Earlier this year, Warner Bros. closed down Monolith, the developer behind 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its 2017 sequel, Middle-earth: Shadow of War. Those LOTR games were beloved by fans in part because of Monolith’s innovative Nemesis system, an AI procedural program that allowed NPCs to remember their previous encounters with the players’ character and evolve accordingly. And according to former Warner Bros. Games vice president Laura Fryer, the development of the Nemesis system was inspired in part by falling sales for Batman: Arkham Asylum.
Fryer recently shared a video on her YouTube channel [via PC Gamer] where she went into detail about her relationship with Monolith while she was employed by Warner Bros. Games. As Fryer recalls, WB was alarmed by the way sales fell from Arkham Asylum’s peak, and company executives believed that millions in sales were lost when used copies of the game were sold on the secondary market including stores like GameStop.
“It all started when Rocksteady shipped Arkham Asylum in 2009,” said Fryer. “It was selling great. Then suddenly sales dropped off. They could see this because the data from their game analytics revealed that more people were playing than were paying. The theory was that people would play through the game and then return the game disc to a retailer and get paid, which was very common at the time. This was great for gamers because they could buy the game and then sell it back to a company like GameStop and buy something else. It was great for GameStop because then they sold that used game for a discount and they pocketed the money. For game developers though, it was a disaster because they weren’t getting paid for every game–they were only getting paid for the first copy sold. They lost millions of dollars.”
Fryer went on to explain that this push was behind the Catwoman DLC in Batman: Arkham City that could only be activated by the initial owner of the game. However, Monolith went its own way to retain players by coming up with the Nemesis system.
“With [Shadow of Mordor] we faced the same problem,” recalled Fryer. “How do we create a single player game that is so compelling that people keep the disc in their library forever? We knew Monolith’s game engine wasn’t yet capable of having a fully open world like a GTA and this team wasn’t interested in going the multiplayer route, but we still had to solve for the constraint. And this thinking is what led to the Nemesis system–arguably one of the most creative and coolest game features in recent memory.”
The prevailing idea at the time was that players would be reluctant to part with their personal nemeses from Shadow of Mordor. That was also why Shadow of War allowed players to import some of their nemeses from the first game. Both of those games were successful, but perhaps not to the extent that they prevented players from reselling their titles. However, the proliferation of digital games, which can’t be sold, has put a significant dent in the secondhand games market.
Prior to being shut down, Monolith was working on a Wonder Woman game that would have utilized the Nemesis system for the title character as she befriended NPCs. The game was canceled with Monolith’s closure, and the Nemesis system itself is under patent protection until 2036. Theoretically, WB could license out the Nemesis system to another developer. But that has yet to happen.