Middle-earth: Shadow of War (Shadow of Mordor Sequel)

lol online battles. tldr: The attacking and defending orcs take one bus to the fight, if you max out the number of defending orcs you can bring, the attacking player only gets one follower to bring

Secondly is that the Online Citadel Assault game mode is straight broken. As time goes on, more and more people are filling out their Citadel roster. What not everyone knows is that each warchief can have 2 bodyguards that show up with them. More and more people are doing this but it has a rather detrimental effect on the attacking players team; there simply won't be enough room on the "army" tab for them to show up. If you give all 6 warchiefs 2 bodyguards each, the attacking player will often only have a single follower supporting them. Even without hacking the game for super orcs, having 6 warchiefs with 2 bodyguards each takes forever to fight through when you have no support from your own followers.

I've given up at this point, maybe they'll fix it in a future patch but at the moment it's straight unplayable.

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Guy always has been that way.

Utnayan So I broke into Act 4 this weekend. Like others have said, you have to beat 20 progressively harder Fort defense/assault missions.

Now I could either spend some time prepping for each fort mission by:
1. Exploring the game world and collecting captains by engaging through the handful of missions types.
2. Replacing weak captains by sending them against tough opponents in the fight pits that I capture when they destroy my pitiful captain.
3. Use whatever silver I have leftover from upgrading your forts to spend on loot crates, which are pretty good.
4. Training up the captains by playing Orke'mon, where I have to analyze an opponent captain's strength and weaknesses and pick out a suitable opponent from my cadre.
5. Also training up the captains by doing the different missions available.

#2, #3 and #4 are also pretty good ways to farm legendary captains, since you cycle through so many orcs very quickly. That list of tasks presents a nice break from the intense fort conquest fights where you're knee deep in orcs for a good 15 minutes. You don't need to spend hours doing it per zone per fight, just need to get a few captains, replace a couple captains and train a few captains before the next fort defense. Doing this will provide each area with a pretty beefy army as your opponent's strength grows.

You could also just lose the fort mission, and then do the pre-attack assassination missions to decimate an opponent's fighting force. Or you could just leather-ass it and defend a fort with whatever shit-stain orcs you have because if you're good and have a solid build with enough damage you can cut through enemy captains quickly enough to pull out the W.

But nah, I can't be assed to go through all that gameplay that is basically the entire focus of the game and is arguably more fun than the fort conquests themselves. I'd rather invest some $$$ on some Tokein-bucks to buy orcs to fill my ranks, and just slog through a single mission-type over and over until Sauron gives up trying to fight my credit card.

Sounds like a great game I will get from Gamefly where I won't be giving them any money.

I fully understand, and fully recognize, the psychological marketing pattern they are doing here with slowly engraining MT's across all facets of systems before they finally flip a switch and it goes fully Pay to Win. We accept this? We accept what happens later. I am not going to be a part of it.

I am just a little ways into Act II and I have probably played 20 hours. I am clearing as many side quests as I can and doing every collection. Based on what I have read I think I will will be just fine by the time I get to Act IV, if that holds true than I have zero issues with the Micros. So far I love this game, but I am not looking to beat it as fast as possible. I am enjoying stopping to smell the Olog Shit.

Sulrn said:

Tuco , your argument is boiling down to the fact that you're okay with them designing a game around micro-transactions as long as you're able to have fun and can play the game anyway. This ignores play time inflation, content gating, and intentional anti-consumer design philosophy that is taking place. Even while shilling, AJ points out this is just a testing ground for future releases of what free to play elements you're willing to accept in a supposed 'AAA' game.

You're embracing the erosion of game design because the waves only touched your toes this time. Defending the game, regardless if you enjoyed what [little / poor] content there was, is simply baiting the waves to get higher.

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Nah, my argument is that the MTX is some tacked on bullshit that all the pearl clutchers assumed the game was designed around. Obviously we won't get this data, but I'd love to see the number of people who paid for more than $15 worth or so of gold. It just makes so little sense to dump $$$ into this game.

My opinion is pretty unchanged from pre-release about this. The people who are grabbing pitchforks because of MTX are useful idiots: they're dead wrong about the usefulness of MTX, but it's useful that they're waging their war anyway for the reasons you stated.

It's tragic in a way, Shadow of War is a really great game for what it tries to do and the nemesis system is actually innovative, but its commercial success was irrevocably totally stunted because of the MTX noise that, in the end, probably doesn't earn them shit.

Shadow of Mordor was abandoned fairly quickly post-release because Monolith wanted to just rebuild their prototype from the ground up and call it Shadow of War. I think they had big plans to support it with DLC, regular events etc, but the well has been poisoned so hard that it's probably impossible. The only thing they could do really is completely remove all MTX and generate a few decent patches/ free content additions. But there's no way their corporate masters will allow for that, and will probably shitcan the support team and put the game on life support.

Also, I'd wager that the crew that fucked up the Forthog (he saved me for the first time yesterday, lol), DLC were in charge of the MTX in this game. Even without thinking about it that hard I could come up with much more palatable MTX options that would be more useful than just buying orcs. Custom skins for your orcs/forts, a custom cloak for Tallion, re-rolling legendary stats with ingame gold (that you can conveniently buy) would be totally inline with other games, and would be something people would consider getting.

Basically, they fucked this game with incompetence, and everyone is assuming it was malice.

DickTrickle said:

Don't underestimate whales, imo. A lot of people are bad at video games and impulsive.

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Tarrant how much Tolkien bux you up to?

j00t said:

Yeah but this never felt like a game that REALLY catered to whales. Like, you COULD drop a ton of cash but it's not like you'd get any cash shop specific orcs. Like, if you could buy the witch king, or gothmog or azog from the movies, ie, identifiable characters, it'd be different.

But as it is, random free orcs can be just as fun as anything you could buy

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I'd say right now the most insidious thing you could sell to players is something that would make an orc never betray you. And I don't even know how much that'd help in Act 4, I haven't explored the undead mechanics enough yet.

j00t said:

or perhaps an item that ignored iron will

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Another good one would be an item that gives you a buff that can give you a single-use last chance attempt.