Middle-earth™: Shadow of War™

[hoho96]

I'm surprised now one is talking about this yet 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g7ufX3I9Cw
Aside from the ridiculousness of the story, what are some of your thoughts on this game and the one before it (Shadow of Mordor).
I quite liked SoM (as open world 3rd person action/adventure games go; I LOVED IT). It painted Mordor in an interesting color: It's not all desert ashes and smoke. The many castles and forts we read about in all Middle Earth books are very nicely depicted. The enslavement of the men of the east and south, and the gondorians from Ithilian, the infighting of the Orcs for leadership. This was quite the most lively mordor we've ever seen 

Now in the new trailer what I'm most excited about is Nazguls in action We're going to see the fall of Minas Ithil which is never shown in any LOTR material before.
I bet we're going to have our ranger doing some over the top ridiculous feats (like somehow going 1vs1 on Sauron, and kicking some Naz-ass), but I'm sure that from a gamer perspective we will get an awesome game

[Walküre]

I'm pretty sure there has already been a quite heated discussion about the topic recently, even though that took place only on ModDB. I don't think I would ever be very keen on bringing this whole frenzy to the sacred halls of MU as well 

I'm obviously joking, dear colleague. Any occasion to exchange valuable opinions should always be welcomed with the most open-minded approach. In this case, I haven't gathered very much information yet on the matter, but I have to say that this forthcoming release managed to get my attention either way. Moving from really general impressions, I appreciated the attempt to recreate bits of Middle-earth too; particularly, every decent project which aims to achieve that goal ought to be given a chance to be considered, at least. Certainly, the lore premises at the root of the entire series are a kind of punch in the face of the true spirit of Arda, in my personal opinion. Seldom, however, do I view things in the perspective of a purist; I find this approach counterproductive and really dry. A too much dry of an approach for a person who cherishes debates. I'm therefore really curious about the outcome of all of this, both in the shoes of a gamer and of a lore-interested guy 

[Qui Lëarrin]

Dear Valar ! That was my face when I saw a friend of mine playing :  ?!

To me, the gameplay seems to be really repetitive and, finally, even if the hero has lot of magic powers (even Gandalf seem to be weak aside him ), he's like a empty nutshell : just a big warrior who will crush everything to give to the player a vanish feeling of power

I will not speak about the scenario... I will not do that because I don't play the all game and, the few I saw gives to me a wrong vision of it maybe - I hope so

But, it's a beautiful game, the Mordor is about to be a nice place to live in it ! Full of life ! And it's one of the few games who try to read the book before (Celebrimbor is a quite unknown by the public, so it's cool to spotlight his story).

It certainly not reinvente the "genre" but, it is not a bad game too 

[hoho96]

It certainly not reinvente the "genre"

Actually it kind of did. The fantastic nemesis system allowed for interactions between hero and enemy that were never before seen. It made hunting the different Orc captains far from repetitive since each one has his own dynamic character, personality, strengths and weaknesses, all of which change every time an Orc interact with our Ranger.
This is something that many other open world games struggle to overcome, hunting down the objectives (I'm looking at you Assassin's Creed), but Shadow of Mordor nailed 

[Qui Lëarrin]

To me, that's one the really good point of the game, but not enough to make it a "very good game, so good as you have to play it if you don't want to have a sad and colourless life" The big difference with the other game is that you choose your ended boss and not battle them in a specefic order.

But, I insist, I didn't playing a lot with it. I'm wainting the next to buy this one on steam (may be it will be costless) and try it with his extension.