Though the occasional orc warchief in Monolith’s excellent Shadow of Mordor could cause you a real problem, by and large they were a chaotic and cowardly bunch.
Not so in The Bright Lord, an upcoming DLC expansion that lets players take the role of Celebrimbor, forger of the One Ring. This time you’re facing Sauron’s forces at the height of their powers.
”[The Bright Lord] has enabled us to go into Mordor at a time when Sauron’s power was at its height,” design director Michael de Plater explains to Gamespot. ”In Shadow of Mordor he’s just returned. It’s all pretty much in chaos, Orcs are running around rioting, it’s very untamed. We were able to go back and forge the Orcs into this more disciplined and elite war machine.”
So what does that mean for players? Well, it means you’ll have to be a lot more careful about how you go about causing trouble in Mordor. Orcs will be tougher, better armoured and have better balanced strengths and weaknesses. They won’t betray each other, so you won’t be able to separate a chief from his warband, and they’ll be actively hunting you down.
Scary. Thankfully to balance that out, Celebrimbor will be much harder to kill than Shadow of Mordor’s Talion, and will have access to even more powerful abilities. Runes level up to 30, and offer more powerful effects, and Celebrimbor can dominate multiple orcs at once. He also has his own animations, modelled after the graceful fighting style of the elves.
He’ll need to use all of those skills when he faces Sauron himself in a climactic (if predictable, outcome-wise) final boss fight.
”We really wanted to create the most epic, momentous final boss fight that we possibly could,” de Plater explains. ”We wanted to create a crafted boss fight that players get through the Nemesis system, to make up for the final boss fight against the Black Hand, which wasn’t so momentous. This is our attempt to revisit that and have another try and do the best we possibly can at creating an epic finale.”
The Bright Lord is expected to release soon, but no exact date has yet been specified.
