Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
With a few shooters under my belt I was ready to try another style of game. After talking with the people at Monolith Productions I accepted an offer for a Senior Designer role and began working on Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor.
One of the first tasks I took on was learning their tools and starting to make small prefabs that could be used in the world. After some time I started to play with their quest system and see what types of game play would work with the emerging character of Talion and his abilities. Once Talion’s game play started to solidify I shifted from the prefab work to more quest related jobs.
Working with engineer Dan Valerius and Lead Designer Steve Rhoades we got the story line quest backbone up and running. Improving and maintaining the system through out the production. We assisted other departments in getting their predicates for missions set up and made sure that the design team was able to use the system to its highest abilities.
Along with the quest backbone I was also responsible for three main character missions, Gollum. These were the missions that introduced many beasts of the world, combat elements for Talion’s growth, and story line information for Celebrimbor.
The main missions of Mordor had an interesting dilemma, we wanted to craft a narrative to pull the player through but we also wanted to make sure to not to ignore the Nemesis feature. Ultimately, we pulled back on a few of the elements for Nemesis in these missions in order to sustain a strong narrative but learned many lessons that would allow the team to accomplish a cleaner integration in Middle Earth: Shadow of War.
The first Gollum mission of the game, An Interested Party, is early in the game. We looked to make this mission teach some of the basics of stealth, stalking, and investigation. We leaned on the special vision mode to get the player comfortable with switching between worlds and gathering information before entering a situation. Our glowing footprints gave the player a path through an area infested with the Uruks where the player could choose to engage or avoid. Then we led the player in to a dead end where we could allow for story beats before surprising them with a new natural predator of the wilderness, the Caragor. Using the bow and a short tutorial the player has a chance to learn an effective method for dealing with them. Shortly after we introduce a new Uruk type, the medium ranged Hunter, who is an AI that counters overuse of the bow. The final twist of the mission is bringing the two new AI together in combat to display their traits and interactions before revealing that the player was following Gollum.
The next time the player encounters Gollum, Shattered Memories, we kept Gollum in the world and along for the ride. I learned a lot from this mission where we mixed stealth, a main character that couldn’t be allowed to die, open world AI systems. Between getting Gollum to move and hide as needed and keeping enough control over the AI to allow for player unpredictability produced a few bugs that were interesting to work on. For this mission Gollum is leading Talion to another relic that he has found but is wary about searching for on his own. We tried a green light, red light design where Uruks were all around and if the player chose to follow a path that we made tense. In such an open world game you never want to fully lock down the player so the mission was made to also allow a player to go full combat without issue if that was their style. Once half way through we used the footprints to lower the tempo and raise the fear tension before arriving at the reveal for the next artifact reveal. With the story expanded we went with another surprise introduction of a natural beast of the world, Ghuls, and another new power Wraith Flash. This event was built in a way to show off the strength of the chaotic rush Ghul and the area control Wraith Flash by pushing the amount of AI to the limit and making the player feel that they may not survive the fight. The mix of strong tension and escaping death was meant to help cement the way to use Wraith Flash.
The final mission for Gollum in Udun, The One Truth, reveals who Talion’s wraith is and a final member of the natural ecosystem. With a strong style for the missions so far we wanted to mix it up and we introduce the largest of the natural beasts of the world, the Graug, right away in the mission. Using stealth and world interactions to get past this beast we had the player move through a cave system where little was going in to lull a sense of security until they found the next artifact. With the revelation of Celebrimbor we return the Graug back to its lair and provide the player with a different path to use for their escape with the Shadow Strike. As the world falls down around them, an angry Graug on their heels, and teams of fleeing Ghuls fleeing we looked to make this mission as close to a high octane car chase as we could with the parts.