



"Actually, a hard mode is probably what we needed even more in some ways than an easy mode" - Michael de Platerĭe Plater went on to say that Monolith's aim for Shadow of Mordor was to create enemies and scenarios that appeared challenging, but at the same time were easy to take down if you took the right approach and discovered your foe's weaknesses. "The people who were the very end of the bell curve in terms of their coordination and skill-the people who found the game most easy, were also the ones who also found the Nemesis System least engaging." "To be brutally honest, we saw that ," he said. Because if you could just hack and slash your way through the game without having to stop and think, without getting killed, without seeing these guys level up, without the world evolving, people wouldn't have got to experience the Nemesis System." "And if we did, the game would have fundamentally been broken. "We could have had an Easy Mode," de Plater told us. Speaking with GameSpot, de Plater said it was always important to Monolith that players feel a certain level of challenge so they could understand the depths of the game's ambitious Nemesis System. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor developer Monolith Productions could have created an "Easy Mode" for the critically adored Lord of the Rings game, but this would have "fundamentally broken" the overall experience, according to design director Michael de Plater.
