8 Popular Video Game Mechanics That Suddenly Disappeared
2. The Nemesis System
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was widely praised for its highly creative and ludicrously entertaining Nemesis System, which kept track of the player's interactions with Uruk foes throughout the game.
If an Uruk survived an encounter with you, for instance, they might show up later with memories of the prior fight and even retain injuries from it.
Uruks who manage to kill the player will meanwhile be promoted to captain, while players could also try to instigate in-fighting among the ranks to unsettle Sauron's army.
It was a wonderfully clever way to make even the most pedestrian combat situations feel more meaningful, yet aside from reappearing in 2017's sequel Shadow of War, Nemesis has gone the way of the dodo.
Unlike every other mechanic on this list, though, we do have a reason why Nemesis fell off the face of the Earth. As it turns out, Warner Bros. pursued a patent for the system in the years following Shadow of Mordor's release, as was finally granted in 2021.
And so despite Nemesis clearly being a mechanic with ripe applications across so many game genres, developers were spooked out of even trying to imitate it, lest they feel the might of Warner Bros.' lawyers.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey's mercenaries system dipped a toe in with its a very dumbed-down facsimile of Nemesis, but that's it.
Though Warner's upcoming Wonder Woman game will reportedly be using the system again, it shouldn't have taken them roughly a decade to bring it back off the bench.