Friday, October 3, 2014

Resitance is Futile - even in Mordor

Capt's Log - Now for something mostly different

We are just a bit out from the start of the new OP at our local shop. And there is still not a lot of info out there on what it will be. Hopefully the bricks have shipped but the info just hasn't gotten out yet.

No idea what I will do with my fleet this time around. May end up waiting till night off when I can see the scenario to do any building. There are rumors that the point total will change or will be altered as to how you should put it together. One rumor was that the blind booster ship would be allowed up to 70 pts. That would be nice as it may indicate some larger ships in the blind boosters this time as opposed to all small ships. Gives me hope for a Romulan heavy hitter. Not a lot of hope mind you :) Just some hope.

My play time right now is severly curtailed. I am currently staying with friends that live an hour from the shop, so play nights put me in bed very late. Not good when you have to be at work at 7 am :) Because of this I missed the Dominion War 3 OP two weeks ago at the shop.

I am also still in the midst of my fall gig run at the KC Renassaince Festival. Two more weekends to go with that then start working on the 3rd CD.

And also looking for a house and working out the logistics of relocating permanently from Tulsa.

As a side note I have put a tiny bit of time into Shadows of Mordor and if you enjoy the Open World style of the Assassin's Creed games you will probably like this. The game doesn't bring a lot new to the table(but it does bring one thing) but the systems they have used from other games work so well other companies have accused Monolith of stealing thier code. Basically take the free running of Assassin's Creed, the combat of the Batman Arkham games, some various other things and mix them all into a bowl and pour them out in a Middle Earth Setting pulled from Peter Jackson's movies.  And lastly add what Monolith calls The Nemesis System.

To sum up the plot, the protagonist watches his family murdered at the hands of Mordor orcs, gets trapped between life and death by the returning spirit of a long dead elf who also went thru a similar incident...meld their abilities together and go off to seek revenge.

Revenge in this case means attempting to single handedly wipe out the orcs of Sauron's army. Which brings us to the Nemesis System.  Sauron's army has a bunch of Capts and Warchief's... any time you get killed the orc who did the killing go up in skill and gets a promotion. Then behind the scenes these orcs will also challenge each other for position so you will see them change, some get stronger, some get weaker.  You can do side quests to actually influence this as well.

But the really neat thing is when you defeat an orc capt there is a chance that he won't actually die. For example at one point I was slain by an orc archer. When this happens the orc makes a comment about "gotta be a promotion for me in that", and sure enough you are treated to the cut scene of the orc becoming named, getting a promotion, and made a capt. Being the player I am I immediatly set this orc as my target and went to get my personal revenge. When I tracked down the newly minted Kuga The Archer said orc actually comments "So you survived," and I could see he was sporting new scars as a relic of our previous battle.

This is a small example, I also have one orc who has managed to pop me a few times and now taunts me everytime he shows up with such things as "when will you learn to stay down"

The orcs actually figure out that you never seem to actually die and this can make them nervous.

The system is pretty deep, each Capt/Warchief has strengths and weaknesses that you can discover and exploit, etc.

The Nemesis System as a whole brings almost a whole game within a game as you can choose to influence the orc power structure if you wish.

Makes for an interesting game for sure.

Until next time: Never trust anyone named Gollum
shadoe42