14 DAY TRIAL // Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor wasn't intentionally designed to copy the Assassin's Creed games from Ubisoft, according to design director Michael de Plater, who clarified that his team at Monolith didn't set out to recreate the action adventure experience.
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is the next big game set in the Lord of the Rings universe, and yesterday it finally received its first full-fledged gameplay video, showing off all sorts of impressive moments from the new open world action adventure title.
However, almost immediately, one of the developers of Assassin's Creed 2 mentioned that Shadow of Mordor was using the same animation system and mechanics employed by him when he worked at Ubisoft.
Eurogamer has now published an interview it did with Shadow of Mordor designer Michael de Plater, conducted several days ago, in which this topic, the resemblance to Assassin's Creed, was discussed.
According to de Plater, the team at Monolith didn't "consciously go for" copying Assassin's Creed.
"We didn't think much about them at all. We just wanted to do a third-person, open-world action adventure. And then now, just by the time you have stealth and melee combat and you're hunting guys behind enemy lines, the comparisons maybe come out at that point. It definitely wasn't something we were consciously going for."
One sequence from the trailer and one core mechanic from the game will be for players to infiltrate a city or location and then kill several low-ranking enemies until reaching a bigger foe that needs to be assassinated.
As you can imagine, this is one of the core pillars of the Assassin's Creed franchise, but de Plater mentions that it's not exclusive to that series.
"Clearly assassinating highly ranked enemies is a key part [of Shadow of Mordor]," he said. "And lots of games have that as well. It's not just Assassin's Creed. Lots of games have you hunt guys down from hierarchies of enemies."
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is set to debut this year on PC, PS3, Xbox 360, PS4, and Xbox One.