Monolith on the "shifting dynamic" of Shadow of Mordor

We talked with Monolith's Bob Roberts about Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor at E3, where we discussed how it's not just a player's actions that will affect the world around them.

"In most games you die, you rewind time, load a checkpoint, play the last 90 seconds / two minutes over again," Roberts explained. "Not for us. For us time always moves forward, and for you, personally, that's going to be: the guy that killed you, he just made a name for himself. He just killed this monster that's been terrorising his leaders, so he could get promoted, you start to learn more about him and you can go hunt him down."

"But even without your influence, if time's moving forward, Orc society, it's a dynamic thing too. They're always fighting and backstabbing and battling each other for power and dominance too, so you're going to see other guys in the world that you didn't even necessarily interact with level up, grow in power, kill each other off, gain new allies, so that it's always creating this shifting dynamic of like "who's your target?". If you were going after somebody, and when you died his bodyguard got killed by someone else, that's part of your job done for you, but he might have also recruited a new bodyguard. Things can change very rapidly, and it's also very fluid so nobodies play-throughs are going to be similar too because of that."

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is heading to both old and current-gen consoles in early October.