Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

[groke]

btw, orcs hanging out in daylight why?

 

[Azazel]

btw, orcs hanging out in daylight why?

Because the developers only watched the films.

 

[Makabb]

Got bored of it after 2 hours. Open world games are cancer of today.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Becoming a wraith or ghost entity in LOTR requires a very specific set of circumstances. Ringwraiths, the most notable example, are still living breathing men who exist in a limbo after being enslaved to the ring. Frodo, as wel all know, would have become one had the blade fragment which was pulling him into the limbo not been removed in Rivendell. The Barrow Wights were evil spirits conjured and sent by the leader of the Ring-Wraiths, the Witch King of Angmar, to animate the corpses in the Barrow Downs and generally cause trouble. The dead men of Dunharrow were not wraiths or wights, but spirits bound to their mountain by a curse laid by Isildur after they abandoned their oath to defend Gondor. They had no ability to interact with the physical world, and indeed did not manifest at all until Aragorn called them to fulfill their oath. Contrary to the film depiction, they simply scared the Corsairs off the boats and were then set free.

In the case of this game, the developers decided it would be a good idea to take fucking Celebrimbor, one of the most well known non-LOTR characters in the legendarium (He forged the rings of power for fucks sake), and shove his soul into their sad-sack Altair ripoff centuries after his death. Not only does his possession of Talion fly in the face of how wraiths work in LOTR (You can't just "possess" a creature, they aren't ghosts) it also contradicts how Elves and their own spirits function. When an elf dies, he is basically sent to Elf Valhalla and either reincarnated or allowed to spend the rest of eternity in Elf heaven (Valinor). They don't fucking sit around for a few hundred years in Middle Earth waiting for some dude to come along so they can go on an adventure, and certainly not if they are an elvish lord born during the first age before the sundering of the world. If he for some reason did not go to Valinor, however, with no physical binding to the world his spirit would simply have withered and "blown away" like Sarumans and Saurons did.

Now, all this being said: there is a weak argument to be made that if you very, very liberally interpreted the Doom of Mandos laid upon the house of Feanor after the Kinslaying, that Shadow of Mordor isn't entirely made up nonsense, but this would require leveraging content from the Silmarillion. As the existing LOTR license prohibits the use of any content not explicitly outlined in the trilogy or appendices, this would again open up Warner Brothers to a lawsuit from the Tolkien Estate which they would lose.

/loresperg

Nope, wait, not done. One more thing:

Talion:

Men do not get resurrected in LOTR. It does not happen. One man, ONE MAN, in the entire damn history of the world was brought back from death, and that was Beren. He was only brought back because the most beautiful woman to ever walk the earth followed him into the afterlife and sang a song of such grief and beauty that Mandos (the aforementioned god responsible for dealing with souls) was moved to pity for the first and only time and sent Beren back to Middle Earth.

Gandalf, despite being a demi-god one tier lower than Mandos and from the same cloth as Sauron, still required the explicit intervention of Illuvatar, who is Literally God in Middle Earth and created everything in it, to be resurrected.

So yeah, everything about this games story is a crock of shit and the writers should be fucking ashamed of their milquetoast mary sue bullshit.

My thanks go to you and others in this thread who have pointed this out. J.R.R. Tolkien took the time to lay down the rules pretty clearly, nothing in this game makes sense in light of his work.

The Tolkien Estate should be going apeshit about this. People criticise Peter Jackson's films but they didn't do anything close to this.

 

[Azazel]

/

 

[Zombra]

//

 

[DalekFlay]

\\\

 

[Mastermind]

http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/1/6881161/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-torture-terrorism

The concept of this game is shocking when you think about what's actually happening. As an ultra-powerful white dude, you use fear and extreme acts of violence to manipulate an enemy's behavior, destroy its militaristic structure, and ultimately gain control of it in the form of living bondage despite being outnumbered by the thousands. Really, chew on this: This is a video game about a spurned man terrorizing an entire foreign culture, literally killing, branding, torturing and enslaving hundreds of living beings. And really they're only tangentially connected to the man's real enemy: another ultra-powerful white dude.

I'm a casual Lord of the Rings fan, so this game is introducing me to an abundance of writing on the complexities of race and the exploitation of cultures within Tolkien's best-known works. That your hero's path to revenge is through an entirely different culture is loaded, something I'd love to see unpacked further by critics. And I'd like to see the developers address what your actions mean, and not in the trendy self-aware way, in which games about killing hundreds of people patronize you for enjoying video games about killing hundreds of people. No, if this is the sort of game a developer wants to make, I want them to justify it, to say why, and not have it be in the form of half-hearted finger-wagging about a gore-soaked genre that makes billions of dollars a year.

