10 years on, leaks have given us a long look at the canned Batman game that became Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Middle-earth was always a bit of an odd setting for Monolith's Shadow of Mordor, the 2014 game that introduced the absolutely brilliant (and criminally under-imitated) nemesis system. Subjecting the game's orcs to harrowing physical and psychological warfare as a one-man guerilla army was great fun, but it didn't exactly fit with the high-minded, mythical tone of either Tolkien's original books or the Peter Jackson films.
Perhaps the reason for that is that the game was, once upon a time, a Batman game. Codenamed Project Apollo, the thing-that-became-Mordor was originally intended as a Dark Knight thing set in the Nolanverse of Batman films. It got some way into production before eventually getting reskinned as a Middle-earth game, but thanks to posts by Twitter user <a data-analytics-id=«inline-link» href=«https://twitter.com/Dageekydude/status/1775571748580180357?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1775572473330672034%7Ctwgr%5Eb7a64f441ec025a28f896716e0fb1ef6c22040f5%7Ctwcon%5Es2_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ign.com%2Farticles%2Fgameplay-for-canceled-nolanverse-batman-game-that-became-middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-unearthed» target="_blank" data-url=«https://twitter.com/Dageekydude/status/1775571748580180357?ref_src=» https:>Dageekydude
(via IGN), we've gotten a deep look at its original incarnation.
Thread of videos and images related to Monolith Productions cancelled Batman video game codenamed «Project Apollo» pic.twitter.com/BMv8P79SESApril 3, 2024
It looks, well, pretty Arkham-y. Which makes sense: Shadow of Mordor's combat and traversal felt very Rocksteady-inspired as-is, and wrapping them in a literal Batman skin is only going to make the comparison more obvious. We see an open world, upgrade trees, traversal by gliding and myriad quest pop-ups.
There's also Arkham-style stealth and detective work that would presumably have punctuated your perp-pounding. In fact, based on the stuff we see in the tweets (which, admittedly, is far short of a
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