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I put together a playlist for the LP if anyone is in the process of catching up. Latest polls here Here's the latest status of the Orc Board  The Game Area: click for video  Latest Episode:  What is Shadow of Mordor? Imagine if the good Assassin's Creed games, the Batman Arkham series and the Return of the King beat-em-up from a decade ago were mixed together. That's the best way I can really describe it, especially because Monolith, the developer on this game, more or less copied the Assassin's Creed movement system and button-for-button copied the Arkham series combat. If the game had been bad it would have been held up as an example of how not to imitate established franchises along with Homefront and Medal of Honor's 2010 reboot. Instead, this game ended up getting amazing review scores, earned a devoted fanbase and recently snatched up a number of yearly awards, including a number of game of the year honors. Most of this has to do with the Nemesis System and what it adds to the game, which I cover below. The game has you playing as Talion, something of a fantasy Border Patrol agent stationed at the Black Gate, the wall cutting Mordor from Gondor and keeping Orcs out of the wider world. Before you even finish the tutorial Talion's world gets pretty hosed and he ends up bonded to an amnesiac elf ghost who happens to share a number of Talion's desires and also happens to need someone to help him figure out who he is. The game explains it in more detail, but the bond between Talion and the Wraith, as Talion calls the ghost, grants a number of new abilities; most important among these is immortality. If Talion dies he'll respawn at a waypoint some time later. As pretty much every preview for the game and even the basic descriptions of the title will tell you, eventually you have to build an army of the only soldiers you have available: orcs. I want to give fair warning that you won't see that until halfway through the story. What's this Nemesis System you keep talking about all the time? click for video  At DICE 2015 the creative director of Monolith gave a speech where he described the motivation behind the Nemesis system as giving you a multiplayer like experience in a single player game. If you've ever played a game against a really good player and become obsessed with trying to embarrass him, or you were playing well and the enemy team made an effort to take you down a peg: that's the feeling they were going for. There are infinitely spawning orcs in Mordor, your average rank and file guys that you'll spend most of your time killing. Then there are the Named Orcs (divided into Captains and Warchiefs, but I'll use Captains as a catch all when possible). These orcs have special attributes and abilities assigned to them by the game based on their level, and they all want you dead. Like the average orc they are just out on the map, you can go up to them and fight them whenever you so choose. Killing them nets you a weapon rune, these are slotted into one of your three weapons to give you additional bonuses. If you can't find the Captain you are looking for they are probably gearing up for an event. These range from feasts to executions to hunts and beyond and serve as side missions, you go up to the location, hit a button and get a little cinematic of the captain in question starting the event. This is where things get fun. These events are pivotal in an orc leveling up. Just like you, orcs gain levels from having successful events and from, well, killing you. As they level up they lose weaknesses and gain more abilities, but also drop better runes. So while you are waging a one man and one ghost war on the orcs, you also want them to get higher levels so you can get better stuff from them. Careful manipulation of the orcs can sometimes be way better than just killing them outright. Good news: I'm leaving a lot of that manipulation up to you. Thread Participation For the most part I'm asking the readers of this thread to decide the fate of individual orcs. If you want one dead or you want one to live or you want me to ruin one's events or however you want to see it done, I'll go along with it. I plan on taking some suggestions at first but later opening things up (once we have more Captains identified) to full on voting. Until the thread decides on how to deal with a particular Captain I'll keep them alive if I can. You can't really take one off the board for good unless you cut off their head or burn them to death or something. I'm also willing to take suggestions on how to play the Nemesis system overall. Should I kill anyone who gets over a set level? Should I let any orc that flees survive our fight? throw out ideas and I'll let you know if they are tenable. Once we have more orcs on the board we'll start this up in earnest. Structure Shadow of Mordor isn't a super long game, there's just lots of stuff to do with the Nemesis system that makes it much longer, thankfully, most of it is fun stuff. My plan is to divide videos a few ways. One will be story videos, like the very first video of the LP: these will cover story mission and their fallout, maybe a little after that depending on how long we've been running. Second we have Free Roam videos. These will be me killing orcs, picking up collectibles and doing some of the Events as requested. There will also be clip videos of things that happen while I'm playing the game "off camera," I doubt anyone wants to see me grind for currency or XP or interrogate orcs to find out more about the Captains. These videos will have subtitles instead of voice commentary if anything at all and will more be if something super interesting happens and infrequent at best. Episodes                                                 
Lazyfire fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Aug 19, 2015 |
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Mar 23, 2015 02:20
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Reserved
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Mar 23, 2015 02:20
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I really don't like how this game starts off, there's a tutorial for walking off a building and another one later for hitting start, and you literally can't do anything but hit those buttons. Once this video is over, though, things really open up. If you happen to be wondering why any of this poo poo is happening, who the ghost is or who the guys who hosed you up are...that all gets explained (more or less) later. One of the really weird things about the way this game tells its story is by just making insane leaps. Whose this Black Hand guy who killed you? The game never really explains that. Why are you banished from death? something about elf ghosts, I don't know. It gets really weird later when they start introducing new powers at random and act like you could have done it any time you wanted and should have been doing it all game. As the first story video this one is a bit more structured than what you'll see in the free roam video. As a matter of fact, the first video of that type is nearly 45 minutes long. Generally, those will get slimmer once I take some things like collecting items out and make them their own videos, but story videos will be where we take on the main missions the game throws at us and free roam will have us doing Nemesis and side stuff, so prepare for that next time around.
