A reader makes the case for Middle-Earth: Shadow Of Mordor getting a modern remaster, as he laments the fate of it and other aging ‘not-quite-classics’.
When video games take more and more time and budget to make, remasters and remakes are the closest thing publishers have to easy money. I can’t really criticise them for that, as long as the end result is good, but we’re at the point where some games have been remastered multiple times. Gears Of War: Reloaded this year is going to be the second one, and it’s not the only game in that position.
The downside to this is that when a good game doesn’t get a remaster it feels very unfair. There’s a lot of talk about online games being abandoned by publishers nowadays, and no longer existing, but there’s also single-player games that you can’t buy anymore. Good luck getting a copy of Forza Horizon 4 or any of the old Spider-Man games now, as anything other than physical versions, because they just don’t exist now thanks to licences running out.
Thankfully the game I want to talk about today isn’t in that position, yet, and you can buy Middle-Earth: Shadow Of Mordor for dirt cheap on Steam and the PlayStation Store. Although the Game of the Year Edition (that year being 2014) is still full price.
It’s not that you can’t get hold of Shadow Of Mordor if you want it, but that it’s a great game that nobody talks about anymore and that’s held back by being a cross-gen Xbox 360 game. Although I do recommend buying and playing it if you never have, I’ve got to admit it’s showing its age and that in an ideal world it would get a remaster or even a remake.
If it wasn’t a licensed game I’m sure it would’ve got a remaster or another sequel by now but I’m not sure Warner Bros. even owns the Lord of the Rings licence anymore. They’re still selling the game, but they haven’t made a new one in over a decade.
The biggest problem is that they shut down developer Monolith Productions, so they can’t make a new game or a remaster. Someone else could do it, but at this point that seems like it would be disrespectful, given there was no reason to close them in the first place.
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What’s also terrible is that the game’s Nemesis system seems to have died with them. This was something I’ve never seen in any other game, where you could meet random orcs and they’d remember you and they’d become your rivals, creating a whole kind of unique storyline that wasn’t scripted but depended on what you did and who you fought.
It worked really well and was beefed up in the sequel Shadow Of War, and I believe it was going to be used in the Wonder Woman game they were making when they were shut down. But now it has no future. There’ll be no more Nemesis system, no more Shadow Of games, and no more Monolith.
Shadow Of War is good, by the way, but while the Nemesis system and combat are a bit better it suffers from a lot of Ubisoft bloat. Also, the story and dialogue is pretty bad. I’m not a Tolkien expert but even I can tell it’s just making stuff up for the sake of it and it doesn’t really seem authentic, although that doesn’t spoil how it plays as a game.
I’m sure the developer not existing anymore wouldn’t stop Warner Bros. doing a remaster if they thought it’d make money but either there’s a legal reason or they just don’t think it’s worth the effort. Either way, I think it’s a real shame and that as time goes by there’s going to be a lot of these not-quite-classics that are left behind, never getting updated, never getting sequels, and having all their good ideas left to rot.
Considering the last Lord Of The Rings game got 1/10 it’s literally true that you couldn’t do worse with a remaster of Shadow Of Mordor. I’d like it to happen, I don’t expect, and that’s a real shame.
By reader Zeiss
The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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