Ken Levine (writing for The New York Review of Video Games, which, despite the cheeky name, is actually a pretty interesting endeavour) has some surprisingly lofty praise for Shadow of Mordor:

There are two games that really kicked off what we think of as the modern “open world” game: Super Mario 64 and Grand Theft Auto III. These games unshackled the player from linear progression through a game’s levels. I think Shadow of Mordor is the first “open narrative” game. You’re not just checking off missions in a variable sequence. You’re changing the dramatis personae. Whenever you succeed or fail, the characters in the story respond to your actions, and not in the manner of a branching “choose your own adventure.” It is an excessively simple, yet impressively flexible, crime story.

The whole thing is worth reading if only to get an influential designer’s thoughts on an interesting game, but what really stood out to me is how he deliberately draws a connection between Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis System and the ideas behind Irrational’s next game, which Levine describes as “Narrative Lego”.

When he first started talking publicly about his concept for dynamic narratives, it all sounded like a Molyneuxesque fantasy, especially since there was no frame of reference that one could reasonably apply. (“Narrative Lego” is a cute term and appears descriptive on its face, but it doesn’t exactly hold up when you take the time to think about how such a system might work in practice.) However, assuming Irrational’s next game resembles Shadow of Mordor in some fashion, we finally have some context for what Levine is working on, even if it ends up being a very different kind of game. That’s exciting, given how well Shadow of Mordor came together.

Levine's project aside, I’m super curious to see how influential Shadow of Mordor ends up being in the long term. It’s clear that there’s a lot more that can be done to the formula — the Nemesis System is impressive while the illusion is intact, but spend a little time with the game and it’s easy to see the gears in motion and how they all fit together. Despite not being quite as complex as it would initially appear, it's still one of the most exciting ideas to manifest in a big-budget game in quite a while, so I hope there are plenty of studios chomping at the bit to one-up Monolith because it’s clear there’s an appetite for games that try to broaden what we think of as narrative experiences.