Hey, I bit the bullet and pre-ordered M-E:SoM (that is a terrible acronym), mainly because Greenmangaming was offering a 25% discount off pre-orders, so I've been playing it a bunch. I figured folks who were on the fence about purchasing it, or just curious about how it plays, might have questions, or just want someplace to discuss it. I've played it about 5 hours now, and I'm enjoying it, so there's that.
I have no idea what the game even is. It is 35GB + 9 more if you want the high resolution textures. Crazy. I read about some people actually able to use 6GB of VRAM, and the game breaks the mold by being one of the first made that is not a console port, and by having system requirements that are more than my ancient system can handle. Even if it is a remade version of Pong I would still have to congratulate them for that.
I bought it myself yesterday, but at that filesize I probably won't be able to play until like a week from now. Mainly have one question, does it seem to be the type of game that you'll unlock every skill upgrade by the end of the game?
Unlocking skills isn't strictly linear; there's a skill tree, and tiers are unlocked by accumulating points doing what are essentially side missions (the spontaneous events). So you unlock at your own pace. There are spontaneously generated events (typically orc captain in-fighting, or an orc feast or something), which you can choose to ignore, or disrupt - and if you ignore them, the orc captains involved will eventually succeed and level up. Anyway, disrupting orc events is the only way to accumulate 'Power' points. Those particular points are used to unlock successive Tiers on the combat skill tree. So you can advance down that tree, or not, depending on your enthusiasm for crashing orc parties. You will definitely want to unlock the later tiers, because some very important abilities are down there. I'm about 1/4 of the way through the plot, but I've been spending a lot of time crushing spontaneously generated events, because combat was becoming difficult without some of the later tier abilities. Speaking of spontaneous generation, the Nemesis system is amazing. Literally any random cannon fodder orc who gets a lucky stab and kills me could conceivably rise through the ranks to become one of the five fearsome Warchiefs, every one with their own generated traits, advantages, weaknesses, and a choir in the background chanting their name when you have a showdown. What's more, they have memories - they'll taunt you if they killed you last time, they get increasingly more ragged and bandaged with each successive appearance if they're the sort to run away, they'll remark if you burned them with fire, and all those reactions are fully voice acted. In the Clockwork Empires subforums, we got to discussing emergent gameplay and memorable characters, and Shadow of Mordor is a great example. The protagonist is pretty 2-dimensional, but I felt compelled to take my revenge on some of these procedurally generated orcs who had managed to elude me (or kill me) repeatedly. They all have so much personality.
Heard a lot of really positive things about this game. Wasn't expecting that! May have to grab it at some point.
I am about to buy a new pc, so I cannot play it yet (and didn't get it obviously), but I heard a lot of good stuff from one of my colleagues, so I'll probably get it at some point.
Well after 2 nights of downloading it I'm at 6gb/34gb, so this is going to be a while I wonder why they didn't compress anything, since the system requirements say 35gb on the disk as well.
Maybe it's the audio files? I know Titanfall's install footprint was 48 gigs (!) because none of the audio was compressed. Every single orc name (and there must be hundreds) gets an announcer voice, a choir chanting his name, and a wraith narration voice, plus snappy patter for dozens of contingencies, and all of that in multiple languages.
As I have explained before, I do not pirate games. But my main resource for hearing when a new game comes out is the Pirate Bay. I read and participate in the comments to help out with technical problems and learn what I can. But I do recall that another game I do not yet own, "Wolfenstein The New Order" was a 50GB game too, so this is not entirely new ground. From what I read in the comments, to use the games "high" quality textures you need a GPU with 3GB of VRAM, and that is before even installing the 9GB "ultra" HD texture pack. So looking at the minimum system requirements, I would guess the "low" quality textures are 1GB, "medium" is 2GB, and then "high" at 3GB and "ultra" at 4GB equals 10GB just in textures alone. It is not hard to tell how it gets so huge.
Daynab's not complaining about the final install size, though. He's amazed (and so am I) that the installation package is 35 gigs (which is the same size as the final installed footprint). i.e. it's not compressed at all for digital delivery.
It does look like you can and eventually will max out all abilities. I have been watching the Let's Play series of it, and the guy playing has already exceeded 26 hours, and currently 105 parts. (I would not be the least bit surprised if even more is added later. This is a pretty good LP.)
Yeah, after completing the main storyline, the game remains open-worldy, so you can certainly take your time and unlock everything afterward. By the time I'd completed the main story, including time spent messing around with the Uruk rites of succession and military hierarchy (~30 hours), I'd unlocked 90% of the available skills.
I enjoyed the game quite a lot; combat is unremarkable, but very good (the two most common comparisons are the Arkham games and the Assassin's Creed games). Everything works - framerate is steady, load times aren't intrusive, textures are good - the whole thing is technically solid. On top of that the Nemesis system really shines. At key moments, an orc captain will spontaneously appear, and you will recognize him, and you will remember him, and this is amazing in a game that is literally about nothing but killing orcs.
I have had my eye on this one for awhile...glad to see that the Nemesis system worked as I hoped it would!! ...Civilization: Beyond Earth, Galactic Civilizations III, other games already coming out, and now this....*sigh* too many games, not enough money.
I finally finished watching that LP of it. And I have to wonder why the hell they Spoiler: Do not ruin it for yourself if you have not seen the ending would want a new Ring of Power after knowing what the last one did. It feels like they are preparing to make more of the content for it by those last eight words spoken at the end. Spoiler: Again, do not ruin it for yourself. The time has come for a new Ring. *Edit* I messed up the spoilers at first, so sorry if anyone Ninja'ed in and saw it before the edit.
Yeah, I was a bit puzzled by the same thing. General consensus seems to be that it can't possibly refer to anything in established lore (i.e. the books), so speculation says it's some kind of hook for DLC or a sequel or something.
Finished it, I really enjoyed it. Ending was very much "oh btw, there will be a sequel if we can make one" which is both cool cause I'd play more of it, but also weird when you get into the timeline side of things (the ending seems to really get close to the start of the Fellowship timeline.)
We can infer, approximately, where it falls in the LotR timeline from some clues: 1) Gollum mentions the One Ring and Baggins, so this is definitely after The Hobbit. We don't know if he's been captured and tortured for information yet. 2) We know Orodruin (Mount Doom) erupted at Sauron's defeat in the War of the Last Alliance, and has been quiet for the entire age since, but begins smoking again quite early in the Lord of the Rings. Shadow of Mordor implies Mount Doom is either about to reawaken, or has quite recently done so.
I had a lot of fun with this - but I wish it had an actual difficulty selection. Towards the end I never bothered with actually using the weaknesses and so on - I'd just run up and murder everything. Same problem with the AC games, you could usually solve any problem with enough violence - except for when you'll simply fail if you get detected. Feels forced and artifical. Arkham did it a lot better, in my opnion - the gun thugs are actually dangerous if you get spotted, and the combat is more varied and challenging.
