By Brandin Tyrrel

For the entire month of April, our IGN First is diving deep into Middle-earth: Shadow of War, the hugely ambitious sequel to 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.

As part of that ongoing coverage, we spoke with Monolith Productions Art Director, Philip Straub, and gained a ton of insight into how the team has crafted the visual design. With so many more layers in the Nemesis system, the massive new diverse regions in Mordor, and a brand new gear system, there’s a lot to learn about the look and feel in Shadow of War.

And for more, be sure to check out all of our Shadow of War – IGN First coverage so far!

What have you done in Shadow of War to make it look and feel different from Shadow of Mordor?

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is a much bigger game in every possible way. We have many more regions than we did in the past game. The diversity of the regions is greater. We have a human city, we have our snowy environments, and we have an island type environment that is much more temperate. The temperate island location brings all of the beauty associated with that type of environment, which is quite an interesting juxtaposition of beauty against the war and destruction within Mordor. We also have Cirith Ungol, which is a really amazing location that is essentially a city above the clouds.

The goal with all of our geology was to create unique and interesting biomes that nobody had seen before in Middle-earth and to explore locations that really hadn’t been explored before. Then we actually take that concept and layer on the tribes.

How do the tribes affect the way each region is portrayed in Shadow of War?

So, the tribes are really interesting in that they have a large, overarching impact on the world. The way to think about it is our tribes are essentially Orc cultures. There’s different Orc cultures within the world, and each one of these Orc cultures has an overlord that owns that particular place. And when they own that location, the entire world changes. So the fortress looks different depending on what tribe he’s associated with.

But even more interesting, each overlord has a signature lighting and palette and weather component to it. For example, the Marauder tribe is very much like a band of pirates and they’re stealing from all of the races all over the place to build their power. They’re basically a bunch of greedy guys. So if you go to the Marauder tribe in the snowy location, the fortress of Seregost, the overlord’s going to bring a bright two-o-clock sun to the location to really accentuate all the gold and stuff he’s stolen.

If you have another tribe, say the Mystic tribe, their overlord is going to bring his own lighting and his own weather. So he tends to be a little more stealthy, a little more secretive. And there’s a bit of a necromancy element to him and that lighting and palette and weather is going to be different.

So if the tribes change the region they control, how does each tribe define the look of its orcs?

There are visual components that are associated with that, too. The system itself is built on the foundation of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor’s, but it’s much more complex in that there are more components that are interchangeable that can be added or taken away relative to your interaction with the Orc over the lifecycle of your relationship with that Orc. Then we also have a much more expanded scarring system, we have piercings, we have all kinds of fun hairdos they can get – obviously fitting in with the lore.

Something that we’ve touched a bit in some of the content we’ve released that is really exciting from my perspective is, each tribe has their class weapon, but they also have a special weapon that is associated with the tribe. So for example, you may have a Feral tribe Orc who essentially has a gauntlet on his arm that has talons that shoot out. It’s sort of like a Wolverine type attack. That attack means that when you engage him, you have to use other abilities and other strategies in order to take him down. Each of these tribes have multiple attacks associated with that tribe-specific weapon as well.

With Shadow of War’s larger and more diverse landscape, how do you create regions that feel realistic and different from one another?

One of the cool things we do for our geology is on-location shoots. For a fair amount of our locations there are coordinated photo shoots in areas like eastern Washington. This is an area that has enhanced the creative development of Shadow of War (as well as Shadow of Mordor) because the overall landscape speaks well to Mordor. This part of the country was very volcanic at one time and there are still some volcanoes around here. So we do broad based photo shoots, but we also do very close and detailed shoots to understand how to break down those materials and the geology over time that forms those worlds.

The other thing we do that’s a fairly new thing, but it’s been going in games for at least a few years, is photogrammetry. We do shoots of some of the geography, then we take those photographs and map that into the game to ensure authenticity. For example, eastern Washington, Alaska, Iceland, all of those places we looked at as influences for geography.

How does the Nemesis system make an encounter with an a procedurally generated orc feel unique?

We’ve created an incredibly large amount of content this time around. There are hundreds of thousands of permutations that you can see in what an Orc can look like. We have all of the different personalities and the different body animations that are associated with their different personality traits.

We also have an incredible amount of facial animations, a much larger pool than what we had in Shadow of Mordor. All of this content is procedural. The art that is created by the character art team is procedural and can be combined in many different permutations to fit a role, a tribe, or a personality. The facial animation associated with that character is procedural. Even the body animations associated with that is procedurally generated.

We have our camera system, what we call our realization cameras. That’s a completely emergent piece that is grabbing a camera relative to what is happening in the world and the camera is basically going, “what’s around me, who are the actors?” And then it says, “oh I’m going to find the best position and then film this.”

So much of the Nemesis system is seeing those Orcs return horribly mangled by your last encounter. Is that going to be as big a factor in Shadow of War?

The scarring system that we have now has been greatly expanded. We have a full variety of different types of mutilation that the player can put on Orcs in combat. We have a much more advanced burn system. We have a much more advanced poison system. The Orcs in the world can get poisoned and the looks of their faces or their bodies change dramatically. They can also get cursed. And, you know, we’ve increased our severing system. So you can slice dudes in half.

What about Talion and Celebrimbor? With the new gear system will we see a big difference in our character?

In Shadow of War, we’ve expanded the RPG system extensively, and that translates into a huge variety of visual components and visual elements that you can use to customize Talion. He can look completely different depending on where you are in the game.

We’re bringing in influences for his gear from some of the dwarven motifs that people think of, those more geometric shapes, which gives Talion a completely different look. We’re bringing in elven visual motifs. So elven armor, some more organic, swooping shapes. We’re bringing in a number of other cultures and really, it’s amazing because everyone’s used to Talion in that standard uniform that we saw in the previous iteration of the franchise. And now we’ve got this incredible amount of customization that just brings a completely different look to our hero.

Is it difficult working on new things in an established universe? Are there rules you have to follow?

It’s really not limiting at all. I don’t feel limited at all. We have such a good relationship with Middle-earth Enterprises in terms of how we develop our content. Because of that, we’re able to stay within the lore. Michael de Plater and I have a very deep understanding of what makes sense and what doesn’t. So there’s nothing like having a creative sandbox to work with that’s quite large and then figuring out how to expand that universe in a meaningful way.

There’s great care going into ensuring that we have that level of realism, because for us, this franchise, it is about the authenticity, but it’s essentially for us. It’s a historic piece that is based on a fantastic element, a fantastic story.

Brandin Tyrrel is an Editor at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter at @BrandinTyrrel.