Amazon's Prime Gaming is currently offering three games from The Lord of the Rings universe. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor GOTY Edition leads the line-up, with its sequel Middle-earth: Shadow of War also up for grabs.

While that sounds great on paper, Middle-earth: Shadow of War is only available to play via Amazon Luna. For those unfamiliar with Luna, it is Amazon’s cloud gaming platform. Shadow of Mordor is a great game and with Luna free for Prime members, it is a good deal regardless. However, it is a bummer for Prime members in countries where Amazon Luna is not available.

The silver lining is that its prequel, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is free for PC, meaning players can claim and download it without any requirement of Amazon Luna. However, there’s a catch for some regions attached to Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor as well. Prime Gaming stated in their blog that Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor will not be available to clai??m in Japan and South Korea, but the reason was not stated.

LEGO The Lord of the Rings is also free to claim right now, with no region-specific restriction here. Both Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and the LEGO title are available via GOG.

Prime Gaming announced that these games have been offered to celebrate the upcoming season 2 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.? The series is exclusively available on Amazon Prime Video, and season 2 is dropping tomorrow, August 29.

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As previously announced and just as Tolkien intended

Maybe it's just the Tolkien reader in me, but there's something even more insidious about shoving exploitative schemes into a project based on a Tolkien license. I never once even clicked on the microtransaction menu in Middle-earth: Shadow of War, but the fact that it was there in a single-player game just felt wrong. Well, now they're gone. A lot of us won't forget that they were added in the first place, but we don't have to deal with them anymore after the frontloaded cash was made.

As part of its Desolation of Mordor update this week the ability to purchase gold (read: microtransactions) is gone, though WB is leaving a rather large window open for players who previously had some to use in the market -- you have until July 17 to do that. So if your're currently backpacking across Europe ??and have a horde of gold to use, you have over two months to get home. If you miss the cutoff, you'll get Gold Loot Chests for every 150 gold you have -- holding less than 150 will net you one chest.

There's no doubt it was a result of fan feedback, and possibly the Tolkien estate, but WB's backing down on loot boxes is in stark contrast to EA's doubling down on them. Now that's not to say that WB has "learned i??ts lesson," per se, but this is one case where they, slowly and eventually, decided to take out a money-making arm right as a major DLC was dropping.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War [WB]

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Greater than Mordor?

The phrase Mordor is so intrinsically linked to my experience of the "Middle-earth" action series that I simply can't escape it from my mind. I've typed "Shadow of Mordor" so many times it hurts, despite the fact that the sequel is indeed called Middle-earth: Shadow of War.

After actually getting my hands on it though the confusion seems to be warranted, as Shadow of War really isn't all that different from Mordor.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War (PC, PS4 [reviewed], Xbox One)
Developer: Monolith Productions
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Released: October 10, 2017
MSRP: $59.99

A lot of the same issues from Shadow of Wardor Mordor still creep up.?? The story is simply too far-reaching and truncated, even wi??th the fantasy licensed world to draw from. Why Talion, one of the most bland characters in the neo-Tolkien universe needed to return, I don't know, and I've heard the phrases "Palantír," "Bright Lord," and "dominate" to last me two lifetimes.

A lot of the tension is lost given that we know some events are taking place between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, even with artistic liberties. By the end it gets truly nonsensical, with rings upon rings and comical retcons. I don't believe in holding any and every adaptation (even the clear popcorn works) to a golden Tolkien literary standard -- please, by all means, get weird every so often -- but Shadow of War is o??ver-the-top in a w??ay that feels wasted and hokey.

Once again though Monolith nails movement and combat, the things you spend most of your time doing. Although the Assassin's Creed series has moved on from the same "hold the run button to parkour and press a button to counter" Middle-earth still clings to it, proving it was never a b??ad system to begin with. If you want to go somewhere you just point to it and run, and the whole assassin?/Batman counter mechanic still makes you feel like a badass in a group scrap.

