Why I’m rooting for the Orcs in Shadow of Mordor

Shadow of Mordor has received much praise for its fusion of an interesting and responsive open world setting with its highly original Nemesis system, a procedurally generated hierarchy of Uruk captains, each with their own personalities, strengths, weaknesses and alliances. It has been pointed out that the Orcish society depicted is an almost total meritocracy, with each captain promoted based on his own merits and abilities, so even if a lowly grunt kills you the result will be his promotion onto the career ladder of Sauron’s army. Uruks, a kind of super soldier Orc elite, can be bought back to life, bearing the scars of your fateful encounter, and usually have a pithy threat or insult to throw your way when you next meet. Similarly your character, a ranger named Talion who died along with his family to Sauron’s commander, The Black Hand, and now twinned with a powerful wraith, has been banished from death and turns up again and again to wreak vengeance on the Uruks that killed him, much to their annoyance and confusion: “Oi! You were dead!” they shout in their incredulous cockney accents.

The efforts Monolith have gone through to imbue each enemy with its own unique appearance, dialogue and personality is really stunning and contributes in no small part to the enjoyment of the game. But it goes further than this. Through their personalities, Shadow of Mordor gives the most reviled race in Tolkien’s famed Middle Earth a certain degree of humanity (or maybe Orcity?). Tolkien is not a writer known for his emotional nuance or moral shades of grey and most of his world was clearly defined as good, evil, or good but a bit mad (Boromir). When good people break bad it is almost always down to some cursed artefact or another; the most famous of which, of course, is the ring of power, which became the cliché to rule them all in fantasy for decades following the publishing of The Lord of the Rings.

As you’d imagine for a book that defined a genre for years to come, Lord of the Rings has inspired many counter readings and parodies, one of the most interesting of which is The Last Ring Bearer by Russian author Kirill Eskov published in 1999. This novel reversed the morality of the Lord of the Rings, which had become increasingly criticised for its racial essentialism, recasting the forces of Mordor as a new nation organised along principles of reason and on the verge of an industrial revolution, pitted against the warmongering ancient races of men, elves and dwarves, who were by contrast backward and rife with religious superstition. The book implies that Tolkien’s telling of the historical story is false as it is a history written by the victors, which inevitably casts the Orcs in a negative light to justify the crusade of the Western races against them. It’s not hard to see traces of a socialist allegory here, but this sharp retelling nonetheless serves to make certain unsavoury elements of the original visible again after becoming naturalised within the conventions of the genre for so many years. The book uses a counterfactual reading of history (though admittedly of a fictional history) to shed light on the original established and accepted truth. In short, by asking “what if” the book makes prompts realisations like, “Oh yeah, the Elves do resemble an arrogant and fanatical totalitarian state.”

It’s approach is not a million miles away from other classic subversions of pop culture icons such as Mark Millar’s brilliant appropriation of American hero Superman in Red Son, which highlights how informed by his nurture in Western Capitalist society Clerk Kent is and speculates what would have happened if his capsule had crash landed in the Ukraine instead. Going even further back perhaps the grand daddy of subversive retellings of established myths is John Milton’s controversial take on the Biblical origin story in Paradise Lost, where Satan is cast as a revolutionary (he establishes a democratic parliament in Hell called Pandemonium) against God’s totalitarian monarchy (Milton himself was heavily involved in the English Civil War, and the novel was largely an allegory of it). The fact that Satan should be our point of identification in the story is that he undoubtedly gets all of the good lines, much like the Orcs in Shadow of Mordor: “I’m going to hammer you flat like a piece of cheap tin!” I rest my case.

Any moral nuance we feel comes through the game play systems, which seem to tell a story counter to the overt plot. And that is perhaps the true wonder of the Nemesis system; that it is able to tell its own story through the player’s interaction with it, that is strong enough to contest the written narrative of the game.

