Overview
A general guide for the sequel to the Middle-earth series, this time, covering new elements of the game while at the same time, providing helpful observations.
Introduction
Years after publishing my guide for the first game, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, it is time to welcome you to its sequel, Shadow of War.
Shadow of War is based on the same engine as Shadow of Mordor and essentially shares a lot with the first game. The basic gameplay mechanics remain the same, however, you have more tools to play with, it has become “smarter” in a way but the good old uruk interaction cutaways remain.
[link]In relevance to the game’s story, this entire guide is spoiler-free. If any ending-related spoilers are about to occur, a proper warning will be about.
Story
The story picks up right after the ending of Shadow of Mordor, which ended with Talion saying that the time has come for a new ring. Celebrimbor is still one with Talion and their mission has not ended, not until Sauron falls.
During the events of Shadow of War, we won’t be revisiting the old locations from SoM, however, they will be mentioned on the world map and you’ll be able to put in perspective where the first game took place and where it ended.
Compared to SoM, we now have a much larger area to play with. Not just two major locations, but through playing the main storyline, up to 5 will unlock.
Also, we still have a few story branches in which each story evolves around a different character and location. Whether it is your fellow Gondorian friends, yours and Celebrimbor’s quest of revenge or accepting missions from other entities.
Sauron is regaining hold over the Mordor again so it is up to you and Celebrimbor to thwart his progression. And there your path begins by, yet again, creating your own army.
(more on the story itself in a standalone section, which will, however, include spoilers and conclusions)
Characters
Throughout your journey you will encounter a fair amount of new characters and some returning ones. Those new characters are tied to their own storyline. The first one you will encounter is Shelob – the great spider. Also a character that has her time on the screen in The Lord of the Rings. Here, Shelob falls into the “enemy of my enemy” category, providing Talion with visions of what’s to come, while Celebrimbor is very cautious of her, Talion relies on what Shelob has to show.
Two new characters are presented to you as well – Baranor and Idril. These two Gondorians, soldiers at heart, are encountered in the first city you arrive – Minas Ithil. They will provide you with a company through several quests.
A brief appearance is also made by Gollum, as Celebrimbor says, “He has his uses.”.
A new character makes its way into the roster as well, an elven assassin Eltariel. She has been tasked by The Lady of Light, Galadriel, to rid the land of the Nazgûl presence and thus will aid you often as well.
There are a couple more interesting and worthy of a mention characters, but I’ll intentionally leave those ones out for your surprise.
Collectibles & Haedir
There are total of 3 types of collectibles – the lost Gondorian artifacts, Ithildin words and Shelob’s memories.
The lost Gondorian artifacts and Shelob’s memories are here mainly for you to uncover the past events through a web of fate and hear some interesting lore from the Gondorian artifacts. Collecting all of those is not just a manner of completionist purposes, but it also rewards you with a skill point for gathering all the artifacts and memories in a region.
The Ithildin words are something different. Collecting all the words in one region grants you the ability to open the ithildin doors in the burrows located in every region. After opening the doors, there’s a specific set of gear waiting for you there.
Mostly unchanged are the Haedir towers and by mostly I mean that they still serve as a point to advance time, fast travel and uncover locations on the map but in a slightly different fashion. Now you have to cleanse the tower of Sauron’s presence using Celebrimbor and Talion’s New Ring and then gain sight over the area and look for valuable collectibles.
Upgrades
Let’s begin with the skill tree. No longer it is split into two – Ranger & Wraith. Instead, it has multiple categories that help divide all of your abilities somewhat better but there’s a catch. You can always only have 1 of the 2 or 3 available “boost upgrades” selected at the moment. Back in SoM, you could have all the upgrades active at all times, that’s not the case anymore as you can see in the image below. With the maximum level cap being 80 and all the ways to collect skill points, you can easily unlock all of the abilities. Personally, I chose to put a fair amount of points into the “legacy” abilities that permanently increase your passive abilities such as might gain or health regeneration. Those are obtained after the game is finished.
In a way, it’s more straight-forward now – get EXP, increase in levels, get skill points, unlock/upgrade an ability. No more tiers.
Mirian, being the currency in both SoM and SoW, is now used to train your captains, upgrade your fortresses and attacking power. (More on sieging and fortresses later.) Captains you’ve dominated have a specific set of perks, things they hate or make them weakened or enraged, vulnerabilities and other traits such as gangs of archers, ologs etc. You can control some of those perks. Mirian is also used to unlock slots for gems in your gear pieces.
