In the wake of the closure of Monolith Productions, former VP of WB Games’ Seattle studios Laura Fryer has revealed detail about the development of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, as well as details about how its critically-acclaimed Nemesis system was created. In a video, which you can check out below, Fryer spoke about her time with WB Games after helping Epic ship Gears of War 2.
“When I joined WB Games, it was growing fast,” said Fryer. “In Seattle we tripled in size through acquisitions and WB games expanded to over 1,500 people in a few short years. It was exciting and complete chaos. It took us a few years to get settled, but in that time, we built a team and culture that shipped Shadow of Mordor, arguably Monolith’s most successful title.”
Fryer spoke about assembling the team that would go on to create the Nemesis system during the studio’s time spent working on multiplayer titles like Gotham City Imposters and Guardians of Middle-earth. She points out that, considering Monolith’s trajectory from working on critically-acclaimed titles to filling its follow up with lootboxes, and ultimately getting shut down, meant that the studio had a leadership problem.
“It’s easy to blame Warner Bros. for everything that’s gone wrong, and it’s true, there were issues with the film studio,” explained Fryer. “For example, if a director didn’t want you to ship a game around the time of their movie, you didn’t ship the game.”
Fryer went on to talk about a game that was internally codenamed Apollo. The game was slated to feature Batman, and would have been set in the same setting as Christopher Nolan’s trilogy of movies. The video also shows off an early demo of Apollo, including UI details that indicated how missions would have worked in the title.
“The idea was the create an open world game,” said Fryer. “A place where gamers could explore and solve missions. They could use different approaches like combat or stealth. We even had a demo of the Batman Tumbler vehicle. It was cool.”
“WB was excited about the game and asked us to work on it in stealth mode until we could talk to Nolan,” she continued. “Well, unfortunately, when we finally spoke to him, he didn’t want us to do it. The Batman Begins game had come out and it was a disaster. And he didn’t want a repeat of that experience. It was completely understandable.”
She also mentioned that the studio had pitched to postpone the release of Apollo until after Nolan’s trilogy of movies were done. Company leadership, however, did not want to wait that long. Ultimately, work on the project was shelved back in 2011. Much of the team would then go on to work on console MOBA Guardians of Middle-earth. In the meantime, the work done on Apollo wasn’t considered a complete waste since its technology could then be used on other titles.
After spending some time talking about working on other projects, including Gotham City Imposters, as well as a tie-in game to The Hobbit movie series that was codenamed Hydra, Fryer talks about needing to change the studio’s priorities into being “game first” rather than tying projects in with movie releases.
An example given for the “game first” philosophy was Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum, which was a Batman game released in the middle of Nolan’s ongoing trilogy and was developed without replicating the imagery from the movies. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was another example of the same philosophy, since it was a game based on a major film property that didn’t directly recreate similar imagery.
“Shadow of Mordor is another example of this game-first principle,” said Fryer. “It has a unique story and game mechanics, but it fit within the lore, it enhanced the story, and it brought in new fans. This is why I was surprised when I learned that Monolith had been working on a new IP. We had figured out how to work with WB. You could have ultimate creative freedom with your game as long as it loosely fit within the franchise.”
After spending some more time talking about how Monolith Productions as a studio was built with the idea of multiple projects being developed simultaneously, Fryer then went on to talk about how WB’s attempts at chasing trends is what ultimately led to the development of the Nemesis system in Shadow of Mordor.
“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.”
During the development of Shadow of Mordor, the question internally at the studio became “how do we create a single-player game that is so compelling that people keep the disc in their library forever?”
“Constraints can lead to better design, and the stellar team we built solved for this constraint,” explained Fryer. “After shipping War in the North, several of the talented team members started on [Shadow of Mordor]. People like our incredible art director Phil [Straub] and our talented design director Michael.”
Ultimately, going by Fryer’s stories, it looks like a game that was never released based on Nolan’s Batman trilogy ended up forming the bones for what would ultimately become Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.
