11 Ways Monolith Should Have Made Shadow Of War
2. Either Take The Lore Seriously Or Don't Use It
While Shadow of War faced a lot of ire for making some radical changes to the Lord of the Rings lore, the problem wasn't the fact that the game diverged from the books and movies, it was that it then tried to tie itself into them so "definitively" in the end.
Turning Shelob into a pin-up model and tying her story directly into Sauron's isn't a problem in and of itself, but when the game tries to make this alternate history official canon, it's doomed to rub fans the wrong way.
Making all of these changes for the sake of the game is one thing, but then having them impact the stories of the main canon is something completely different. Sadly, Shadow of War just doesn't have the storytelling prowess to pull it off.
Monolith needed to either carve out their own little section of Middle-Earth and go nuts with changing whatever they want, or spend time getting the world of the fiction right, before telling a true Lord of the Rings tale.