Quick Look: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor: The Bright Lord

oh dear

I haven't watched this yet, but that is a hell of a pun.

Yes!

The return of the cinnamon girl

Damn elves. Buncha fancy lads.

Dan is such a LotR nerd.

Might be worth a pickup later.

Man. Only 2 DLC missions come with the Season Pass?

Dan I know you're new to the site but you really need to excuse Brad he is bad at games.

That thumbnail makes them look like they're in the middle of a musical number.

Hehe

Did you say "node"?

A musical number Dan would like, too.

The minimap sure is useful to look at.

Brad's branding is top notch. I really like how he uses that skill sparingly.

these missions look absolutely terrible

Now I have not actually played this game, but based on the 40 or so hours of video footage I've seen of it on Giantbomb, it seems to me like branding enemies and having those guys keep busy any unbranded guys is a much better way of keeping the things from being destroyed, than temporarily killing everyone and moving to the other side. Just saying.

Oof... I know part of it is Brad losing focus while playing, but this does not look like a great bit of DLC. I've only played a bit of Lord of the Hunt, but I like it so far. This one just seems a bit bland and frustrating.

The word "brand" is starting to lose all meaning. Someone should tally up how many times it's used.

Any spoilers in this? I haven't finished SoM yet.

People like Brad must give game designers fits:

Designer: Why didn't you use the brand mechanic?

Brad: I didn't want all the clutter.

god dammit brad!

I hear this dlc is pretty Celebrimboring.

Ah yes, one of my favorite Quick Look pairings, Celebradbor and Dandalf the Grey.

God, watching someone not combat brand constantly combat brand in this game is rough because it breaks the game so fast.

Bright master!!!

I'm with @brad always be executing.

I feel like every time I see this game the mission takes place at the same bridge/tower thing.

Brad did a Brad.

Brad brand branding

I played through most of the stuff in this Quick Look and even factoring in the distraction, Brad is making this way harder than it looks. The difficulty has been bumped up, so if you're coming back to the game after a long absence you might have some trouble remembering the controls, but after that as long as you keep Flash Branding at every opportunity and get those counters in, these missions are fine.

Oh and EQUIP WEAPON RUNES. People forget to do that and it will kill you considering that this DLC is built around people who are pretty good with the game.

Oh god Brad BRAND, PLEASE BRAND.

I personally thought the game got kind of boring if you used brand a lot. You could just stroll through the country side without getting attacked. It was weird.

None of these missions even look fun, I'll probably pass on this one.

So how exactly did Fahrenheit 451 end up on Dan's Lord of the Rings mock list?

Like, the actual incompetence in fighting would be fine but the continual attempts to justify why "take one enemy out of the fight, gain one ally" was not good really makes this whole QL so grating

Awesome, got some classic Brad .

did they remove the stun too? wtf is Brad doing.

You can't spell brand without Brad and Dan.

The mission design seems pretty bad in this.

I like how Brad discusses the scholarly theories that the Ring power varies depending on the will of the person using it, so cowardly people like Bilbo and Frodo turn invisible but more strong-willed people might just become powerful badasses. In any other circles, that "scholarly thought" would just be idle fan theories.

Either way, it's a fan of a story speculating on unspecified details of the story.

Yeah, it sounds like Brad forcibly made this game into Batman combat only, instead of embracing the combat brands that are like, the big distinguishing feature of the game aside from all of the Nemesis stuff.

So this is what the recent 8 gig update to the game was for...

I think I'll just download the first DLC story (in the more lush area, with my dwarf buddy) if I want to play additional content in this game. These missions look like like [Uruk word for shit].