I maintain that Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis System is one of the most innovative game mechanics of the past decade and a bit. I think Hideo Kojima is also vying for that crown with the… everything in Death Stranding, especially the cross-game ‘strand’ mechanic that underpins his post-apocalyptic deliveroo simulator. Tears of the Kingdom’s Ultrahand deserves a mention too, for how it allowed players to showcase their creativity and for how much work must have gone on under the hood to get those physics interactions running perfectly on the Nintendo Switch.
There are others I could mention, but the Nemesis System will forever stand above them. I’m a Lord of the Rings fan, so the Orc promotion system debuted by Monolith Productions in Shadow of Mordor instantly hooked me. It took a lot for me to forgive the lore abuses in those games that disregard Tolkien’s work, but the Nemesis System and Assassin’s Creed-esque parkour through the Dark Lord’s domain went a long way towards smoothing things over.
Where Is The Nemesis System Now?
So why haven’t we seen the Nemesis System since Shadow of War in 2017? Because Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, which acquired Monolith in 2004, patented the mechanic so it was the only company that could use it. Then it didn’t bother to.
There’s a lot to unpack here, so I’ll start with the patent itself. It’s not unethical or illegal to patent a game mechanic – Pokemon, amongst others, does it all the time – but it’s anti-consumer and deeply uncool. Imagine if Marvel’s Spider-Man, already a great game, could have had mob bosses increase their power over Manhattan every time Peter Parker perished in pursuit of justice. What about indie developers, always the leading innovators in the industry, who could have implemented the system into their quirky Itch games?
We missed out on a whole generation of cool games because Warner Bros. decided to patent the Nemesis System. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, Warner Bros. didn’t even use it in that time. Perhaps this annoying patent could have been forgivable if Warner Bros. had pumped out Nemesissed-up games over the past decade, but it’s made exactly two, one being the innovative debut and the other being its sequel that never quite lived up to expectations.
Wonder Woman was meant to be the next game to use the Nemesis System, but that’s been cancelled and Monolith itself completely shut down. Will Warner Bros. continue to implement the system into non-Monolith games going forward, or will it just sit in the patent office gathering dust for all eternity? I can’t imagine Quantic Dream’s Star Wars game will use it. Maybe the next Harry Potter game will make Snape rise up to the rank of headmaster and become immune to the killing curse or something. Revolutionary.
From Bad To Worse
As well as squandering the best mechanic since 2010, Warner Bros. has squandered a team of brilliant developers. Hang on, make that three teams of brilliant developers. Along with Monolith Productions, Player First Games and Warner Bros. Games San Diego have both closed because Warner Bros. has decided that they don’t make the company enough money. Who cares about the art, who cares about the games they were working on, who cares about the lives of these developers that have been uprooted? All that matters is profit, and a game languishing in the limbo between live-service and single-player for four years isn’t currently earning.
To borrow a metaphor, Warner Bros. is the Orc overlord at the top of the pile. It has risen up the ranks as we have bought its games, acquiring a loyal following of warchiefs to use as bodyguards. And the moment Talion hits the fan – or, in this case, the board members aren’t happy with their dividends – they sacrifice those loyal chieftains to maintain their position at the top of the food chain.
Warner Bros. won’t blink an eye at this cost-cutting measure, despite the life-changing effect it will have on so many developers. Many will struggle to find work seeing as so many layoffs have happened over the past few years. Many more will leave the industry voluntarily. Those developers who leave the industry for good will have had clever ideas brewing, labours of love they were working on. Whether they were coding enemy AI or texturing the Bracelets of Submission, they deserve a shred of decency from their employer.
Warner Bros. is coming out of this looking worse than Azog post-beheading. But it doesn’t care. It didn’t care when it patented the Nemesis System in one of the most anti-consumer moves in gaming history. It didn’t care when it squandered all the hard work that had been put into a Wonder Woman game that could have been brilliant were it not for corporate meddling. And it doesn’t care that it has disbanded three entire companies and laid off countless developers, presumably to appease shareholders chasing profit after profit. It’s time to mourn the Nemesis System. It’s time to think about what could have been. And it’s time to be furious for all the developers impacted by this company’s decade of selfish decisions.
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