Shadow of Mordor is losing its online features

One of the uglier orcs in Shadow of Mordor
(Image credit: Warner Bros.)

When Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor released in 2014 it included a handful of online features. Those are about to be deprecated, as a note on its Steam page explains. As of December 31, the nemesis forge, vendetta missions, leaderboards, and WBPlay connections will all be unavailable. Here's the full list of affected features.

  • The Nemesis Forge feature will no longer be available. Therefore, players will no longer be able to transfer their in-game Nemeses from Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor to Middle-earth: Shadow of War.
  • Vendetta missions and Leaderboards will no longer be available.
  • WBPlay will no longer be available, but the epic runes "Orc Hunter" and "Gravewalker" will automatically be awarded to all players.

The vendetta missions allowed players to get revenge on behalf of their Steam friends, with orcs who had slain someone on your friends list showing up in your game so they could be hunted for an achievement called Repaid in Blood. Like everything else on that list it's a minor aspect of Shadow of Mordor that I frankly won't miss, but it's still disconcerting to see parts of a game being removed after the fact. Especially a singleplayer game like Shadow of Mordor.

The sequel, Shadow of War, inspired the saga of Mozû the Blight. Which ended like this. Never forget Mozû.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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