Traversal is even better thanks to the injection of more magical powers, and the conundrum of "how do I kill this guy?" has been greatly expanded in recent years, augmented by the Nemesis system. A mechanic, mind, which is getting there, and far more fleshed-out than the original beta Mordor rendition even if it still feels gamey as hell. More personality drawn out of the denizens of Middle-earth is the chief reason for this, but then you have...sultry humanoid Shelob capping off an encounter in a subsequent cutscene. It's just weird, and rather than shoehorn in existing players (Gollum was really the only natural fit??), I wish the powers that be were able to craft more original creations. One of the chief sins, without spoiling anything, is trying to cram multiple existing characters from the lore into the Nazgul (only two were named in the source material, the Witch King and Khamûl).

A lot of that melts away when you're knee-deep in what feels like a miniature war, fending off archers with a tempered focus-fire mechanic and leaping ov??er formidable mini-bosses while you pop the heads off grunts to heal. Although it's still gamified I do appreciate the ability to gain knowledge about enemy NPCs and slowly build a case against them, and it fits nicely in this more sprawling open world -- the idea of whittling down enemy forces while growing your own army to sack fortresses is fun in fleeting bursts.

There are a few growing pains as Shadow of War attempted to make everything bigger. Gear is needlessly convoluted, with rare and unique item levels and gem sockets. Earning skills and gradually increasing your power has been done to death bu??t it's once again natural here -- it's when you start to force players to delineate between all 20 swords they have equipped that you start to lose momentum. No, I don't want to stop in the middle of a ?bloodbath to manually pick up items with R1/RB then carefully weigh their stats. This doesn't feel like that kind of game, but the abundance of items is so intrinsically linked to the loot crates that spew out rewards. Oh yeah, those exist in a single-player game in 2017.

Wait what? Yeah, there's some microtransaction scheme directly linked to Shadow of War. Why are there even loot boxes in an open-world game? I mean, even Ubisoft's "you have to open these sandbox chests with an ??app" gimmick felt less in??trusive. XP boosts? For a single-player action joint? I really want to be a fly on the wall of the next executive board meeting that decides to inject loot crates into a single-player experience.

But it's not the end of the world if you have the will to ignore them. Luckily Shadow of War makes little to no effort to lead you into the "shop" screen (I still remember how bad Dragon Age: Origin's "want to buy some DLC my lord?" NPC was), and I was never weak enough where I felt the need to essentially buy cheat codes. If you open a cra??te you earn naturally it leads you to the shop, but I quickly cl??osed it out after looting my plunder and only saw the menu a few times during my entire playthrough. But the fact remains -- they're pointless and simply have no business being in there.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War has a lot of fluff t??hat attempts to sabotage it, but it succeeds in its effort to make its hollow and silly world worth roaming around and killing things in. Although I wasn't enthralled by the a??bsurd story beats that try to dance around telling an actual epic and somber tale, the ability to create my own stories with an expanded level of depth was more than sufficient to call this a step up.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game prov??ided by the publisher.]}

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Falls afoul of a drunken Orc

There is a new episode of Conan O'Brien's Clueless Gamer series, where the chat-show host, comedian and former Simpsons writer tackles an upcoming title for a little bit of PR, to som?ewhat amusing effect.

The new episode has Conan try his hand at Middle-earth: Shadow of War, alongside actor/comedian Kumail Nanjiani, who also features in the open-wor?ld sequel. Conan gets into a few battles, with varied success, which is kind of reflective of the comedy in these skits.

We also ge??t to hear Nanjiani's "Orc voice" in action which, unsurprisingly, earns him some ridicule from Conan which Kumail then neatly transfers to the game's Creative Director, Michael de P??later.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War l??aunches next week, October 10 on PC, PS4 and Xbox ??One.

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Impressions from PAX!

Maybe the strongest praise for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor necessitates pointing out its most glaring flaw. The game was a darling, managing to please fans and earn critical acclaim. All of that in?? spite of the fact that the final b?oss encounter with Sauron suuuuucccccckkkkked.

