"Almost certain failure": How Monolith saved Mordor

Wednesday, 27 November 2024

"Almost certain failure": How Monolith saved Mordor

Added: 07.05.2015 3:17 | 9 views | 0 comments

Eurogamer: It started, fittingly, with the nemesis system, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor's most interesting design feature, which, perhaps for the first time, brought emergent storytelling to the forefront of a mainstream blockbuster video game. "We were just a tiny skunk-works team to begin with," explains Michael de Plater, design director at Monolith, who joined the studio in December 2010 around the same time the first prototype emerged. "Because we were small we knew that we had to take a systems based approach to the design; we were just not going to be able to compete with other open-world games in terms of scale."