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Mar 23, 2015 02:27
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I've never played this game, but stabbing through orc politics always sounded hilarious.
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Mar 23, 2015 02:35
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Oooo, shadow of mordor. This should be good.
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Mar 23, 2015 02:50
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My "Favorite" part of the opening is the cut between your "Death" and being on top of the tower I was sure when I played it I had skipped something.
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Mar 23, 2015 02:55
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Ah, Shadow of Mordor. I didn't like this game quite as much as some goons did and never ended up finishing it, but I still had a good time murdering a ton of orcs and seeing how the nemesis stuff played out. Maybe I'll get inspired to finish the game as I watch the LP, there's still plenty of orcs to stab. 
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Mar 23, 2015 03:28
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I only have one request: see how many orcs you can kill with a single button press. You know the one. 
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Mar 23, 2015 03:34
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Stormgale posted:My "Favorite" part of the opening is the cut between your "Death" and being on top of the tower I was sure when I played it I had skipped something. Yeah, it constantly feels like there was a weird jump cut between important events, like things got removed or they ran out of pre-rendered cutscene budget or something. The game also has a nasty habit of completely dropping characters once you've completed a couple missions for or with them that annoys me. Doc Morbid posted:Ah, Shadow of Mordor. I didn't like this game quite as much as some goons did and never ended up finishing it, but I still had a good time murdering a ton of orcs and seeing how the nemesis stuff played out. I just really like the combat, to be honest. The fact that almost nothing in the game (save one sword legend mission) feels like a complete drag helped make me want to just gently caress around for hours on end.
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Mar 23, 2015 03:43
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It's funny, right as you were talking about the song the wife was singing I was thinking "This sounds a lot like Rains of Castamere", so it wasn't just that one person online 
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Mar 23, 2015 04:29
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This game has some of the most amusingly dumb plot points if you're a Tolkien fan (like me!) but it also does a pretty earnest job of trying to flesh out parts of the legendarium that don't get touched on much. If Lazyfire doesn't mind I can try to do a few write-ups of the various lore bits that show up throughout the game, since in this case "don't get touched on much" usually translates to "a few dozen paragraphs in the appendices".
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Mar 23, 2015 04:36
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The Nemesis system is really, really good. Sometimes, it'll make you love these horrible perversions of man and elf and you won't even realize until the very end. I ended up feeling a bit too sentimental when I permanently killed Goroth Ghul-Lover and ended our feud 4 to 3.
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Mar 23, 2015 04:37
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Isn't that epic rune a scripted drop, since you can normally only get them from warchiefs or captains that have been death threated? I'm almost certain I got the same one really early.
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Mar 23, 2015 04:43
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Do you intend to do the Brightlord DLC (I'm spoiler texting that just to be paranoid, DLC name that might spoil the identity of the wraith)
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Mar 23, 2015 04:46
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Lazyfire posted:I just really like the combat, to be honest. The fact that almost nothing in the game (save one sword legend mission) feels like a complete drag helped make me want to just gently caress around for hours on end. The last two or three dagger legend missions auto-fail if someone so much as glances in your general direction, and since they're not main-story missions you can't auto-restart if you fail. Cue about two hours of me doing 10 minutes of stealth, failing because the game decided not to recognize my stealth kill prompt, then spending 5 minutes evading captains and high alert strongholds to get back to the mission start. Sindai posted:Isn't that epic rune a scripted drop, since you can normally only get them from warchiefs or captains that have been death threated? I'm almost certain I got the same one really early. That rune is guaranteed because it's super helpful and allows for doing hit and runs on captains inside garrisons. Kurieg fucked around with this message at 06:45 on Mar 23, 2015 |
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Mar 23, 2015 06:41
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Going from Nazi Murder Simulator 2014 to Orc Murder Simulator 2014:Lazyfire picks the best games,I swear.