The climax, the moment the whole game had been working toward, was incredibly anticlimactic. The battle was a quick-time event sequence (and a short one, at that). None of Shadow of Mordor's systems were implemented in any way. No sign of the lauded Nemesis system, no Arkham-like combat, no Assassin's Creed-like climbing around. Instead, Mordor's biggest threat was dismissed with just a few butto?n presses.

It was such a ridiculous letdown that it cou??ld really only be chalked up to the realities and constraints of video game development. Anyone who played that whole game had to know that wasn't the end that Monolith envisioned. The studio must've run out of time or money or both.

Monolith assures us this won't be a problem in the upcoming Middle-earth: Shadow of War. We sat down ??with design director Bob Roberts during a hands-on demo at PAX West, and he expresses a similar defeated attitude ?when talking about the predecessor's ending. He makes a point of mentioning that the developer doesn't go down that same route again. "I think people will be really happy with this ending," he says. "Well, maybe they'll hate it for being too epic."

There's something inherently funny about fans of high fantasy being put off by "too epic," and, let's be honest, it's probably not going to happen. There's evidence that everything will skew toward more grand this time, just like we suspected upon reveal. With an hour to prep for and launch a fortress attack, we saw the ways that Shadow of War's expanded sandbox heaps variable after variable into the equation?.

One of the more notable moments came when we attempted to simply assassinate a warchief's bodyguard. Upo?n arriving in his area, we found an elemental Graug. Roberts perked up. Apparently this was quite rare. On one hand, he got to see the sandbox play out differently than the countless other demos he had hosted throughout the months. On the other, he expressed slight disappointment that the ??Graug's appearance would make this section entirely too easy in a way that's not necessarily representative of the game.

He was right. I killed that bodyguard and anothe?r captain entire??ly by accident. The fire-breathing Graug just kinda kicked everyone's ass.

Shadow of War is a tough game to play competently in a preview setting. There are so many skills, so many approaches, and so many external factors. Without the benefit of knowing y??our character and knowing the environment, you kind of just bumble around until you're successful. It's never really indicative of how ??encounters will play out for someone who has the benefit of learning as they play the full game. It's more about gauging whether it seems like all these things can complement each other in a way that makes for a balanced game.

That's probably the most important obstacle for Shadow of War to overcome: That it doesn't let bulk become bloat. That it doesn't aspire to be bigger at the expense of being focused. It's impossible to know now where that balance will end up. Just know that Monolith is aiming for "epic" and that's fro?m beginning all the way through to the end.

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Forthog rides again

[UPDATE: Readers with eyes far better than mine have directed me to the microscopic di??sclaimer at the end of the trailer, which reads as follows: "Donations will be made on purchases from any 1 of the 50 US or DC (excluding purchases made from AL, HI, IL, MA, MS, and SC) Void where prohibited by law. Your purchase is not tax deductible."]

The developers of the upcoming Middle-Earth slaughterhouse Shadow of War have created a cha??racter to honour a comrade who passed away in 2016.

Michael Forgey, an executive producer at Monolith, lost his fight with a rare form of cancer at just 43 years old. Forgey, who was affectionately known as "Forthog", will be immortalised in the upcoming Shadow of War as DLC character; Forthog the Orcslayer.

Players who have purchased the character will encounter him randomly as he joins the fray, one-shotting Orcs left, right and center, before vanishing back into the mists. The character will cost $3.99, with $3.50 of the sale going to Forg?ey's family.

T?he trailer below sees The Orcslayer in action, powered on by music written a??nd performed by the big man himself, followed by a message from the development team.

Middle Earth: Shadow of War launches on PC, PS4 and Xbox One on October 10.

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That's how you 'finish the fight'

After months of speculation, Warner Bros. and Monolith confirmed what we already suspected: Key Nemesis figures from the Shadow of Mordor will carry over to the sequel.

