New Middle-Earth: Shadow of War story trailer shows off tons new footage

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

I love LORD OF THE RINGS. The books are great (if a bit long-winded), the movies by Peter Jackson are of course amazing,
and they even have a decent track record with videogames. The two tie-in beat-em-up games that came out alongside the films were fun (if a bit shallow) and even that RTS they did a while ago was fun as well. However, the last big LORD OF THE RINGS game was MIDDLE-EARTH: SHADOW OF MORDOR, another action game set between THE HOBBIT and LORD OF THE RINGS proper where instead of playing as the heroes from Tolkien’s books, you instead played as Talion – who shares his body with the spirit of the elf lord Celebrimbor – and fought against hordes and hordes of Orcs and ne’er do wells. It was most known for its “Nemesis system”, where if an enemy killed you they got promoted and ranked, creating grudges and incentives to take them out.

Now that game’s sequel – MIDDLE-EARTH: SHADOW OF WAR – is coming out, and this time Talion and Celebrimbor use one of the Rings of Power to amass an army to fight against Sauron and his Nazgûl forces. Though, there might be some ulterior motives on Celebrimbor’s part…

Anyway, you can see for yourself in the new story trailer. Let’s take a look:

I mean, it definitely looks cool, and is probably (like its predecessor) fun as hell. Although that story (and dialogue)
are honestly kind of dumb. One of the things that sticks out to me is at the end of the trailer, with Talion ready to take on an armored Balrog, because that brings up a problem a lot of prequels have to contend with: since it’s technically a sequel you want to up the ante on action, spectacle, creatures, etc., but also since it’s also technically happening before the story proper, it makes those moments in those stories seem quaint in comparison (I mean, how bad can a Balrog be Gandalf is some dude could take it out?)

Either way, MIDDLE-EARTH: SHADOW OF WAR will charge onto consoles October 10th.