The option to buy Orcs in the Market may have given you a quick fix, Monolith said, but it perpetually "risked undermining the heart" of Shadow of War's Nemesis system, which has you building up rivalries with villains. It not only compromised the stories the studio wanted to tell, it risked you missing out on your own stories. Just having that choice broke immersion, the company added.

At the same time, Monolith is promising to upgrade the defend-your-fort Shadow Wars section with new story elements and a "more cohesive" experience, while the Nemesis System, skill tree and progression systems will all get updates.

These changes aren't going to have as much impact now as they would have in the fall of 2017, when the game was fresh. That they're happening at all is notable, though. The teams behind Star Wars: Battlefront II and Destiny 2 may have suspended or scaled back the dependence on their in-game economies, but they've always intended to keep real-world purchases in place. Monolith, however, is dropping them entirely -- it's convinced the potential for extra profit hasn't been worth the compromises to gameplay. You could argue that this is a cynical attempt to rekindle buzz for a game that fell off the radar, but it still suggests that opposition to loot boxes and pay-to-win systems is now considered a selling point.