Shadow of War-Bore: Fight Pits, Shadow Wars and How To Kill An Ending

Very mild spoilers for Middle Earth: Shadow of War up ahead, but hopefully no major plot twists.

The game's final act devolves into siege and defence missions.

Shadow of Mordor took a lot of people by surprise; a game that broke a long trend of poor video game adaptations set in the world of Middle Earth, and which combined elements of other popular franchises to create something greater than the sum of its mechanics. After briefly dismissing it on PC because it didn't run very well, once I got the game on PS4 I was addicted - I poured over 50 hours into that sucker, and eventually had to tell myself to stop. Over time the longing wavered, but recently I decided to soak up those last few trophies and soon I was back in love. Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is an incredibly fun time simply because it does a lot right at once - an immersive and well-crafted world, the genius Nemesis system, and movement and fighting mechanics that are easy to get good at and hard to master.

So I was excited when, in 2017, the sequel, Middle-Earth: Shadow of War hit store shelves. Not soon after launch the game was mired in controversy over its predatory lootboxes and microtransations, and I decided not to purchase the game until I could do so without sending anything to Warner Brothers. As of May 8th, the mechanism for those microtransactions has been removed from the game entirely, with an overall of the game and its final act coming later this week. I picked up the game a few days ago and, breezing through the story, I find myself wading through Act 4: The Shadow Wars. This, over all other things, will be the topic of this article. I could talk about the game's differences in tone, its new clunky mechanics and its major divergences from Tolkien, but none of those things have sapped the joy from my spirit as much as the game's final chapter.

One of Shadow of War's biggest selling points was the restructuring of its Orc hierarchy from a loose oligarchy of five warchiefs into a series of Fortress siege-and-defence missions, with each related mission requiring the input of a lot of time and resources. After the game's major twist in Act 3, the rest of the game become a long series of these missions, as the forces of Sauron repeatedly attempt to take the four fortresses that protagonist Talion has conquered. If the required fortresses are defended, the stage progresses; if they are taken, then progress is linked to taking the fortress back. The most efficient way to take back a fortress is to remove the Warchiefs and replace them with your own, allowing you to waltz in and take it back in a breeze.

Fight Pit missions are unskippable and boring to watch, and yet
form a backbone of maintaining your army.

A big feature of both games is the ability to take Orcs you have brainwashed to your side and have them ingratiate themselves with an enemy Warchief in order to betray them down the line. In Mordor, this was accomplished by having said Orc succeed in one of the game's standard "Nemesis" missions, in which they would have a fine feast, or ambush an enemy camp, or hunt a beast. While those styles of mission still exist in War, the act of making your Orcs into spies has now fallen to the Fight Pit missions. Fight Pit missions pit one Orc against another in a three-minute unskippable cutscene, and while mostly harmless at first are easily the worst thing about this game once in the Shadow Wars. Act 4 of the game requires you to defend your fortresses from 20 individual assaults, and each failure to defend adds a siege to that number. I am seven sieges in, and I failed five of them for various reasons. As a result, I have sat through over 90(!) of these Fight Pits in siege preparation alone, not counting the ones I watched in Act 2, or the challenge fights you inexplicably have to finish in order to have a full roster of Warchiefs to defend your fortress properly.

The ending of Act 3 was a shocking twist and, had the credits rolled on an uncertain future for Talion, it still would have made for a fun and engaging addition to the series. Shadow Wars feels tacked on and trite; the narrative talks of Talion fighting for decades to disrupt the armies of Sauron, but it feels more like the game stretching out playtime in a way which isn't fun and isn't dynamic. Manipulating the Nemesis system in Mordor was part of the fun of the game; it was engaging and even when I had to grind through it for a trophy, it was still a good time. Preparing for a siege in War is a dull slog. My most efficient method of removing all of the Warchiefs is to give each of them two Spy Bodyguards, which usually sees me watching twelve Fight Pit cutscenes in a row and then doing six identical Betrayal missions in a row. I then have to watch six more Fight Pit cutscenes to install my Warchiefs, hoping that at some point I didn't recruit too many Orcs and the game had suddenly decided to wipe one of my Spies from existence for no reason. (This happened three times.) This lasts up to an hour, at which point you are on to the next siege, and the next threat of tedium.

Of course, this is simply the most efficient method of preparing for these sieges. You could finish off the Warchiefs by doing their individual missions, which while still repetitive do offer more of a challenge. But even with these missions, you still have to sit through six fight pits, and you miss out on the few benefits that the Fight Pits have - weeding out the weaker Orcs in your army and buffing the ones who make it through. It is stupid that these missions are so beneficial and yet so damn tedious. Not only did the developers artificially extend the runtime of their game with this exploitative and soporific crap, they made the best mechanism to traverse it literally the most boring thing in the game. The controversy around Shadow Wars and microtransactions has enveloped this game's potential, and for the majority of players their experience ended either after having sat through this monotonous void of fun, or having given up somewhere along the line, dejected and disappointed. At the moment, that last one is me - I will go no further.

I don't even know if that counter does anything...

I really wanted to love War as much as its predecessor. Ironically, Mordor saw me playing long after the main story had ended because I enjoyed the gameplay so much. Now here with War I feel like I'm in a limbo state - not particularly enjoying myself, but still invested in seeing this thing through that I can't stop. On the way, I'm finding that the length of Shadow Wars is not its only problem. All of the little shortcuts that War has made in terms of its variety of Orcs, its ambient dialogue, it all gets highlighted when being repeated over and over again. Shadow of War doesn't just manage to kill its own ending; it manages to make a good game painful to sit through. I will not finish Shadow Wars. And you shouldn't either.

Thanks.