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Mar 23, 2015 06:55
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Shadow of Mordor is a really good game, taking everything that worked in the big action games of last gen, polishing them to a fine sheen, and then adding something new that more games to need to ape in the Nemesis System. I really liked it and the funny thing is when I first heard about it I thought it would be poo poo. The plot is meh but its inoffensive and helps the game along so I had no problems with it.
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Mar 23, 2015 07:05
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It did pretty much look like an unremarkable Assassin's Creed clone until they started doing unscripted demos of the nemesis system a few months before release.
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Mar 23, 2015 07:26
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Sindai posted:It did pretty much look like an unremarkable Assassin's Creed clone until they started doing unscripted demos of the nemesis system a few months before release. Even if this game turned out to be lovely (luckily it rules) I would have sung untold praises of its prerelease campaign. It seems like every single publication that asked nicely got sent a few hours of gameplay and a developer to explain things while the journalist was loving around. There must have been 20 hours of raw gameplay footage floating around Youtube weeks before it release, and every single minute had the developer's blessing. Compare this to someone like Rockstar, who release a carefully cut and tailored trailer every six months and then viciously crack down on any other footage that manages to pop up.
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Mar 23, 2015 07:54
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Goddamn did I enjoy the hell out of this game, probably the only nitpick being that later combat upgrades completely and utterly trivialize combat, which changed the flow of the game from 'carefully stalk and plan out the simplest and most efficient means to murder Ghulb Goatfucker and his posse' to 'casually waltz through the middle of the loving camp as the literal incarnation of violent death'. That THAT is the biggest problem I have with the game just goes to show how much fun it is.
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Mar 23, 2015 07:59
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My vote is that you shouldn't be afraid to kill any Captain you come across. If they flee, then kill them if you want to, let them run if you want to, their death is in your hands: it will come to them one way or another, it's simply a matter of time. That said, I say you should try to refrain from using methods that are likely to permanently kill a Captain (execution attacks or what have you) unless you deem it... appropriate. They deserve an extra shot at the belt if they have the heart to survive the first fight.
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Mar 23, 2015 08:12
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McKilligan posted:Goddamn did I enjoy the hell out of this game, probably the only nitpick being that later combat upgrades completely and utterly trivialize combat, which changed the flow of the game from 'carefully stalk and plan out the simplest and most efficient means to murder Ghulb Goatfucker and his posse' to 'casually waltz through the middle of the loving camp as the literal incarnation of violent death'. The biggest problem I feel is that(like Arkham) the flow of combat breaks with certain enemy types especially as picking who to target is annoying. This goes doubly for enemy types that become outright immune to the usual specific method of handling them.
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Mar 23, 2015 08:22
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I like the combat system of Arkham Asylum, I like the movement system of Assassin's Creed and I sure as hell like the Lord of the Rings. What can go wrong?! I'm looking forward to this.
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Mar 23, 2015 10:43
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Good choice of game Lazyfire. I enjoyed the hell out of your Wolfenstein LP and I am sure I will enjoy this one. This game was super amazing fun and while I finished and shelved it; I am sure I will pick it up again in a few months mercilessly slaughter some more Orcs. Also by default you know which randomly generated Orc name you must make your primary nemesis DUCHE DUCHE DUCHE
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Mar 23, 2015 10:52
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What is meant by 'permanently' killing a captain?
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Mar 23, 2015 12:34
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Throwing my hat in the ring: I would like you to (if at all possible) do as much as possible through orc politics/fighting rather than direct action.
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Mar 23, 2015 14:23
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Samovar posted:What is meant by 'permanently' killing a captain?
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Mar 23, 2015 14:31
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Accordion Man posted:Most of the time orc captains will come back from most injuries, the only exception is being decapitated. Which gets really annoying considering two of the upgrades down the line for skills you use tonnes result in a decap.
