Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor almost had climbable Great beasts

At some point during development, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor let you climb the hulking, rhinocerous-like Great beasts, according to a post-mortem written by design director Michael de Plater on Gamasutra.

These guys:

The feature was eventually cut as developer Monolith focused on the core parts of the game, like the Nemesis System, which had some big changes itself.

Plater goes through the biggest successes of the project and the biggest hurdles the team had during development. For example: Monolith used gameplay demos as milestones to maintain constant progress.

“One of the key ways that we tried to stay on target was to “always be shipping” – that is to have meaningful consumer facing demos or deliverables no more than three months apart,” Plater wrote. “Sometimes demos, such as E3, can be treated as inconvenient distractions from the main product and schedule.”

Give the post-mortem a read. It’s not often we get to hear about the process of making the big games. And let’s hope the climbable Great beasts return, because it’s not like we’re getting a sequel to Shadow of the Colossus any time soon.