User blog:The.Outsider/Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Hello everyone!

This blog is being created by me as a basic introduction to who I am & my relation to the LoTR books, movies & all other types of media that coincides with this. However, the true purpose of this blog is to discuss the upcoming video game "Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor".

I am not sure how active people are towards commenting on blogs on this wiki, so any comments will be truely appreciated.

A Little About Me
So, as a brief introduction before I move on to the main topic, my name is Michael. I am currently 14, approaching 15 in April. My relatively young age meant that as I was growing up, the LoTR movies integrated quite heavily into my childhood. I remember watching all of the 3 original films many times & I became an instant fan as soon as I saw Fellowship. Of course, I only saw them on DVD because I would have been about 4 by the time Return of The King came out.

Regretably, I have never read any of the books. However, I still have a basic understanding from reading about the books in detail & from watching the films, so I'm not a complete newbie. I do plan at some point to start reading them, but I'm completely out of money after buying a PS4. I'm not joking, I literally have just £10 left over - maybe I'll buy The Hobbit.

So, as you may have gathered, I am a gamer (hence the blog about a game); & as such, I took an immediate interest into this game after seeing an article about it. I will go into detail in a second.

The Game
So, if you haven't already heard about it, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is a game create by Monolith studios & published by Warner Brothers.

As you can guess from the title, the game is set entirely in Mordor, after the events of The Hobbit & before the events of the LoTR trilogy. Within the game you play as a ranger by the name of Talion, who was stationed on the Black Gate after the defeat of Sauron. As Sauron's forces begin to return, they attack & reclaim the gate. Everyone is killed, including the entirety of Talion's family. Talion however is spared death by an unknown Wraith, who merges with Talion & brings him back to life. Talion returns with the aim of destroying Sauron's armies, using the broken sword of his son as a dagger & a whole range of abilities granted to him by the Wraith.

My Thoughts
After hearing about the plot, any LoTR fan may be a little confused as to why & how a Wraith can merge with a human. The answer to that is I have no idea. Maybe it's got to do with the fact that I'm not a die-hard fan, but this doesn't bother me; in fact, I think that sounds pretty cool. I have read many other fan's prospective on this & they don't seem impressed. They see this as a complete disregard to the lore & an insult. I think that's an over reaction. For a start, we barely know anything about the plot or the world, so making conclusions that it disregards all aspects of the lore is just ignorant. And developers of games can't always be limited by previous lore otherwise the game could turn out very poor in quality. Besides, the game isn't canon, it merely takes everything already existing & adds its own twist in the world. This isn't going to alter any of the books or films; it's the books (or films?) that are going to alter it.

Now I'm done with that, I would like to talk a bit about the gameplay. So being a fan of games such as Assassin's Creed, Dishonored & the Batman Arkham series meant that this game grabbed my attention from the start. The gameplay is very reminiscent of these three games, containing the climbing of AC, the combat & stealth of the Arkham series, & the magic abilities of Dishonored. This for me is a winning combination. And top that off with the LoTR lore is the best combination I have ever seen. And I also don't think I have ever seen an open-world LoTR game before, so that makes it even better as they are my favourite type of games.



Conclusion
I am very interested to hear your thoughts, from teh prospective of both video game fans & LoTR fans. Please leave a comment below :)