![]() ![]() They would serve as a foil for the people having character arcs around them: The humans they’re protecting. Our protagonist can be stoic, calm, pragmatic, and extremely slow to anger. Someone who is hundreds of years old isn’t likely to experience rapid changes anyway. They wouldn’t go through any huge transformative arc. Like Batman, our central character would be more or less a fixed element. The story would be small-scale, limited to some sub-section of either Rohan or Gondor. That’s slightly unusual(ish) and is appropriate for someone who lives in the wild. And if they’re going to be a man, then they should at least have a beard. Maybe I could at least get them to have the protagonist wear some color. PR would shoot this idea down in the end, but I’d try. ![]() Talion is SO much a boring dudebro, and anyone with common sense should realize that having a unique and iconic character is an asset. (Immortality doesn’t really work that way in the books, but this isn’t any more of a compromise than what Shadow of Mordor gives us.) I’d also fight hard to make the protagonist female, if only to make them unique. If we can get marketing to let us make the protagonist an elf, then we can even hand-wave the whole “no game over screen” by just saying that elves are immortal. This gives us an excellent setup for a lone protagonist who lives in the wilderness and fights against evil alone, which is exactly the scenario this game demands.īeing an Elf or a man of the west, we have someone who we can broadly justify as being far stronger than typical men. They didn’t want the glory of being heroes (and such glory is corruptive anyway, as the protected have a tendency to ask you to be their leader) and they didn’t want common folk to live in fear. The rangers regularly protected places like Bree, and did so in secret. If I wanted something fitting tonally and thematically with LOTR, I guess I’d begin with the idea of the Dàºnedain, or (even better) an Elf. We can’t do anything to change this, so how can we make the best of a tough situation? Arkham gameplay is popular, LOTR is popular, they have the license, and it smells like money to them. But for the sake of argument, let’s imagine we’ve been given that very job by a clueless but well-meaning executive. ![]() Now, maybe you’ll argue that Tolkien is fundamentally incompatible with a visceral Arkham-style empowerment fantasy. Usually writing a column is cathartic, but this one made me angry to write. This is one of those cases where I went in thinking I was just going to critique a few points, but the more I analyzed the story the more outrageous it seemed. There are no new Lord of the Rings games currently announced, but you can check all the new games of 2022 to see if anything catches your attention.My column this week is not a work of subtlety. Sure, the drama the Nemesis system creates isn't canon, but Shadow of War is an excellent flagbearer of the Lord of the Rings franchise on its own terms. It's an impressive feat that comes to life during the game's massive castle sieges, culminating in intense boss fights that can be approached in any way you choose. Orcs even remember how you fought against them, adapting to your playstyle while leveling up alongside you. In Shadow of War, the Nemesis System evolves into a genre-defining webbing of inter-connected Orcs. Monolith shed the grim aesthetic of its predecessor, and delivered one of the best open world games of the generation in this sequel – expanding upon everything, including the intricate lore of its world and protagonist Talion. If Shadow of Mordor was an ambitious step forward, Middle-earth: Shadow of War was a great leap. ![]()
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