Saturday Morning Gaming: The Nemesis System

I’ve been replaying Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War (quite regularly on sale!) and I am, once again, taken with the Nemesis System they have.

If you’ve never played, the nemesis system works like this:
You play a wraith. A cursed captain from the Black Gate. Any death you experience is only temporary… whenever you die, you come back.
There are thousands of Orcs. You fight them all the time. They tend to attack in groups.
You die. A lot.
When an orc kills you, he gets a name, a backstory, and some special powers.

So you will regularly find yourself in the middle of a dozen orcs who all pile on you and you can’t get away and, wouldn’t you know it, you catch a spear in the chest and the spear-thrower stands over you laughing. Then you watch him get a promotion and now he is your Nemesis.

The first time I played through the games, there was a particular nemesis I was given that killed me multiple times. He showed up while I was fighting other orcs. A couple of times, I found myself in a battle that I was pretty sure I’d win and, whammo, he’d show up and ruin everything. I would specifically say “I’m going to hunt him down” and something would go wrong. He’d manage to run away, maybe. A caragor would show up in the middle of the fight and I’d have to deal with it *AND* the guy’s bodyguards and, suddenly, he’d succeed at running away or killing me *AGAIN*.

I got so frustrated that I eventually said “no more of this, he is now my main goal” and I ignored all sidequests and collectibles and other captains. He became my main priority and, when I finally beat him, I put the controller down and ran upstairs to tell Maribou about it. She smiled and nodded and was happy that I had a fun gaming experience and I ran back downstairs to get back to the rest of the game.

The game had an emergent part of it that became more fun than the stuff that the developers deliberately wrote to be in there.

And since those games came out? No game has used the nemesis system.

I mean, part of that might make sense… one of the reasons it worked in the Shadow games was that the orcs killed you. The Batman games had similar dynamics but the plot of the story would stop working entirely if a low level mook succeeded at taking Batman down. The game pretty much has to come out and say “that didn’t happen” and send you back to a checkpoint.

You pretty much need a game where your opponents either have no reason to kill you after they defeat you *OR* you have to be a character who is only slowed down (but not stopped) by death.

So you can’t do superheroes, I don’t think, unless you’re one of those superheroes that can regenerate and come back. Maybe Wolverine could pull it off.

Perhaps you could have something like a “World of Kung Fu!” where the point is just to win any given interaction and then, once your enemy has established that his Kung Fu is the best, he wanders down the road.

Or something where you are remote piloting a human mech and when your mech gets beaten, you just get a new one. (You’d have to figure out how to make this mechanically sustainable, though).

I’m mostly just shocked that this is one of the best and most fun things that a game has done in the last decade and it’s the only game that has used it. Ah, well. Back to it.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is Grom the Rogue. Screenshot taken by the author.)