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Shadow of War’s art director on just how big the new Middle-earth game will be

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 6 min

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment spilled the beans last week on Middle-earth: Shadow of War. GamesBeat’s Mike Minotti and I went to a preview event to see the first gameplay demo during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco a week ago.

The title comes out August 22 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. For me and many other fans, it is a long-awaited sequel to Shadow of Mordor, set in the early Third Age of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy realm Middle-earth. The first tale — a prequel to The Lord of the Rings — was about the ranger Talon, who fought his way through Mordor with the wraith elf Celebrimbor. Their quest is to deny Sauron of the Rings of Power, and it turned out to be my favorite game of 2014.

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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.