There's a newly-added "Nemesis Forge" mode in Shadow of Mordor that will automatically detect both your highest ranked orc foe and your highest ranked orc follower. Then, those will import to Shadow of War&n??bsp;when that releases this fall. The video that's embedded above explains how it all works.

This particular feature has been all but confirmed for months. Upon Shadow of War's reveal in March, GamesRadar asked Monolith's creative vice president about save imports and he responded by saying "Oh, I don't remember what we're allowed to say about that." Then, last month, Shadow of Mordor received a mysterious patch that seemed to do nothing. We asked Warner Bros. ??representatives about it but received no response. It was clearly being saved for a marketing beat later in the summer.

For anyone who has no nemesis because they never played Shadow of Mordor, now is the perfect time to jump in. The Game of the Year Edition is available on Steam, PS4, and Xbox One for $4 (but probably slightly more expensive if yo?u aren't a subscriber to either PS Plus or Xbox L?ive Gold). That's an absolute steal, even if the game is three years old.

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Maybe needs a little lessdor

One of Monolith's greater ambitions with its Shadow of Mordor sequel is, well, adding more. Upon sitting down with the E3 demo, I was presented with a few options. Either I could try out the expanded Nemesis system we've already previewed before, try out some story missions, or "just run around for a bit," as a Warner Bros. rep put it. Naturally, with a pitch like that, I had to see where Shadow of War would take me if I just kill?ed time in the world.

As I found myself collecting an army of orcs like they were stamps or Pokemon, I felt an ever-encroaching emptiness. While the story mission I tried had a bit more personality, the smaller encounters Shadow of Mordor was famous for seem dimin??ished in a wider world.&n??bsp;

Trying out a story mission first, main character Talion (who's still connected with the spirit of Celebrimbor) wandered through a fog-covered forest as the voice of Shadow of War's main villainess -- a nature deity attracted to the power of War's new ring Macguffin -- summoned various monsters. After defeating a few of them and using Shadow of War's detective vision mechanic to reveal a set of footprints by rotating the joysticks, led Talion to several orcs trapped in the shrubbery. Interrogating them (read: using ghost powers to suck out their soul) revealed flashbacks of story. (For Prototype players, it's sort like the side missions where you'd absorb a person to get a fragment of their memory.) After doing this a few times, the deity summoned a golem out of that same shrubbery and I died instantly. At the very least, upon death, I got a good look at her as she taunted me one last time before game over. Unfortunately, if Shadow of War was trying to avoid comparisons to the Arkham series, this seems like a gross oversight. 

As the demo took place several hours into Shadow of War, the nearly fully-upgraded Talion felt fantastic to control. Running and jumping with advanced elven magic is truly satisfying, and it made stumbling on random missions in the world fun, but once locked into a mission, the fun dissipated quite a bit. Try??ing out a stealth mission in which I needed to interrogate five of a particular enemy felt exactly like the more action-oriented forest mission I had already tried. Sneaking up on an enemy is a bit wonky right now, as I ran right in front of enemies several times and was still able to interrogate as needed. In fact, there's a bit to exploit here as I found myself using the soul-sucking a??bility at a farther distance than most likely intended. Repeating this five times, with each successful interrogation resulting in a brief cutscene, really hit home that the mission types I stumbled on were more similar than not. It might take a different route, but both eventually led to the same place. 

More missions and options seems like a good route for Monolith to take with Middle-earth: Shadow of War, but with the time I got to spend with it testing what kind of encounters could oc??cur, I was a bit disappointed to have two eeril??y similar experiences. 

Either I was a victim of happenstance, or Shadow of War has less variety than we'd hope. 

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A guy, a girl, and a ghost

For a game that is all about small, emergent stories that come straight from the gameplay mechanics, I'm curious if many people care much about the overarching story of  Middle-earth: Shadow of War. I'm sure some people do. For those people, here are two?? minutes of uncensored, adulterated plot.