For instance, it’s possible to get your captain a caragor mount for 750 Mirian, or a gang of warriors for 450, perhaps a fire/poison weapon. There are a lot of ways to boost up your captain and that’s where you use Mirian. I find the most natural way of obtaining Mirian apart from doing missions, is to destroy gear you don’t have any use for. Once in a while stop and destroy all that you carry and it will net you even thousands of Mirian.
And then there are gems. Gems can be dropped from captains or with a bit of luck, from regular uruks that carry a white symbol above their head. Gems can be attached to any piece of your gear (6 pieces total with The Ring). There are three types of gems, all can be combined into a singular, more powerful gem, in case you have a lot of these. Once combined, you can insert them into your gear, vastly increasing its not only combat capabilities.
Advices & Tips
Make the storyline your priority. Story quests reward you with new abilities and a fair amount of EXP as well as other rewards. Do not get stuck doing one thing over and over if you’re having hard time completing it.
From the difficulty selection standpoint, I’d suggest for the optimal experience without any real struggle, the normal difficulty. I started on the normal difficulty but when I got the hang of things and felt confident, I put on the Nemesis difficulty and that’s a great jump from normal. Captains adapt to your fighting tactics very easily, you are spotted quickly, take more damage and have only one last chance. It’s a grand challenge.
As soon as you can, unlock the Execution, Perfect Counter & Fatal Counter, Elven Agility, Brutalize & Undying Ferocity. These are the key abilities to unlock because the fights early on tend to drag on without you having any real source of damage to end the fight. Elven Agility helps you traverse the map fairly quickly and Brutalize with Undying Ferocity helps you enter combat with a bit of an advantage because it lets you make one or two uruks flee and also enable you for an immediate execution, if you also get Brutal Aggression & Ceaseless Might.
As soon as you pick up a new gear or gems, always wear it if it has anything better to offer, compared to what you’re currently wearing. Don’t be overly tied to the passive perks and the challenges to unlock them. The idea is that you’ll eventually wear Legendary Gear Sets anyway. However, that is of course relevant to the difficulty you’re playing on.
Keep in mind that you can always escape any fight with an ease. That is often better than letting an uruk kill you and become a captain and completely shift the Army screen.
If your targeted captain has a higher level than you, you can still take on the challenge but get the intel on him first. He may be dozen of levels on top of you, but he may be mortally vulnerable to stealth, softheaded or easily weakened in other way.
Later on in the game when you get these abilities, use Elven Agility boost to jump off an edge, then double jump, aim and using the ability Talon Strike, you can jump a great distance that would otherwise take you a lot of time.
You can advance time in the Haedir towers but be careful, if you have any followers that are on a mission, they might not make it without your help and advancing time makes them go through the ordeal alone.
Some captains may have the perk called “Iron Will” or “Unbreakable”. Those captains cannot be dominated straight away. Iron Will prevents them from being dominated and Unbreakable from being held when broken. When you see an unbreakable captain, kill him straight away, but iron willed captain can be recruited if you shame him a couple times and thus, along with levels, he may lose this perk.
I once dominated an orc so far up to point where he was level 1 but still iron willed, the next shaming, he lost this trait but went from level 47 to 1. The goal was to dominate all of the infamously iron willed Minas Morgul.
Once you get access to other regions, you can use the Garrison feature to move your dominated captains between regions by placing them into the garrison at the cost of 1000 Mirian and then re-deploying them.
When fighting a tough captain that resists almost all of your strategic moves, see if he is vulnerable to stealth. You can always run away a little, hide, then surprise him with a stealth attack and repeat.
When you’ve run out of last chances, fear not, you may still be saved if some of your captain followers are nearby. Or, if you’re even more lucky, you may have Forthog Orc-Slayer show up. He is a tribute to one of the game’s developers who has passed away.
SoW brings tribes to the table. Depending on what tribe does the region’s overlord belong to, you get to either find a lot of baits or treasure or others. Not only they affect the region in this way but also affect its looks.
If there’s a captain you struggle with and do not wish to take him on all by yourself, you can send one of your follower captains to duel the enemy uruk and then select 1 or 2 other dominated captains to reinforce or ideally, ambush the enemy uruk. Ensuring your victory.
At the beginning of the game, it pays off to be more cautious and stealthy. Once you get the hang of things and be more fearless, you’ll find you’re better off charging in for the captain, despite the hordes of uruks and going for the stealth hit. Unless, of course, he is vigilant againts stealth.
