The Dark Tower in Middle-earth: Shadow of War
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Middle-earth: Shadow of War: Creative director explains controversial endings (spoilers)

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 5 min

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is getting a some flack for the way its story ends. But the ending isn’t the problem. Rather, it’s the fact that the final cinematic is hidden behind 10 to 20 missions where you have to laboriously take over fortresses. There are only four fortresses involved, but you have to keep on taking them or holding them over and over. Fans aren’t all that happy about this, since they believe you can bypass the tasks by spending a lot of money on loot crates.

But that isn’t really true, and it certainly wasn’t the design team’s placement of the ending cinematic, said Shadow of War creative director Michael de Plater in an interview with GamesBeat.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.