The games of Lord of the Rings by Monolith Middle-earth: Shadow Of Mordor and Shadow Of War are fun stealth actions that deserve praise just for their combat. What really makes them both worth mentioning, though, is the nemesis system that turns procedurally generated villains into your own personal antagonists the more you encounter them. Why haven’t more developers tried their own approach to the enemy system in the past six years? Because Warner Bros. patented it. This sucks.
In my experience, you can hardly mention Shadow Of Mordor (or War) without the conversation immediately turning to your enemy system. Shadow Of Mordor creates Orc captains with names and combat skills and quirks that you can hunt and kill. If you do, another Orc with your own abilities will likely take their place. If you fail, your nemesis will likely be promoted, gain new skills, and then refer to your shameful defeat at your hands when hunting for a rematch. Even when you’re not looking, Orcs can defeat each other to climb the villain’s corporate ladder. It is a clean and reactive system that invents its own stories as often as it provides material to tell its own.
Inevitably, any conversation about the nemesis system turns into imagining what other series could do with it. Seriously, imagine a nemesis system from the Yakuza series. They already have the corporate hierarchy. It would be great?
Conversation about the enemy system has resurfaced this week thanks to a new episode of the Game Maker’s Toolkit (above, to learn more about why it’s so good), which points out that Warner Bros. applied for a system patent in 2015. So far as I can tell, it is an application that has not been officially granted a patent number, but it seems that the scary effect on developers who want to tamper with a similar system is the same.
Monolith has launched some really interesting bases in its Middle-earth games, but the system also has its shortcomings. The enemy system really deserves to be improved, but it seems unlikely that other developers will give it a chance if they risk a fight with the Bros. and your lawyers for that.
To be fair, WB is not the only company that patents gaming systems. BioWare has patented its dialogue wheel. Take-Two recently filed a patent application for Rockstar developers related to AI navigation. With regard to the systems that I really want to see more of, the nemesis system is really a drag to see potentially blocked.