Hopefully the main reason we haven't seen any Nemesis-like systems yet is simply the lengthy period of time games take to develop. Whether we've seen them yet or not, Bithell thinks that a heap of games will clone the system as a way to breathe life into NPCs. Imagine if your quarterback gets tackled and injured in a football game like Madden, and then the QB's nerves are shot the next time he lines up opposite that defender. The system shouldn't be limited to open-world games either. Or what about a bounty hunter-type game, either old west or outer space, where your targets grow more cunning after each encounter. How much more interesting would No Man's Sky have been if you had rival space explorers you would encounter periodically. Nothing makes you believe in a game character as much as the implication that they do stuff when youвЂ™re not looking. Imagine a dynamic turf war in Grand Theft Auto or Mafia, where gang shootouts result in shifting territory and growing beefs. The foot soldier that takes you out in Assassin's Creed could be promoted to castle guard, maybe even rising in the ranks enough to one day become an assassination target himself. It's easy to envision the likes of Ubisoft or Rockstar embracing enemy personalization in their own open-world sandboxes, for instance.

No clones to be seenД¬onsidering how freely ideas, mechanics, and gimmicks get borrowed, cloned, or iterated on in the gaming industry, it's surprising we haven't seen Nemesis in another form since 2014.

The sequel to Shadow of Mordor exists in leaks and rumors, and no game that I can think of, triple-A or indie, has implemented a similar procedurally generated enemy system. 'Pretty damn repeatable too, no reason that an indie game couldnвЂ™t do this on a text level.'Д«ut now, two years later, Nemesis ripoffs are nowhere to be seen. Shortly after Shadow of Mordor launched, game designer Mike Bithell, creator of Thomas Was Alone and Volume, wrote a blog post breaking down how the Nemesis system is actually a relatively small number of overlapping systems that work together to make you believe some smelly Uruk is going out of his way to harass you. And in late 2014, the big thing everyone was talking about was not just that Shadow of Mordor was a great game (it still is), but that the Nemesis system was the future of enemy design-and ripe for copying. It breathed a sense of history and persistence into an open-world game that was mostly aboutВ running around comboing groups of enemies with Batman: Arkham Asylum's elegant combat system.

In other words, if you were cut down in a fight, the orc that struck the killing blow was promoted, given a unique name, title, and voice lines, and set up to fight you again in the future. Rather than having the droves of nameless orcs you plow through led by predetermined enemies, the game's generals and warchiefs were procedurally generated as you play-primarily from orcs that best you in battle.

New shadow of mordor game