the chiefs as people or discreet enemies. Their traits were never significant enough that I would say to myself "I'm going to hunt the nearest chief", then change my mind because the nearest guy was a badass, and by time bodyguards became a big thing, I was powerful enough that I didn't have to worry about picking them off before facing their boss, I'd just attack the boss's stronghold and kill his bodyguards in the ensuing 4v1.

 

I also want to say that the mind control thing was a huge letdown. When I got it, I made it a personal mission to mind control every single named orc, and that manifested as simply going around hunting the nearest orc, and finishing him off with mind control rather than a KO. My mind controlled army only really paid off in one fight where the boss brought in three bodyguards, two of which came already controlled. When I finally had them all, it was a huge anticlimax, because there was no payoff, no reason for me to have done it, and the game didn't recognize my accomplishment (the plot really doesn't make sense when you own the entire orc command structure). In fact I realized that I'd have been better off killing them because that way I'd get their sweet rune drops.

 

 

Also in the months leading up to Mordor's release I got very proficient at the Arkham-series style combat so Mordor combat was a breeze for me.

 

Tangent warning: Mordor is also just fundamentally looser than Arkham's. You can keep your combo despite being struck, and with runes your combo meter takes forever to time out. You can crouchwalk up to an orc who is looking straight at you, across an open field, and you'll still have time to stealth-takedown him before he alerts anyone. When you have bullet time, the bow isn't even a weapon, because you don't fight with it, you just use it as a magic device for converting arrows into free kills. Arkham combat had a way of recognizing and rewarding perfect play that you get in very few games, and more than the looseness just being bad, it lost Mordor that recognition of perfection, which I think is the major problem.

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My nemesis had obscene traits that just made it impossible to kill him, unless I managed to stealth kill. He also basically one shot me. Sadly the final confrontation was a letdown because all my chieftains kicked his teeth in for me.

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My nemesis had obscene traits that just made it impossible to kill him, unless I managed to stealth kill. He also basically one shot me. Sadly the final confrontation was a letdown because all my chieftains kicked his teeth in for me.

 

The only obscene enemy I ever encountered was a guy who was immune to ranged, immune to stealth, immune to being jumped over, and had a shield so you had to jump over him to attack. He was literally invincible until I realized that ranged drain builds combo, and spent about two minutes chaining drains into combat finishers to kill him. Other than him, every enemy was either vulnerable to combat finishers, in which case I'd build combo off random orcs and pump the boss full of finishers; or they didn't have whatever the super uncounterable/parry/whatever ability was, and so once I killed all the other orcs they had no hope of damaging me as I slowly basic attacked them down to zero.

 

Until I ran into the "must be jumped over/can't be jumped over" enemy, I assumed that certain traits were mutually exclusive (like being extra good in basic combat + immune to finishers) to avoid producing anything really stupid. I may have just gotten lucky.

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I don't understand the point of the Nemesis system. Like, why is it supposed to be good? I didn't have much engagement with it, because almost all the chiefs I faced died the first time around, but whenever a chief survived and leveled up, it didn't feel that significant because I didn't tend to think of the chiefs as people or discreet enemies. Their traits were never significant enough that I would say to myself "I'm going to hunt the nearest chief", then change my mind because the nearest guy was a badass, and by time bodyguards became a big thing, I was powerful enough that I didn't have to worry about picking them off before facing their boss, I'd just attack the boss's stronghold and kill his bodyguards in the ensuing 4v1.

 

I also want to say that the mind control thing was a huge letdown. When I got it, I made it a personal mission to mind control every single named orc, and that manifested as simply going around hunting the nearest orc, and finishing him off with mind control rather than a KO. My mind controlled army only really paid off in one fight where the boss brought in three bodyguards, two of which came already controlled. When I finally had them all, it was a huge anticlimax, because there was no payoff, no reason for me to have done it, and the game didn't recognize my accomplishment (the plot really doesn't make sense when you own the entire orc command structure). In fact I realized that I'd have been better off killing them because that way I'd get their sweet rune drops.

 

That's pretty much what I mean when I say they don't go far enough.  It's an interesting idea but in the end it doesn't really matter all that much beyond the plot, which is terrible to say the least.  If they expanded it beyond individual orcs and chiefs so that it actually had a noticeable impact on the world at large it would have been better.  Perhaps that was just too large a scope for the first game to use the system, hopefully it will get expanded in a follow up.  Also the LOTR universe is not at all a good fit for this but I guess it's too late to change that now. 

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I love that game, but it's just too easy in general. None of the traits really mattered because the game was never hard enough to make you care about them. I'm really bummed they don't have difficulty levels in that game.

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I love that game, but it's just too easy in general. None of the traits really mattered because the game was never hard enough to make you care about them. I'm really bummed they don't have difficulty levels in that game.

 

To solve that problem, I tried playing without upgrades. Mostly, it only makes the large battles harder, where the absence of the upgraded bullet time bow and your lower finisher output is felt. It pushes you towards a stealthier approach, and the game's stealth is just too loose for that to be good.

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I picked this up when it was on sale the other day for $6, and so far I've played for one evening.  And daaamn, is this one video ass game video game.  The UI alone makes me hate it, it's so freaking busy.  Just waypointing one spot after another, watching myself move around the minimap.  Every single thing you could possibly need, use or find interesting is waypointed and gets unique marks on your minimap.  But some of them are basically impossible to find without depending on it.  And then, just in case you took your eyes off the minimap for a moment, you get popups to let you know when something useful is nearby!  It's like the worst kind of "must hold the player's hand at every single moment" design. 

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This is free to play on Steam for the weekend.

 

I've played an hour or so and it's fucking terrible. Just a constant onslaught of menus and objectives and combat moves. If you have about six combat keys all with different results depending on if you tap or hold them, your combat is too complicated. I went from 'looking forward to killing some orcs' to 'do not give a shit about any of this' in about ten minutes.

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The combat's actually rather simple, all things considered. It takes a little while to get used to it but once you do it's not like you're playing Batman or something where there are a bunch of different combos and gadgets and stuff.

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3 hours ago, Ben X said:

This is free to play on Steam for the weekend.

 

I've played an hour or so and it's fucking terrible. Just a constant onslaught of menus and objectives and combat moves. If you have about six combat keys all with different results depending on if you tap or hold them, your combat is too complicated. I went from 'looking forward to killing some orcs' to 'do not give a shit about any of this' in about ten minutes.

I thought it was fine, but I'm less persnickety than you.

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I do not recall feeling that the combat was too complicated. However, I don't remember if I was overwhelmed and/or confused during the first hours of the game, so it might well be that everything felt really complicated in the beginning.

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14 hours ago, osmosisch said:

I thought it was fine, but I'm less persnickety than you.

 

I am persnickety, but I wouldn't characterise my reaction to the game as that!

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I also felt overwhelmed and confused by the combat system in the first 1-3 hours, but once I figured it out and leveled up enough to have more tools to use with those controls I ended up really enjoying the game to the point of finishing it and all the DLC. It really opens up after a while, but you are pretty dis-empowered in the beginning using just the basic combat system, but that's also thematic. 

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12 hours ago, Ben X said:

 

I am persnickety, but I wouldn't characterise my reaction to the game as that!

Yeah sorry just joshin' a bit. Reading your fps thread is super fun but also is demonstrative of the extreme difference we have in tolerances.

 

Anyway, shame this game didn't click for you, I found it to be great fun.

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