Simply put: the nemesis system in the last-gen version of
Mordor feels slight. It seems limited in comparison to the robust and colorful orc infrastructure that I've enjoy so much in the original game. I still had some great moments with my new batch of orcs, don't get me wrong. One threatened me with the delightfully silly line: "I'll kill you until you're so dead you can't be alive!" But between memorable moments like that, I ran into an unpleasant amount of repetition. Much like I mentioned when describing the scenery of the game, there are a lot of finer details missing in these new orcs. They all seem to have a smaller set of names, weapons, pieces of armor, and snappy orc taunts to draw from. The orcs in my PS4 and PC versions of
Mordor got repetitive at a certain point too, for sure. But I only began to notice it then after playing for upwards of 20 hours or so. On my PS3, in comparison, I quickly found myself thinking: "Oh, great,
another orc wearing that same suit of body armor just said he wants to kill me." I guess, on one level, that
is what all the orcs in
Mordor are doing, regardless of what version I'm playing. But the beauty of the original game came in the sheer amount of diversity it had to offer. While they did and said a lot of stuff that
seemed pretty similar, no two orcs ever truly felt like they were the same.
It's worth remembering that Monolith, which
hasn't said much about how the nemesis system works, acknowledged that last-gen gamers wouldn't be getting quite the same thing. In an
interview with
IGN back in February,
Mordor design director Michael de Plater made it clear that new-gen consoles were the priority when developing the game, especially in regards to the nemesis system. Here's the relevant passage, emphasis mine: