Author: John Scalzo

Insert Quarter is our showcase for some of the best and most interesting writing about video games on the Internet.

In this installment, Austin Walker, writing for Paste, contemplates the rich lives of non-player characters found in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Watch Dogs. Each game attempts to create a background for each NPC, specifically the Orc Captains that stalk Shadow of Mordor’s Talion through the game’s “Nemesis System” and the petty criminals of Watch Dogs that cause pain for so many of the game’s other citizens.

I’ve been thinking about non-player characters for four months now. I’ve been thinking about them ever since I stood over the body of the eleventh man I killed in Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs. He had a sneering face and a stuffed bank account. The game told me that he was listed on FBI watch list. His name was William Jones. I shot him three times: twice in the back and once in the head.

[…]

Monolith offers the player all sorts of ways to fail [in Shadow of Mordor]. As Talion, I regularly overcommitted to combat deep inside of Orkish strongholds only to find myself surrounded by dozens of Uruk-hai, including a few powerful enemy captains. The Arkham series of games taught me that if I could just counter enough attacks, I’d never fail. No matter their number, the Joker’s henchmen would always leave room for me to knock them around. That is not the case here. Even in the final hours of the game, with almost all of Talion’s abilities unlocked, I was once dropped to one knee by ranged attacks and then instantly killed by a particularly strong captain. I wasn’t sent to a “Retry?” screen. Instead, the Orc who killed me rose in rank, and when he saw me later, laughed in my face. My failure—the act of my death—was not erased; it was just made more complicated, more interesting.

You can read the rest of the article at Paste.