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.