Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor's Nemesis System is still beloved more than a decade after its release, but it was apparently only created to stop people from selling their physicals discs, according to one former executive.
"Trend-chasing has always been a thing in the games industry," former WB Games executive Laura Fryer explains in a new retrospective video about the now-defunct developer Monolith Productions. "It's not new, However, in some ways it's gotten worse. And we faced this when I worked at Monolith - it's literally what led to the Nemesis System."
Fryer recalls that Batman: Arkham Asylum was "selling great" when it first shipped in 2009, but it quickly dropped off. WB Games' analytics revealed "that more people were playing than paying," so the company concluded that many people had completed the game and then traded it in at a second-hand retailer to get some of their money back, which obviously hurt publishers who only got revenue from the first copy sold.
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With the then-upcoming Lord of the Rings game, the publisher wanted to combat second-hand sales. "How do we create a singleplayer game that is so compelling that people keep the disc in their library forever?" Fryer says Monolith's engine wasn't capable of a GTA-scale open world at the time and the team obviously weren't interested in going down a multiplayer route.
So, the Nemesis System was thought up as a solution. In case you've never played the fantasy duology, the Nemesis System was essentially how the studio handled enemy AI. Orc higher-ups each had their own personalities, names, attributes, and memories - if you beat one in an explosion, he'd show up hours later with burn marks and a fear of flames, for example. They'd even climb up and down the orc hierarchy, creating an ambient storyline that sat alongside the (less compelling) main one, and I'm sure you could spend many more hours just messing around with them.
Monolith Productions were set to remix the Nemesis System with its Wonder Woman game, but WB recently scrapped the project and shut down the entire 30-year old studio, which was also responsible for classics like No One Lives Forever and FEAR.
There's still plenty more coming down the pipeline, though. Check out the new games of 2025 and beyond.
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