Shadow of War is getting a tantalizing new trailer that gives gamers a sense of the scale of the vast open world that publisher Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and developer Monolith Productions are building with the sequel to the big 2014 hit, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.
The trailer, released a few weeks ahead of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) show, doesn’t have many words. It opens with the voice over, “Death calls for you again, Ranger. How do you answer?” The game comes out on the consoles and the PC on August 22.
The trailer shows Talion the Ranger, who has become The Bright Lord, in opposition to the evil Sauron, the Dark Lord in J.R.R. Tolkien’s immortal The Lord of the Rings. Warner Bros. and Monolith have said the game will be several orders of magnitude bigger than Shadow of Mordor, which took me about 80 hours to finish in 2014.
You can see a wide variety of landscapes, from the Sea of Nurn to the mountains around Minas Morgul in the trailer. I’m very much looking forward to this game as one of the big console and PC titles of 2017.
This time, instead of fighting scattered orc clans, the ranger Talion will harness an orc army to fight against Sauron, in this tale. The story is set in the 60 years between the events of The Hobbit and start of The Lord of the Rings in the Third Age of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
The trailer closes with the cryptic words, “Nothing will be forgotten.” But, of course, that’s the legacy of Talion. His story takes place in the 60 years between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. But there’s no word of Talion in the history books.