Shadow of Mordor Dev Bit Off More Than It Could Chew

Design director says Monolith was too ambitious at the start of development.

Monolith's overly ambitious original version of the game, cost the studio major cuts to the game.

"During pre-production, we didn't have good metrics on our production capacity," he said. "This led to the specification of the game being over-ambitious, which, as we started to get a clearer picture of reality, required us to make some pretty big and painful cuts."

"This created a double dip of pain," he added. "Firstly, there was the lost work on the features that were cut. Secondly, we created quite significant amounts of new work to replace the cut features or content including some large wilderness areas and epic creatures such as the Great Beast."

Also de Plater talked about Shadow of Mordor's Nemesis System. He said this system originated as a "fairly simple idea" of amassing a network of personal villains, but over time, it experienced "feature creep" that made it much more complex.

"For example, at one point we had multiple Uruk Factions with separate bars for Morale and Discipline," he said. "Each Captain influenced these Bars and their state determined the behavior of the Orcs in combat as well as emergent missions. At this point, their Hierarchy UI looked somewhat like a Christmas tree."

After many playtesting and refinements, Monolith sculpted the Nemesis System back to a version that was closer to the original intent.

"This was an improvement and evolution over the original vision which was closer to Sam and Frodo's experience in Cirith Ungol, where interrogation did not have any magical properties and you were turning your enemies against each other," de Plater said. "The final game is closer to the idea of the power of the One Ring where you are directly controlling your Enemies."

Shadow of Mordor launched for consoles and PC in September 2014.