Perhaps Shadow of Mordor doesn’t make quite such a radical revision of its source material, but it is still quite a bold step for a large scale licensed entertainment product to say “hey, perhaps the Orcs aren’t all bad?” I think this is largely because fantasy games, influenced as they have been by Bethesda and Bioware, have outgrown the black and white morality of classic fantasy, as represented by Tolkien, realising that players want to make difficult, nuanced decisions or at least reflect on their morality and role in the world as part of the gameplay experience. It’s a pity, then, that the written narrative does little to reflect the moral ambiguity Talion might feel in butchering his way through the Uruk ranks, but rather frames it as a straight forward revenge story. Any moral nuance we feel comes through the gameplay systems, which seem to tell a story counter to the overt plot. And that is perhaps the true wonder of the Nemesis system; that it is able to tell its own story through the player’s interaction with it, that is strong enough to contest the written narrative of the game.

The narrative arc Talion undergoes, like many games, feeds into the need for players to unlock more and more skills and abilities as they move through the game world. At the start of the game you feel genuinely vulnerable, struggling even to take on small bands of Orcs, let alone the elite captains. Slowly but surely you unlock skills that make combat a doddle, giving you a strong sense of empowerment in the late game as you carve your way through vast swathes of enemies, using a host of potent abilities. Your growing supernatural strength ties into the reaction of the Orc community. They begin to fear you. Many will attempt to flee from you in battle and if you sneak up on a group of Orcs sat around a campfire later in the game you’ll notice that the ambient dialogue has shifted from boasting about how they can’t wait to get their hands on you, to nervously discussing your latest exploits. They even begin to call you, out of fear, by a different name: Gravewalker.

This brings to mind the plot of another classic fantasy novel from 1954, exactly the same year as The Lord of the Rings: I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. As many will only know of I Am Legend from the disappointing 2007 Will Smith vehicle, which threw out all the book’s clever philosophical cynicism and replaced it with Hollywood themes of heroic sacrifice and an obnoxiously religious happy ending, some explanation is in order (look away if you don’t want this 60-year-old book to be spoiled). The novel, which is widely recognised as a precursor to the zombie apocalypse literature which we all seem to enjoy so much these days, is set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles after the world has been ravaged by a disease that has turned everyone into creatures resembling vampires. It follows the sole survivor, depressed alcoholic Robert Neville, as he attempts to stay alive and find a cure for the plague. By night he barricades himself at home surrounded by garlic and crucifixes, and by day he roams the city, exterminating vampires in their sleep. As the book progresses, his research allows him to better understand the disease, allowing him to more effectively dispatch hundreds of vampires, not unlike Talion’s process of levelling up (and much like Talion he is also haunted by the death of his wife).

The interesting thing about the book, as opposed to the film, is that the vampires are highly intelligent (rather than brainless zombies) and eventually manage to build a new society on the ruins of human civilisation. Eventually the new vampire society is able to capture Robert and put him on trial as, basically, a reviled serial killer. The book ends with Robert anticipating his execution and reflecting that in this world he is the legendary remnant of an ancient civilisation and not the vampires; he is a bogey man who kills people in their sleep and terrorises society. In short, he realises that he is actually the monster, in an incredible switcharoo that has become a staple in books, films and videogames ever since.

Perhaps it was too much to hope that Monolith might pull the rug out from under us by having Talion captured and executed by the Orcs, perhaps with a nice speech outlining how the Orcs believed they were building a better Middle Earth, but the Nemesis system does hint at a moral complexity in the game that isn’t really acknowledged or supported by the written story, which remains at best serviceable. This makes Shadow of Mordor something of a missed opportunity and a  good example of how videogame scripts often work against the emergent story the game world builds.

In truth a Triple A videogame based on a beloved multi-million dollar license, which was made under the dual pressures of a large commercial publisher and the careful custodianship of the Tolkien estate, is probably not the best place to explore such a radical retelling of one of the twentieth century’s most influential fictional works. So we should be grateful that Monolith managed to get away with as much as they did. Having now proven themselves to be a studio still worthy of note, I hope that their next project will be a new IP, less constrained by expectations, where they can be freer to explore their subversive ideas. But in the meantime, I’m sympathising with the Orcs!