“Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor” developers aren’t concerned about comparisons to the “Assassin's Creed” franchise.
IGN reports Monolith Producers were accused by a former Ubisoft employee of using codes from “Assassin's Creed II” to create the game. “Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor” lead designer Bob Roberts assured fans this is not the case.
"I don’t know if vindicated is the right word, because we always knew what it feels like to play," Roberts told IGN. "Once people get their hands on it, they stop worrying about the comparisons and it totally feels like its own thing.
“There’s so much new going on there thanks to the Nemesis System and the way we combined all the elements to make the world come to life. So we never really got that criticism once people had a chance to play it. As soon as we started showing it, it became clear we had nothing to worry about."
The Nemesis System is the name for the gameplay system developers created for “Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor." The goal of the technology was to create an incredibly detailed system where no two characters are alike. This means there are distinct voices, animations and attributes developers must go through an polish before releasing a title.
"The Nemesis System is the backbone of our idea and was from the start," Roberts told IGN. "Obviously though it’s so big and there’s so much content tied into it, that once you’ve done all the animations, voiceovers and tuned the fights and so on it takes a huge amount of time over a number of years.
“We also needed to really figure out how much variation we needed so you don’t see the same guy twice, so you don’t see the same personalities twice either so you can start building stories.”