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Still coming in October with Xbox One X enhancements

So we can stop calling it the "Scorpio" now. In all of its literature leading up to this moment Middle-earth: Shadow of War was described as "Scorpio" compatible, but that end tod?ay with the announcement of the Xbox One ??????????????????????????X.

The October 10 bound game (that's also coming to PC and PS4) had another demonstration today, mostly showing off some boss fights, banter, and the dominatio??n/nemesis system yet again. It's...all a little too similar for my tastes.

"Beat up boss, hold B, then choose a QTE" isn't the best way to show off Shadow of War, at least not as well as the siege system in its debut trailer. As someone who wasn't the biggest fan of the first, there's ple??nty of room for improvement.

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Yeah, I took the low-hanging fruit in the headline

Shadow of Mordor is getting a sequel. Obviously Shadow of Mordor is getting a sequel. It's a triple-A game based on an incredibly popular property (Lord of the Rings), it was almost universally well-received (except, funnily enough, by this site), and it even won a few end-of-year awards (like Game of the Year at the 2015 GDC Awards). A second Shadow of Mordor was certainly a case of when and not if.

Developer Monolith's ambitions for Middle-earth: Shadow of War are high yet predictable. In a hands-off demo in San Francisco, a representative outlined a bunch of gameplay c??hanges that will define this title. It's the exact same route all big-name sequel??s take: More, more, more. We can't yet say if it'll be for better or for worse, but we feel comfortable asserting that feature creep is the main attraction.

Shadow of War's intentions aren't masked for long. Within 30 seconds, we??'re told "We w??anted to expand the scale of everything. There are more epic stories and a much more massive world." A setting so massive that there's now a world map because "We have many more regions. They're far larger than they were in the last game, and they also extend beyond Mordor."

We all see exactly where this is going.

The bulk of our presentation was focused on combat and all the additives that accompany it. Shadow of War's major encounters will be Nemesis Fortresses, strongholds that control the different regions of Mordor. Rule the fortress and you rule the region (each region "significantly larger than anywhere we had in Shadow of Mordor"). What's unique about the fortresses is that the leader influences the entire region's ??society and culture. For example, a feral tribe will emphasize hunting/trapping/taming/using creatures in battle, while a mysti??c tribe will specialize in dark magic like necromancy.

Each fortress is run by an overlord, one orc rank higher than the warchiefs of Shadow of Mordor. Although, in order to approach the overlord, his warchiefs will have to be defeated. And, each warchief bring??s their o??wn special modifiers to battle. In our demo, one had a cursed weapon that disabled some of our powers; another was fire savvy and made it so the orcs were equipped with flaming arrows, fiery trebuchets, and boiling oil.

This embellishment of the enemy's forces is reciprocated on the protagonist's side. The Ranger is accompanied in combat by some followers, a group of orcs who are willing to fight on his side. We were shown a Demolisher who "is basically a living battering ram," good for helping us smash through gates; an orc who's riding a fire-resistant mount (they ride mounts now); and a sniper spy who has infiltrated th??e enemy ranks. Of course, those circumstances -- and all circumstances -- are completely different for each player because of the game's Nemesis system.

Ah, the Nemesis System. The defining feature of the previous game. This too is being overhauled in the name of amplification. Now, more types of stories can exist. "In Shadow of Mordor, the Nemesis System's most memorable stories were really around bloodshed and revenge and hunting down the guys who killed you," we're told. "But now by expanding enormously on the followers, it opens us up to have a whole range of new types of stories. So now we can have stories of savior, ?stories of betrayal, stories of loyalty, even stories of friendship."

The example we're given is an interesting one. Stormbringer, one of the warchiefs, used to be an ally of ours. He was a casualty of a rescue mission and was unfortunately left for dead. As it t??urns out, he cheated death but feels pretty betrayed by how we treated him. He holds a burning grudge, a giant orc-sized chip on his shoulder. Rightfully so, to be honest.

