If you were playing Monolith's Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, one thing that you might have noticed is that while the game had DLC, it lacked the ability for you to open special creates, or spend additional money in-game to get new equipment. In a new post on their forums, Warner Bros. has decided to ease your mind and announced that Middle-earth: Shadow of War will be there for you with a microtransaction premium currency and a series of crates and boosts available to purchase with the premium currency and in-game currency.

All of these purchases will be made through an in-game store, called the Market, which will work with both the premium Gold currency or the in-game Mirian currency. Mirian is returning from Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, and you earn it by finding it in the world, missions, defeating treasure orcs, recycling gear, or destroying orc followers for their gear, which you can then recycle. Gold can be purchased and will be awarded additionally for community challenges and reaching specific milestones.

What are in those chests? Well, there are two main types of chests: Loot Chests and War Chests. Let's take a look at each here:

Loot Chests contain weapons and armor of varying quality, and can also contain XP Boosts that you can use to level up Talion faster.

War Chests contain Orc Followers of varying quality and rarity to help your army out. It can also contain Training Orders for leveling up and customizing your Orc Followers. When you deploy orcs from your garrison to bases or regions that you get from chests, they and their gear are scaled to your level.

Beyond the chests, you can also buy XP Boosts separately as they are consumable,and bundles that package together chests and boosts, apparently at a discount.

While Monolith and WB are saying that no content is exclusive to gold, it is worth noting that some of the content in them, like Training Orders, is only found in chests. It is, however, purchasable with Mirian, and orcs with those abilities can be found in the wild, if with less control than purchasing with gold gives you.

There are also several different tiers of chests. These rank from silver to Mithril, with an increasing price. Silver chests are purchasable with Mirian; gold and mithril are only purchasable with gold. For Loot chests here is how it was shown in the stream (gold and mithril loot chests were not shown):

Silver Loot Chest: Costs 500 Mirian, gives 2 pieces of gear (weapons or armor) with at least 1 rare

Silver War Chest: Costs 1000 Mirian, gives 2 Orc Followers with at least 1 Epic, and 1 consumable either a Training Order or a Boost like XP or Spoils of War Boost (which they wouldn't explain). Training Orders can give things like leveling, reassigning, mounts, levels, or more including epic trains.

Gold War Chests: Costs 200 Gold, gives 3 Orc Followers with at least 1 Legendary and 2 Epic, along with 2 Consumables

Mithril War Chest: Costs 600 Gold, gives 4 Legendary Orc Followers and 1 Legendary Training Order (the one shown let you upgrade any orc to legendary)

Specialty Warchests include things like an "Olog Reinforced War Chest" which was a specialty version of the Gold War Chest that cost 260 Gold giving you the same thing, aside from guaranteeing at least one would be an Olog.

If you want to look at the stream you can view it here which has some footage of unlocking chests and how it works shown by the developers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF3G7xV6VgQ

Quick Take

Personally, I'm still experiencing some whiplash from them repeating in the forum that it will not impact how you play or force choices. The fact that the garrison assignments are done through there and that the only way to get training orders to customize your orcs is via chests means that it is being pushed. While you can do it without paying more, buying a silver war chest, which has no guarantee of a training order, costs the same as upgrading one of your fortresses.

They also are talking about how it interacts with DLC, meaning that this game is going to have the trifecta of payment methods with $60 entry, microtransactions, and DLC all involved. Personally, it gets a little tiring having a game constantly with its hand out for more.

What do you think of the Middle-earth: Shadow of War microtransaction market? Do you think this is a fair way of implementing it? Share your thoughts in the comments below