While not combat-oriented skill at all, but the Treasure Hunter ability is really worth more than it seems. It’s not a lazy player’s tool, on the contrary. Sometimes you’ll find there are items you cannot pick because it’s overrun with uruks and captains bother you and thus you cannot just run in, pick the item up and leave. Not to mention picking up all the loot after a large skirmish yourself.
SoW offers a lot of lore and I mean plenty of lore and backstories to read in the game’s appendices. I personally find some of the bits interesting to read as it also changes the way you look at things.
Later on in the game, once you get the ability to resurrect your fallen captain followers, you must ensure they do not die in a Pit Fight or have their head chopped off, otherwise they cannot be brought back. A decent way to kill them yourself and then resurrecct, is to mount a Graug and stomp them to death. Apparently they do not see that as a betrayal. Even setting your desired, soon-to-be-killed follower as a bodyguard and hit him a few times makes him turn on you.
If there are occupied spots on your Army screen with dead captain bodies that don’t seem to go away, you can force that by letting yourself be killed by a random uruk, who is then promoted to that occupied position. That is only helpful, however, only if you wish to have the whole region’s army dominated.
Do not stick to fighting all captains the same exact way. Especially on the Nemesis difficulty where captains adapt to your playstyle very quickly. Do you like vaulting over and freezing them? Do it 3 or 4 times and then you can no more, the captain adapts. Your repertoire of murderous ways has to be larger on this difficulty.
In relevance to the tip above, the following two ways of battling captains will be your bread and butter for a while:
- Ice Storm, spam attacks to the point where you would end the combo, but then cease and begin anew with the attacks to stack your might and deal more damage to make the most out of the time while the enemy is frozen, then, follow up with a Ground Finisher, repeat. (Provided he’s not immune to frost.) You can also input Rain of Blades for good measure.
- Shoot the captain in their head (ideally when Softheaded trait is on them), immediately attack once as they fall down, then Ground Finisher again.
(Always begin the fight with a stealth attack, especially if you don’t have intel.)
Legendary Gear Sets
Fairly early on, you’ll start collecting those purple sets that seem to be more powerful with more items of specific set you have equipped. This is, compared to SoM, a new feature.
You should not feel entirely obliged to go through the challenges it offers to unlock its true potentional as they are aimed more towards the endgame.
There’s one legendary set for each tribe in the game as well as others like Celebrimbor’s Ringmaker set.
Legenary gear can be, as other gears, upgraded to your current level and also have its bonuses rerolled. If you really want the best possible gear stats, you can toy with this a great deal but I suggest leaving that for post-story gameplay.
Fortress & Siege
One of the grand new things that’s in SoW is owning a fortress. Soon enough, once you get to dominate captains, you’ll get to capture your first fort. You will be guided on this process but there is otherwise more to know than the game tutorials outright say.
Making a fortress attack go as smoothly and quickly as possible requires preparations. Each fortress has an overlord and warchiefs. Both of those groups may have, and likely will have, bodyguards. When targeting a fort, it’s wise to first eliminate warchiefs, but mind me, not during the actual siege, but during preparations. Taking out warchiefs removes fort’s defenses that are tied to those specific warchiefs. So that’s one way, eliminate warchiefs by calling them out as well as killing their bodyguards – significantly reducing the stress on you and your army during the siege.
The other way, more subtle and my personal favorite, to dominate those warchiefs instead, their bodyguards as well if you feel like. Dominating warchiefs results in you still crippling said fort’s defenses but with the addition of those warchiefs joining the fight once you capture a point in the fort. You can also choose to kill specific warchief only to empty his slot, have one of your preferred, possibly stronger, captain win a pit fight duel and thus gaining a spot in the fort, but as a spy – also destroying whatever defenses that spot held.
Beware, however, your spies may be found and captured by the overlord, who will then remove them in a threatening fashion.
Once you begin the siege, considering you’ve removed all the fort’s defenses, you simply make way to all the capturing points, eliminate uruks while you capture the point and move on all the way to the overlord.
If you fail to take down the overlord, you won’t have to start the whole process again, you will just be tasked to take on the overlord again, who is celebrating your defeat. If you’re having a hard time taking the overlord down, you may assign him bodyguards that you’ve dominated. To do that, have them prove their worth in a pit fight, but beware, they will die if they lose.
Once they’re bodyguards of the overlord, they will turn on him, easily making the fight, 1v4 for example.
