Saturday Morning Gaming: Returning to Mordor
Back when Shadow of War came out, I called it “highway robbery” that they sold the game for $60 PLUS you got the DLC with all of the bells and whistles for an additional $40. $100! Highway robbery! Well, after a few weeks, the base game went down to $40 so I got it. (The DLC was still an additional $40 and I refused to pay that.)
It was worth the $40, though. I beat it, start to finish, and then I put it down and said “JEEZ! NOW I NEVER HAVE TO PLAY THAT GAME AGAIN!” and sold it to the local Entertainmart for 8 bucks worth of store credit.
Well, it’s two years later and I found myself beating the Batman games all over again and I beat Shadow of Mordor all over again…and then I said “Dang. I wish I still had Shadow of War.” So we looked online and saw that the “Definitive Edition” is being sold by Amazon for $12. Holy cow. That can’t be right. (That’s one of the things that Maribou said to me as we were looking it up on Amazon. “Is that right?” we checked and double-checked and, yep, it’s right.) So I got it. Seriously, it has dozens of hours of gameplay in there and if you’ve got muscle memory from playing the Batman games, you’ll be able to pick this thing up and start playing it without having to learn a thing.
(Well, you’ll initially be frustrated because all of the awesome stuff you mastered in the Batman games involved using skills that your character in Shadow of War just doesn’t have yet. So you’ll have to go up a couple of levels if you want to do an instant take-down in the middle of a fight, for example. But you’ll have parry and dodge and jump mastered.)
One of the things I had forgotten being very frustrated with was the online store. Now, lemme just say that this is one of the few games that did the online store thing as close to ethically as could be done. You never NEEDED to spend money in the store to beat the game. It just made it a bit easier. It provided a shortcut. If you were inclined to pour hours into the game, you could accomplish the exact same thing as spending $5 here or there would do. You earned the currency, slowly, that you could then spend in the online store. It just took longer.
This had the side effect of making the game feel like it was weighted to make you want to take the shortcut.
Well, they fixed that. I booted up the game and the first thing the game told me was that the online store had closed and they spent all of my (EARNED!) pent-up currency on my behalf. The store is gone! Never to return! Hurray!
So if you looked at this game and turned away with disgust when you saw that it cost $100 for the full thing AND they had microtransactions? Well, now it’s $12 and they got rid of the microtransactions.
And playing the game now feels like a revelation. Holy cow! It’s fun! And they’re not trying to squeeze money out of me!
As for the review of the game, I really can’t add on to what I said here. It’s an amazingly awesome game that doesn’t really understand its source material. It gives you awesome powers, awesome violence, and gigantic battles where you pit Orcs against Orcs and slaughter them by the bushel. And then, at the end of the game, it tells you “You can’t use evil to defeat evil, you know.” Which, technically, is the right message to give at the end but “the medium is the message” and the medium was pretty much violence, war, and slow-motion danses macabres.
But if you can get past the thematic incoherence, MY GOSH THIS GAME IS AWESOME. And it’s only $12 now.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is “Bargains” by thisisedinburgh. Used under creative commons license.)
I do recall an article talking about how it was kiiiiiiinda fucked up that you pretty much puppet-master some slave and make him into your slave that you then use to violently murder hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of his fellow slaves. The article was presented by someone mocking it, like, “lol this tragically woke bro is so upset about a vidjagame” but dude kinda had a point?Report
Yes, thematically it’s a mess. “I’m treating Orcs really poorly!” is something that I’ve thought at least once.
I keep in mind that I’m kind of a spirit of vengeance who, without getting into spoilers, kinda gets his just deserts.Report
I might have to go back to it. I never put in the time for the original; it came out the same year as Destiny, and I hit that pretty hard. When I did play shadow, I would have a small mob I was fighting that would then drift into another hero and I’d get owned. I should have stuck it out. But I still have to put more time into RDR2.Report
Do you want a game with depth and demands strategy? Play NetHack.
NetHack was still version 3.4.3 when I stopped playing around 2010. In 2017 version 3.6.0 came out. Since then the version’s creeped up to 3.6.6 and 3.7.0 is right around the corner and not in the G.R.R.M. sense of “Winds of Winter when?”
But in those stagnant thirteen years of 3.4.3 there was a lively modding community for NetHack. Sure there’s nothing wrong with vanilla NetHack, even if the graphics are mere ASCII, but one can do with gameplay tweaks like auto-opening doors, highlighting bits of inventory, one’s status and HP, in addition to adding new items and monsters. During my last two years in Colorado I wrote a couple of patches and there are some patches I can not do without while playing this venerable game.
Best of all, NetHack is free. You don’t have to play with other people. You can’t play with other people. Sure, it can be streamed on Twitch but why bother?
NetHack is turn-based. No need to pause when you can simply stop gaming, use the bathroom, go eat, spend time with your living partner, visit Costco, and when you return you’ll see nothing’s changed unless the cat jumped on the keyboard.
And one can download tiles for NetHack if one needs purty graphics. You haven’t lived ’til you’ve attached your computer to your big flat screen TV with a HDMI cable to play NetHack.
For what it’s worth, my home-rolled NetHack utilizes my platypus patch (adds the platypus, giant platypus, dire platypus, and octopus in addition to the correct pluralization of those animal words), Snakesin (artifact robe for monks, not my patch). My priest patch where any race can be a priest, and monks are given special greetings by shopkeepers much like valkyries, knights, and samurai are greeted. Also my pikachu patch which adds pichu, pikachu, and raichu to the game and pichu can be a starting pet for the tourist class. At the moment I’m trying to figure out how to patch in a jalapeno (confers intrinsic fire resistance, vegan) and a mushroom (confers intrinsic telepathy or causes hallucination, vegan).
NetHack is difficult. I’ve only ascended once since I started playing back in ’03 or ’04. I’ve begun playing it again in hopes of distracting myself from the current news cycle of panic.Report
Playing Path of Exile… they released a new league at the beginning of lock-down, March 13… so I’m on my third character.
It’s really and truly free to play… micro transactions are 100% cosmetic (plus a couple QOL items for organizing your stash).
Over the past 10 years or so, they’ve softened a bit on the whole Diablo II or death motif. Its a lot more fun to play… if you like ARPG Diablo type games.Report
I pretty much never buy new PC games anymore. In the long run, pretty much everything will eventually be available for $20 or less. Back in the days before digital distribution, this was a risky strategy, because they might stop making it, and if it was a cult classic you might end up paying two or more times the launch price for a used copy.
Nowadays, though, you can’t lose. I have a functionally limitless list of old games I want to play, so I don’t even mind waiting.Report