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Mar 23, 2015 14:59
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Samovar posted:What is meant by 'permanently' killing a captain? Orcs can and will come back from the dead unless you decapitate them, immediately replace them, or pop their heads with wraithfire. Note that I haven't found a guaranteed way to do either of the head removers so it's kind of random. What is cool though is they will come back bearing the scars of however they survived last time. There was one guy in my game who had the tough to kill trait and the fast runner trait. By the time I finally killed him he had both sides of his face covered in leather bandages due to wraithscarring, and most of the rest of his body was covered in burns from the multiple times I set him on fire. I think he was also missing an arm.
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Mar 23, 2015 15:02
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Kurieg posted:Orcs can and will come back from the dead unless you decapitate them, immediately replace them, or pop their heads with wraithfire. Note that I haven't found a guaranteed way to do either of the head removers so it's kind of random. Not guaranteed. I've decapitated one of my Nemesis once and saw him return. Then again, his nickname was "Troll-Born". He also was completely bound up in bandages by the time I killed him permanently.
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Mar 23, 2015 15:36
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I was going to LP this until I realized that most of the fun in this game is the open world and Nemesis manipulation stuff, and that's more stream material than LP material. Still though, I'll be watching this, because I love me some Shadow of Mordor. I should play the DLC one of these days. Delta Green posted:Not guaranteed. I've decapitated one of my Nemesis once and saw him return. One orc I met looked fairly normal for an orc. Greenish gray, both eyes, ugly as sin. By the time I finally killed that fucker off for good he was so scarred, burned, and battered that he was a deathly shade of white and I'm pretty sure he was blind in both eyes. I think he also got skinnier?
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Mar 23, 2015 15:56
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Delta Green posted:Not guaranteed. I've decapitated one of my Nemesis once and saw him return. Not that I'm complaining, since I found the whole thing hilarious.
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Mar 23, 2015 16:30
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Stormgale posted:The biggest problem I feel is that(like Arkham) the flow of combat breaks with certain enemy types especially as picking who to target is annoying. This goes doubly for enemy types that become outright immune to the usual specific method of handling them. Shield captains that can block a vault and also don't get Wraith Stunned can be hard. When they are combat masters who also have an immunity to projectiles you may as well run away for a while. The game is amazing at coming up with combinations like that towards the end. kalonZombie posted:I was going to LP this until I realized that most of the fun in this game is the open world and Nemesis manipulation stuff, and that's more stream material than LP material. Still though, I'll be watching this, because I love me some Shadow of Mordor. I'm really planning on taking it easy with the videos once we open up more of the Nemesis stuff so people can plan and argue before I go off to do the thread's bidding. I realized like you that this is probably a better game for a stream or something similar, but I'm cutting out a ton of grinding and background tasks so we can focus on the action for the videos and seeing things get set up. For example, I filled out the entire Nemesis board for the second video, a task that easily took an hour, but I did it while not recording so no one has to see the terrible grind you need to go through sometimes.
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Mar 23, 2015 22:30
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One neat thing worth noting is that you can interrogate more than just the worms. You can get the identity of any captain you don't already know about from a regular, ordinary orc. It doesn't give you their weaknesses, but it does tell you who you're dealing with. It's especially useful early in the game when you're doing the general upkeep things of "learning the identities of all the captains, getting all the wraithtowers, etc".
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Mar 23, 2015 22:34
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Hey Broman, I hope your realize that you're such a giant Dush.
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Mar 23, 2015 22:37
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Considering it just came out, I believe this is relevant to the thread.
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Mar 23, 2015 22:59
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VolticSurge posted:Considering it just came out, I believe this is relevant to the thread. This is probably their greatest one yet.
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Mar 24, 2015 00:08
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Lustful Man Hugs posted:This is probably their greatest one yet. I laughed my rear end off when the "Fear of Automobiles" kicks in and he starts running away while screaming like a little girl.
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Mar 24, 2015 00:10
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Lazyfire posted:I'm really planning on taking it easy with the videos once we open up more of the Nemesis stuff so people can plan and argue before I go off to do the thread's bidding. I realized like you that this is probably a better game for a stream or something similar, but I'm cutting out a ton of grinding and background tasks so we can focus on the action for the videos and seeing things get set up. For example, I filled out the entire Nemesis board for the second video, a task that easily took an hour, but I did it while not recording so no one has to see the terrible grind you need to go through sometimes.
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Mar 24, 2015 00:14
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I just bought this game and have been decapitating orcs by the hundred ever since I figured out the combat (before that, I was getting hosed constantly). Anyhow, I was bemoaning that there was no decent LP and here you are!
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Mar 24, 2015 00:35
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