Rarely during the campaign you’ll get to defend the fort. That “fun” is reserved for the epilogue of the game – Shadow Wars.
While defending a siege, during Shadow Wars, you get to see the assaulting force’s units and chosen upgrades.
You can counteract those if you see, for example, Olog-hai that are aiming for the outter walls, by placing poison spouts.
Perhaps there are sappers going for the main gates, so use an upgraded gates or place caged drakes to fire the enemy once it attempts to pass through the exploded gates.
You can also check out the details of enemy warchiefs and see their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. If they are immune to poison, there is little use in using poison catapults.
Whether defending or attacking, target the graug catapults first by exploding their satchels. I also suggest dominating any enemy captain that’s not a warchief during the siege, whether you’re defending or attacking, dominate captains and add some more muscle to your fight. For that reason, Shadow Dominate is a great ability as you can quickly react to broken enemy captains to dominate them before they’re dead.
Playing Online
SoW enhances the online experience from not just displaying an online leaderboard capturing your overall ingame score but adds a lot more.
Online activities involve fortress sieges, overlord’s pit fights and online vendettas.
Apart from online vendettas, the other two activities can have an absolute impact on your dominated uruks.
When you begin a siege, attacking other player’s fortress, you risk losing your dominated captains for good, provided they die during the siege and you finish unsuccessfully. Same thing goes for online fight pits. There, you select your overlord to fight other player’s overlord, if your uruk dies, he is gone.
However, that is not the case for the defender, he whose overlord or fort is attacked, won’t stand to lose anything. In online vendettas, you get the chance to avenge other player’s death by killing the uruk that has killed said other player. That has no negative impact on you or the player you’re avenging. The avenged player will be notified if you’ve been successful when completing the vendetta.
The rewards for completing a siege depend on the rating you get – gold, silver or bronze, that is relevant on how long it took you to finish the siege. If your overlord wins a pit fight, you are rewarded with a box.
These boxes may contain rewards ranging from equippable gear to orders, such as free caragor, elemental weapons or other, instead of paying Mirian for them.
Blade of Galadriel
Blade of Galadriel is a DLC, where you get to play as Eltariel, an elven assassin in service to Galadriel, the elven queen. Her quest – to banish the Nazgûl. The story picks up just after the game’s epilogue; Shadow Wars. You get to team up with Talion in order to help him defend his fortresses and recruit new followers, but by Eltariel’s standards, not Talion’s.
Playing as Eltariel, you get access to a completely new skill tree, which is, compared to Talion’s, very simplified and reduced. All the skills are fairly enjoyable and mostly new. Eltariel wields the power of the light which is her source of power along with The New Ring.
You still get access to most of the regions from the original game but the amount of quests and other missions is limited to simply killing uruks, collecting legendary gear and completing the main questline.
It is important to note that to gather all of the legendary gear pieces, you need to defeat all the “unique” uruk captains under each mission. Those captains are fairly strong and it is often advised that you collect a specific gear set first in order to face said captain. They can be tough and without required gear, you often cannot take them down.
The lenght of this DLC is fairly short, all in all, about 3-4 hours, taking into account the main storyline while collecting all the legendary gear pieces. It likely won’t amaze you but won’t insult either. Altough, in my view, it’s somewhat overpriced but if you’re looking for the complete experience, price of the content is generally not as much of an obstacle.
Desolation of Mordor
Now, this is an exemplar DLC. Desolation of Mordor offers a completely different while not too distant of a way compared to the regular Shadow of War game. You play as Baranor in Lithlad (this region is also available in SoW if you own the DLC), the timeline seems to fit somewhat after Baranor leaves Minas Ithil.
The key aspects to this DLC are the following:
- Baranor is a mere human, if he dies, the story is over
- No wraith spells and inhuman abilities, only Númenorean artifacts
- You lead a group of Easterlings, men for hire
- High score dependant on your score which is based of off your runtime
As stated above, Baranor does not posses any kind of powers like Talion does so all action must be approached with caution at least untill you get to hire yourself some bodyguards and obtain a few new skills. There is also a completely new set of abilities for Baranor to take on the uruks with, but to enhance his pool of choices even further, he has to collect the Númenorean artifacts to which he is given a map from Torvin. These maps are somewhat vague at times but mostly describe the location well enough. No skill point is needed to unlock these abilities, only to find their blueprint and bring it back to Torvin.
