shadow of mordor killing captains permanently

Caught unprepared, I’m suddenly pitted with the decision of running and allowing the captain to become stronger, or staying to fight and potentially die. I’ve marked enemy captains, intending to hunt them down, only to have them find me instead.

I’ve even had orcs cross regions to hunt me down and get revenge for leaving them to die, betraying me, upsetting the balance in both the region they came from and the region they traveled to. Each and every encounter with an orc captain is a nail biting game of wondering how this experience will tip the scales in the region. That same thrill can be felt in Middle-earth: Shadow of War. That feeling of risk and permanently losing an army I’d spent hours carefully cultivating is part of the thrill that makes XCOM such a great strategy title. It’s nigh impossible to get through an XCOM campaign without losing well-loved soldiers, but the taste of victory is so much sweeter when the odds are monumentally stacked against me.

It even taught me to accept defeat and failure sometimes, hard as that might be. Those are games that taught me to get over my perfectionist attitude of completing every encounter perfectly and to accept the narrow victories. One of my favorite strategy series is XCOM. The orc that killed you grows in power, and the balance shifts. The Gravewalker always returns and the ecosystem of Mordor moves forward. Shadow of War creates meaning from death, spinning an interesting narrative that persists even as Talion finds himself impaled on a pike or has his head crushed by a hammer. Perhaps it’s nothing more than a couple minutes of wasted time as you go from checkpoint to checkpoint, or just attempting to retry an encounter, but it rarely has real implications on the game and the world. In most games, avoiding death is the goal, yet death remains more or less meaningless.

Shadow of mordor killing captains permanently