14 DAY TRIAL // Monolith Productions, the developer of the recent Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor action-adventure experience, believes that the huge success reached by the title is because it allowed players to forge their own stories through the Nemesis system.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor wasn't met with a huge amount of excitement as previous games based on the popular "Lord of the Rings" book and movie series didn't exactly deliver the best of experiences.
Even so, when the game got released back in October of last year, it quickly went on to gain a lot of fans thanks to the innovative Nemesis system that allowed the Urok captains scattered across its world to gain new abilities and more details after managing to kill the player.
Allowing players to forge their own stories was a major advantage
Now, at the DICE Summit, Monolith Creative Director Michael de Plater, who oversaw Shadow of Mordor, shares some details about the game's success, via GamesIndustry.
According to him, players always want to create their own stories in games, instead of limiting themselves to the actual plot crafted by the developer. As such, with the Nemesis system, Monolith actually empowered players to achieve this.
"Players are no different from us, they also love telling and creating and sharing stories, it's just such a fundamental innate human need," he says. "But it was more important for us to worry about empowering their ability to tell stories than it was for us to worry about telling them our wonderful stories. This was really the secret sauce of how the Nemesis system worked."
The Nemesis system, which brought foes to life, combined with imaginative players that may or may not be "Lords of the Rings" fans, and methods through which they could be shared, like YouTube or Twitch, generated Shadow of Mordor's success.
The game has since received different add-ons and more are on the way, so it's bound to generate even more profit for Monolith and Warner Bros.
