“We Made Some Pretty Big Cuts” Says Shadow of Mordor Developer
- gamersunitedgg
- Jan 23, 2015
- 2 min read
Monolith Productions, creator of the Lord of the Rings game Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, bit off more than they could chew over the course of their three-year development. Their game design director has announced that they had to make some serious cuts to the games.
“During pre-production, we didn’t have good metrics on our production capacity,” he said. “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.”
“This created a double dip of pain,” he added. “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.”
De Plater pointed out that even when the features of the games were cut, other elements were redesigned to take their place. In the case for Shadow of Mordor, this ended up creating more work for the developer than they had expected.
Now there’s some question about these features that have been eliminated may make their way into a potential Shadow of Mordor sequel. It’s too early to say right now but De Plater said previously that Monolith has “only scratched the surface” in terms of how it could move the series forward with another game.
De Plater also talks about Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis System that many consider to be the game’s major gaming contribution. He said this system originated as a “fairly simple idea” of amassing a network of personal villains, but over time experienced “feature creep” that made it much more complex. As a result, the Nemesis System actually moved away from the concept’s core premise.
“For example, at one point we had multiple Uruk Factions with separate bars for Morale and Discipline,” he said. “Each Captain influenced these Bars and their state determined the behavior of the Orcs in combat as well as emergent missions. At this point, their Hierarchy UI looked somewhat like a Christmas tree.”
After testing elements Monolith sculpted the Nemesis System back to a version that was closer to it’s original intent with key improvements.
“This was an improvement and evolution over the original vision which was closer to Sam and Frodo’s experience in Cirith Ungol, where interrogation did not have any magical properties and you were turning your enemies against each other,” de Plater said. “The final game is closer to the idea of the power of the One Ring where you are directly controlling your Enemies.”
Shadow of Mordor launched in September 2014 for console and PC play while still being in the running for the Game Developer’s Choice and D.I.C.E. Awards.
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