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It started, fittingly, with the nemesis system, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor's most interesting design feature, which, perhaps for the first time, brought emergent storytelling to the forefront of a mainstream blockbuster video game. "We were just a tiny skunk-works team to begin with," explains Michael de Plater, design director at Monolith, who joined the studio in December 2010 around the same time the first prototype emerged. "Because we were small we knew that we had to take a systems based approach to the design; we were just not going to be able to compete with other open-world games in terms of scale."Lord of the Rings is, of course, renowned for its scale. The three novels total almost half a million words, while even the comparatively terse original versions of Peter Jackson's cinematic trilogy plod to a conclusion after no fewer than nine and a half hours. Monolith's challenge was sizeable, even if its team and budget were not: how to create a game based on an expansive myth with a scarcity of resources. "If I had known at the time how hard the development was going to be, I would have predicted almost certain failure," says de Plater. "There were too many hurdles, too many unknowns, too many things we were learning for the first time. But we knew one thing for certain: Don't do a movie game. That never works."
Today, the nemesis system seems like a logical, almost obvious solution to the problem. It divides Sauron's army, who are camped outside Mordor (where the game principally takes place) into ranks of power and seniority. There are officers, generals and grunts and the game reveals the composition of these ranks, allowing you, in the role of Talion, to target specific enemies and create your own dynamic story. As you skulk around Mordor, causing chaos from the shadows, so you disrupt this social ladder. A murder makes room for a promotion, which, in turn, may create a power struggle.
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