Middle-Earth: Shadow of War Announcement Trailer Thoughts

            Hey everyone!  They just released an announcement trailer for a sequel to Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor!  Let’s take a look!

            Well that looked like…a prerendered trailer that tells us nothing about the gameplay and only vaguely hints as to what the plot is about.  And that’s because it is a prerendered trailer that tells us nothing about the gameplay and only vaguely hints as to what the plot is about!  Now, to be fair, they say in the trailer that there will be a gameplay reveal released on March 8^th and I fully expect myself to revisit this subject then.  But until then the only emotion that I can conjure up for this reveal trailer is “meh”.

            For those of you who don’t know, Middle-Earth: Shadow of War is a sequel to the 2014 game, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor.  It was a game that actually surprised everyone at the time with just how good it turned out to be, especially given the questionable behavior Warner Brothers had displayed regarding the game’s promotion and the release of press copies to gaming critics.  For me, however, the game was just decent.  The Nemesis System was pretty cool and I did like how the developers gave the orcs distinct personalities as well as different weaknesses and fears to exploit.  It also happened to be one of the few instances where the game actually acknowledged the death of the player in a mechanical way which I thought was kind of nifty at the time. 

            Unfortunately, the game had no multiplayer to speak of, was populated by mostly boring supporting characters and had a plot that mostly consisted of taking control of orcs, making them war chief so you can move on to the big bad of the area only to find out you had to do it all over again.  Because of this I generally find myself discussing the odd continuity hiccups the game has in relation to the rest of The Lord of the Rings lore with my peers more so then the actual game itself.  And from the looks of this trailer, it looks as if it might be more of the same in this regard.

            All that this trailer seems to tell us is that the Gondor captain, Talion and the elf wraith Celebrimbor succeed in forging a new ring to challenge Sauron and the forces he still has in Mordor.  Not long after he apparently loses Celebrimbor and Sauron has gathered his forces to wage war on Middle-Earth and has somehow regained his physical form despite not having The One Ring.  And apparently, beta versions of the Ring Wraiths are flying around for some reason destroying stuff.  And he has a Balrog.  I have no idea how he got control of one of those.  And apparently Talion thinks he can stop all of this with his new magic ring.  Okay.  Again, just “meh”.

            Now to be fair, this is just an announcement trailer so maybe some of this stuff will be better explained in game.  Once again, we haven’t seen any gameplay footage of the new title so we should wait until we see some of that before we swing our expectations either way and I’ll be sure to revisit this subject once that happens.  So until next time, please follow the site, like the Facebook Page, follow me on Twitter and let's hope that the gameplay footage proves to be more promising.