It's a lot to process in 15-or-so minutes but that's unique to our situation. As is pointed out to us, we're on the cusp of launching a major assault. In practice, getting there could take hours of preparation and planning for a meticulous player. It's ?the culmination of a lot of sandbox gameplay.

But, for all that's new, it looked familiar again when we finally got to the heart of all of this. Shadow of War is just as stylish and grotesque and ext??ravagant as its predecessor when it comes to lopping of??f orc heads. Its cinematic qualities again make every dead orc feel like an event until you remember that you've already done that a thousand times. There may be a lot more to it all, but it's also pretty fucking great watching the Ranger mow his way through an army of goblins with a calm and collected flair.

The sequence ended with us defeating the overlord and appointing one of our own as the new ruler of the region. We chose a fellow from a looting tribe, the idea being that he??'ll earn more money for the area. With that, we can expand the size of the fortress and make it more secure from inevitable attacks. This is a microcosm of the manifest destiny of open-world games: Always get bigger, always expand.

As much as it pains me, I'll draw from a Tolkien reference to describe Middle-earth: Shadow of War. If Shadow of Mordor was The Fellowship of the Ring, then Shadow of War is The Two Towers -- specifically Helm's Deep. The scale of everything is so tremendously grand, far more than anything the series has shown us to this point. A worst-case scenario wo?uld be that this ends up as subtraction by addition. Something tells me that probably won't happen, though. A detailed and fleshed-out world is exactly what most Tolkien fans want.

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Hope this isn't an embargo-breaker!

Even though the vi??deo says it's a paltry five seconds long, the meat is actually even less. It's two seconds. Orc looking like he wants to fight, ranger riding a dragon, everyone yelling. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am, we're out.

But, this teaser is in service of a March 8 Middle-earth: Shadow of War gameplay reveal. While Warner Bros. will have its take on what's new, so will we. We saw Shadow of War in San Francisco at GDC last week, and we??'ll have our thoughts on all the changes that WB sho??wed us.

F?or now, enjoy these two seconds of teaser. You can watch it a whole lot of times between now and Wednesday.

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OF COURSE!

Not content to simply sell you the game, WB Games has unveiled the "Mithril Edition" of Middle-earth: Shadow of War for a quaint $300. Included in the package comes the "Gold Edition" of the game alongside a steelbook case, a war chest, 12" statue, the soundtrack, a cloth map of Mordor, a magnetic replica of the "Power Ring," a collection of lithographs, a sticker pack (joy!), ??and a collector's box.

In another surprise twist, this collector's bundle is only available at GameStop. The retailer also has a listing for a "Silver Edition" of the game (costing $80), but doesn't detail the differences between that and the "Gold" variant. All of these aforementioned different versions are listed for both PS4 and Xbox One, in case?? you are worrying.

At least if you were questioning how WB Games was? going to milk customer??s, you now have an answer.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War Mithril Edition - Only at GameStop [GameStop]

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Sequel to the best Assassin's Creed game

Fans of Monolith's take on the classic Lord of the Rings saga will be happy to know that a sequel is in the works. Leaked by Target, Middle-earth: Shadow of War seems to be? the title of the upcoming game. The description on the Target website (which has since ceased to be) reads, "Go behind enemy lines to forge your army, conquer Fortresses and dominate Mordor from withi??n."

The much-touted "Nemesis" feature from the first game will? be making a return. In addition to that information, a "Gold" version of the game was listed which included two story expansions, a different playable character, new abilities, and extra side missions. The "Gold" version also comes with some exclusive "Nemesis" content in the form of an extra Orc fortress and specific tribe.

The release date was listed for August 22 and will cost $60 for the standard and $100 for the "Gold" on PS4 and Xbox One. Seeing as how the past game launched on PC, as well, I'd assume the? game is also coming to that platform.

Shadow of Mordor sequel Shadow of War leaked [PC Gamer]

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