Consider me sold.

 

[taxalot]

#YesAllOrcs

 

[groke]

Not to mention that you're possessed by the ghost of an antediluvian Übermensch, clearly a reference to disgusting nordic ancestor-worship something something white supremacists.

 

[Angthoron]

That excerpt hurt my brain.

 

[Multiple Sarcasm]

ultra-powerful white dude

Is there any other kind?

 

[Talby]

Gondor calls for you to check your privilege.

 

[Turisas]

http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/1/6881161/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-torture-terrorism

You just can't win with these assholes.

 

[Angthoron]

Bought two copies now because I like when games accurately represent me.

 

[omega21]

Is The Verge a mainstream site? I can't imagine people actually read and believe that drivel.

I bet they could twist Minesweeper into something terribly awful, too. Throw in some crap about kids with their legs blown off and the review writes itself.

 

[DalekFlay]

I want you to think about just who might have been in all those enemy spaceships in Space Invaders. Don't you care about who you're killing? What is that war all about? Don't you feel uncomfortable about such slaughter?

 

[mediocrepoet]

I want you to think about just who might have been in all those enemy spaceships in Space Invaders. Don't you care about who you're killing? What is that war all about? Don't you feel uncomfortable about such slaughter?

Pac-Man is about a drugged out, ravenous cannibal!!

 

[Akratus]

You play minesweeper? You vicious, heartless bastard.

 

[sser]

Is The Verge a mainstream site? I can't imagine people actually read and believe that drivel.

I bet they could twist Minesweeper into something terribly awful, too. Throw in some crap about kids with their legs blown off and the review writes itself.

At first, you're just clicking. That's how it always begins with the game. Nobody walks into it knowing beforehand what to expect, just like nobody knowingly walks into an actual minefield. But a deeper look at Minesweeper shows us the dissonance between game developers and their supposed consumers. Minesweeper is based heavily on number-crunching, a skill which most inner-city kids are left without. The game was made by people with computers for people with computers -- and these biases are too much. While highly educated white men can play the game with the equivalent of an actual minesweeping tool, the underprivileged are left to click about, click click click, their footsteps carrying through the minefield at complete random, their demise certain. Every game ends with a frowning smiley, a sardonic, if not insulting finale inserted by the devs. A reminder that, like the magnetic nature of urban crime and drug use, failure is always a step away. But let it be known: when I had two squares left, and it was obvious which one was the mine, I took the mine. For solidarity, and to check my mine-checking privileges.


+ Pixel graphics take full advantage of computing power.

- Inherently abusive game mechanics.
- Too punishing for the uneducated.
- Winning made me feel dirty.

 

[sser]

Does Sauraman have an actual physical presence? The reviewer described him as "another white male" but I don't remember him ever being described. If these guys could put aside the social crap for once, there's actually an interesting topic to be had in this game, and it's how the insane amounts of violence clashes heavily with Tolkein's writing...

 

[Drakron]

Yes, as Annatar thats how he managed to trick Celebrimbor into crafting the Rings of Power.
Also he shows up as THE OVERLORD as well because ... you know.

Anyway Sauron was a Maia and you cannot get more white dude that a angel.

 

[Azazel]

Does Sauraman have an actual physical presence? The reviewer described him as "another white male" but I don't remember him ever being described. If these guys could put aside the social crap for once, there's actually an interesting topic to be had in this game, and it's how the insane amounts of violence clashes heavily with Tolkein's writing...

I wouldn't necessarily say that. I mean, the Children of Hurin in it's extended and Silmarillion form is pretty dark and the Silmarillion as a whole was classic norse mythology ultra-violence.

Now I secretly wish somebody would do a Witcher 2 style game in Turins storyline, that would be an amazing setting and total mindfuck of a plot for anyone who hadn't read the story before.

Yes, as Annatar thats how he managed to trick Celebrimbor into crafting the Rings of Power.
Also he shows up as THE OVERLORD as well because ... you know.

Anyway Sauron was a Maia and you cannot get more white dude that a angel.

Oh man, do they actually name him as Annatar in the game? I know fo' sho' that he's never referenced by that name anywhere in LOTR or the appendices, that alone would get them sued.

 

[Azazel]

/

 

[Echo Mirage]

Why don't they own the rights to Annatar?

I know he is listed as Annatar in the Unfinished Tales in the index along with Artano and Aulendil.

Or does the extended works outside of the main body of work fall under the rights of Christopher Tolkien?