Middle-Earth: Shadow of War symbolises everything wrong with this industry. Oh, it’s far from bad, in many respects it’s even spectacular. It offers an engaging story, great new mechanics for your armies, and even a refined system of battle mechanics and orders. By all rights this is a spectacular release, and yet all of that is buried beneath a constant push to grab more money from the player.
So I've intentionally waited before replying to this because I've heard a lot of conflicting opinions about it, both positive and negative.
ReplyDeleteOn the positive end, from what I've found you don't actually lose anything in the single player campaign if you don't defend against somebody else online, which definitely makes it better than MGSV's bad online.
On the negative end however, there's everything else. A lot of people said it's possible to do the entire game without the microtransactions, however while that is the case, you might as well say it's possible to travel from Canada down to Brazil without using any sort of vehicle. It's possible, but it'll take forever and there are things made to make that go a hell of a lot faster.
I don't usually have an issue with grinding in games honestly, probably because I grew up playing a lot of RPG's and JRPG's, but I definitely get that in the vast majority of cases there's no need for it. Personally I think that the best use of grinding is when it's entirely up to the player and isn't entirely random. A good example of this is The Surge where if you want to get all the gear you need to grind, but you also have guarantees about what you're going to get from each enemy.
Getting back to this game though, it's just frustrating that you can put a lot of grinding into something just to see it all come to nothing because the ork and stronghold you spent so long getting fell to a massive swarm that you couldn't adequately defend against, and then you have to do it all again.
Unfortunately that first point does depend upon how you play. I was almost tempted to cut it some slack, but one particular mode does effectively influence what you have on hand because of them. Worse still, even if you do actively ignore them, I'm actually noting a lot of flaws atop of the grinding and how much they hide behind a paywall. For one thing, orcs tend to die much faster than in Shadow of Mordor. Before the review was up, I had multiple orcs abruptly die at the start of a battle, either bleeding out or just suddenly falling dead to mysteriously anonymous attacks. These were often the high level ones though, particularly Legendary ones, which makes me seriously think that the game might be programmed to kill off certain orcs in order to push the micro-transactions.
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