Next, there is an overhauled system for augments. Augments drop from captains, “white symboled” uruks and can be also found on corpses. Augments can be stacked one on another, amplyfing its potential. It is important for you to equip these as soon as you loot one, remember, every second in combat that may be lethal to you, means a complete wipe.
New tools are available to Baranor to traversing the land of Lithlad, the kite and a grappling hook.
Early on, the combat itself is fairly dangerous but eventually, you’ll be jumping straight into hordes of enemies without fear for your life. Especially on your second run and onward as you keep all your unlocked abilities, Torvin’s blueprint abilities and some of your earned coin from the last run.
Desolation of Mordor does have a story on its own, fairly short as well but in my opinion, more compelling than Blade of Galadriel. You should not really be bothered by what score you get or what difficulty will you be playing on the first run, just grasp the new mechanics, enjoy the story and obtain all the blueprints.
Try to aim for a higher score on your second playthrough using ideally the Nemesis difficulty to x2 up the points.
When shooting for the high score, your first concern is to immediately aim for an outpost but before you do that, hire the basic mercenary.
After capturing your first outpost, get the 10% discount on mercenaries and an increased pouch for potions.
The entire premise of as high score as possible is to primarily stick to getting the -10% cost on mercenaries, therefore you should aim to get EPIC and LEGENDARY mercenaries as soon as possible while at the same time obtaining larger health potion and ammo pouches. Time is of the essence here.
Before launching your attack on the fortress, I suggest taking out one or two warchiefs at most. Precisely those that have more than 2 bodyguards as they might become an annoyance during the siege and halt you down.
Overall, a well though out DLC with lots of new mechanics and a feel to the game as well. Definitely worthy of playing. While your playtime gets likely shorter and shorter each time you play it, it’s still an enjoyable experience. Compared to the Blade of Galadriel, there is at least some replayability value. However, non-sale price of 20€ seems a bit over the top, just like with the Blade of Galadriel, in the end, it’s nowhere near as vast and deep as other games of this price.
Shadow Wars
Without a doubt, the epilogue called “The Shadow Wars” deserves a mention. After the main story is finished, you are tasked to defend your fortresses againts numerous attacks. It is split into as of now 3 stages, composed of 5 defenses in total.
These numbers have been drastically lowered from original 10 stages, made out of 20 attacks. Shadow Wars are infamously known among the SoW community and not well received. It used to be a very lenghty process since at one point, you had to defend up to 3 fortresses at once, having the enemy forces often decimate all of yours.
That would have proven difficult due to the fact that you would have to recruit suitable uruks over and over, train them as necessary and withstand more and more assaults on all fronts.
As of July, 2018, a new update has brought several changes, especially the most welcomed one about reducing the stages of Shadow Wars down to aforementioned 3.
Personally, I welcome that change and applaud anyone who has had the patience and will to go through such process.
Handy tips including siege warfare have been mentioned in the Desolation of Mordor and the Fortress & Siege section.
There’s also a surprise waiting for you once you finish the Shadow Wars stages. That will be mentioned in the next ‘story conclusion’ section.
Achievements & Completionist
Speaking of achievements, you may easily play as most of them are naturally obtained through playing the game – especially the base Shadow of War, Talion’s path. If your intend is to obtain all the collectibles, explore the nemesis system and exploit its uses, you will end up with next to no achievement to do while playing as a Talion.
Your 100% completion may include appendices as well – collecting lore on all kinds of bits of Mordor.
Again, most are obtained on their own but for me, there were a few I was missing. The Hell-hawk entry (best found in Gorgoroth around the Haedir towers), then the lore on other locations in the world map (make sure to press “2” to view lore on locations like the Barad-dûr or the Black Gate and other locations you cannot directly visit, they will also make an entry) and clearing one final outpost (simply open up each region’s map and look for red-colored area. If all of your army is dominated there, banish one of your captains from the army and he will appear in that area, kill him there and it’s done).
Some exceptions that I still had to do after being done with most of the collectibles and all of Talion’s story were: Wild Things (only had to kill a drake while sitting on a Graug), Trolling (very tricky achievement – I suggest shaming a captain down to as low level as possible and look for Ologs to jump on by blinding them after you’ve damaged the captain just a little), Vertical Mobility (simply let any uruk kill you, then dominate him once he’s a captain and ideally, if you control a region, reposition him to the overlord’s position and the achievement’s done, then you can revert), Everything is permitted (simply seek out an assassin captain and shame him with Worse Than Death perk untill he is deranged – he must not be unbreakable).
