Middle-earth Scriptwriter : Shadow of Mordor sees the future of open-world-games in the development of multiplayer

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Recently, the leading game designer Red Dead Redemption and co-writer Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Christian Cantamessa conducted a lecture-masterclass in the City of Science and Industry in Paris. He discussed with the audience the development of games and talked about his vision for future projects with the open world.

Christian believes that such games have already separated into a separate genre, in which you can successfully tell the story, give the player the freedom to act and add to this a multitude of multiplayer functions. The latter in open-world-projects with time will become even more, and with the help of multi-user content the player will be able to better feel the plot.

According to Kantamesa, sometimes history, gameplay and multiplayer are separated from each other, but in the future they are integrated and will become more natural. As an example of a high-quality implementation of the mechanic, he brought the Nemesis system in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and the multiplayer content of Grand Theft Auto Online. He thinks that thanks to the development of such ideas in new games there will be more history, a cooperative and a higher quality level of role playing in the framework of multi-user sessions.

Replies • 6


Lunar

It will be refreshing to see this approach become mainstream.



Interstellar

Combining multiplayer and a well thought out story cohesively is difficult.  There are games that have both, but they tend to mostly be separate, you play through the story mostly alone, and then hit content that doesn't involve much story that's for multiplayer.   It'd be great if game more successfully combined the two.


Planetary

I'm always a bit worried that "bigger world + multiplayer" will equal "shallower world".  I like my worlds a bit smaller, but deeper, I think.