Before Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor was released in 2014, Monolith Productions was preparing to head in a very different direction with its principal project. The team was working on a Batman game rooted in the ‘Nolanverse’ under the codename ‘Project Apollo’. It would have been a fully open-world Batman title set in the gritty heart of Gotham City, featuring a wide variety of stealth and combat mechanics inspired by the Arkham games and leaning on the ‘Nemesis System’ that later surfaced in Shadow of Mordor.
Recently, images and some short snippets of gameplay appeared online, courtesy of SpideyRanger on Twitter, who compiled the content from various sources, including developer portfolios.
From Batman to LOTR
In a series of comments, it was explained that Warner Bros., the eventual publisher of Shadow of Mordor, disagreed with having two Batman franchises running in parallel. It was just one year after Shadow of Mordor was released that Arkham Knight launched, of course. Not only that but there were also reports of issues getting ‘Nolan’s approval’ on some of the designs proposed for Project Apollo, which used models from the Dark Knight movies.
This isn’t the first time that this content has surfaced, but it’s one of the best collections of content pulled from the game’s scrapped development cycle that we’ve seen.
It would have been a monumental title, especially as it would have been the first outing of the Nemesis System, which sees enemies remember the player character and evolve, building grudges, learning how the player fights, and re-appearing later in the game with alterations based on previous clashes. Fortunately, this system will be used in Monolith’s Wonder Woman, which is in development now.
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