Shying away from traditional fantasy elements may seem like a strange approach to a game set in Middle-earth, but director of design Michael de Plater and lead writer Christian Cantamessa are building a more grounded and historically-inspired take on Tolkien's world. Your main adversaries in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor will be orcs, more accurately they are an elite breed of orcs called "Uruks", that are under Sauron's control. When visiting the studio for our December cover story, we learned that the team at Monolith Productions are taking great care to present these orcs in an interesting and more complex light than the typical fantasy archetype.

Watch the video interview below to learn how the team is crafting the orcs as extreme versions of humans and which question about orc society they were hoping wouldn't be asked.

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