I'll be honest, though, and tell you that I was so weary toward the end of the game that I didn't do anything with loot boxes in my playthrough. I was too focused on hammering out all of the quests, but it seems like they go you thinking. What's in those boxes?

Austin: Okay hold the phone, wait. I'm now extremely glad I didn't finish the Bruz questline. Fuck, dude. Bruz seemed cool as hell! Talion should've just let him have the fort! Dude put in work, he earned at least one fort.

What's actually interesting here is that Bruz's story is this careful blend of scripted and generated events (unless all of the Bruz stuff, necromancer included, was pre-penned, which seems unlikely). In your Polygon piece you stress a divide between narrative—Celebrimbor is clearly a fascist and Talion is a complicit abetter who will have to face his sins one day—and mechanics—the player happily enslaves countless orcs because it's a core mechanic and because the depth of the game happens there.

I think you and I have both written about various binaries that we use when analyzing games: "scripted" vs. "systemic," "gameplay" vs. "story," "easy" vs. "hard." They're useful to us as critics, even though they're often reductive, and sometimes because they're easy we can fall into the trap of forgetting that reality is way more complex than these simple dualities. Bruz's story sounds like it collapses that binary: It unfolds a singular, nihilistic narrative through a blend of hand-made content (writing, voice acting, quest design) and the dynamic storytelling of the Nemesis System.

That model of blending hand crafted and procedurally generated (or procgen) content seems like something we'll see more and more of in the next few years. (As a reminder, No Man's Sky did something very similar to great effect with their Atlas Rises patch earlier this year.) But there is something important to remember about this sort of storytelling as we continue down this road: The algorithm, as it were, is not neutral.