Rest should come naturally.
One thing worthy of a mention. If one of your goals is to dominate all of the captains for every region, then you will find Minas Morgul difficult. Captains are naturally aspiring to claim the Iron Will trait, apparently captains added in the first row of the army screen are almost guaranteed to be iron willed. It takes a while for you to dominate all of the region but it is doable.
To rid the captains of their Iron Will is to shame them untill it is gone. After each shaming, check their perks, if still iron willed, shame again, if not, dominate. Try to advance time as little as possible so that there are no betrayals (Iron Willed and Shamed captains are more likely to betray you than regular captains). If you absolutely have to kill a captain because he is unbreakable or killed one by accident, do not advance time several times, just let yourself be killed by an uruk and he will then take place of that fallen captain – only advances time once.
Here’s an example of me shaming a captain down to level 1 yet he still kept his trait for this long.
When it comes to Blade of Galadriel and Desolation of Mordor, there’s only very little of achievements that come to mind you may miss if not focused on directly.
That is the I See the Light from Eltariel’s DLC, simply place down 20 light traps around uruks and you’re done, takes a few minutes.
In Desolation of Mordor, Bombardier can be missed, simply glide above a group of uruks and hit them with everything you got – all 6 types of ammo and bombs. Perhaps Baranor the Conqueror may be missed as well if you only run the DLC once. Refer to the Desolation of Mordor section above in relation to this achievement.
Story Conclusion [SPOILERS]
As I have stated in the Story section, the game picks up right after the events of SoM, Talion and Celebrimbor forge The New Ring and through that make their way to Sauron. As it turns out, and as Talion has been told by The Black Hand back in SoM, Celebrimbor is, and always has only been, using Talion as a vessel for his own revenge againts the Dark Lord. When Talion shows restraint, knowing that Celebrimbor wants to dominate the Dark Lord, he stands back. Celebrimbor sees Talion is hesitating and joins Eltariel’s side. She takes on The New Ring and goes to face Sauron.
Naturally, Talion begins to die as the ringmaker has left him. Talion is motivated to take on Isildur’s dark ring only to live on a little longer and become the counterbalance that Mordor needs. Whatever the cost, Talion took this opportunity and went to reclaim Minas Morgul to act as a first line defense againts whatever may come.
Slowly submitting to the dark ring, Talion still resists and observes the fight between Eltariel, Celebrimbor and Sauron. As it turns out, Celebrimbor and Sauron became one, while the elven assassin gets away only missing a few fingers. This is where Eltariel’s DLC path begins as she goes to find Talion, essentially during SoW’s Shadow Wars epilogue.
During these events, as witnessed at the end of Eltariel’s path, she defeats Talion as he is no longer himself yet he still keeps the forces of Sauron at bay. Eltariel’s quest ends as Galadriel tells her to return but she refuses.
After what apparently is decades, Talion finally submits to the Witch-king and becomes one of the nine. Giving in.
(hover over the black square to view the screenshot)
Reason for that is that this closely ties into the Lord of the Ring trilogy and Talion is that one Nazgûl who ventures into the Shire. Eventually, Talion, or the Nazgûl that he has become, dies during the eruption of Mt. Doom and finally finds peace, ending his decades of fight.
After having his family killed in front of his eyes, having his throat slit, being brought back from the dead, defeating the three aspects of Sauron, fighting the battle alone, being betrayed, taking on Isildur’s ring, knowing it will eventually be his demise, he keeps defending Mordor but inevitably, he succumbs but after a long time, he gets to rest.
(hover over the black square to view the screenshot)
After completing the Shadow Wars epilogue, you’ll obtain a secret ending in which Talion finally finds peace. Dropping his gear and weapons and ultimately giving us a farewell.
Personal View
Middle-earth: Shadow of War to me, was a must-play game especially because of the opened ending in Shadow of Mordor. It really intrigued me to see how the story unfolds, knowing full well that it is very loosely tied to Tolkien’s TLotR saga but still well enough to reference some points in story and moments it ties into.
From a completionist standpoint, it turns out to be a fair grind and at times, things become repetitive. At one point, things get pretty stale and stop surprising you, but with the enhanced nemesis system, new gear set mechanics and enjoyable story missions, you can get some fun hours from this game.
Closure
Should you not have checked out or played the prequel, Shadow of Mordor, I suggest starting there as I already have published a guide for that game as well.
Enjoy the game and happy uruk-hunting!
“As long as I have breath in my body, my fate is my own…”