Shelob, the giant spider featured in JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, will be featured in Middle-earth: Shadow of War, Monolith's sequel due to hit PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on October 10th.
In fact, as revealed during San Diego Comic-Con 2017 by the developers, Shelob will shapeshift for at least part of the game into a rather attractive woman (played by Pollyanna McIntosh, seen in The Walking Dead) despite none of this ever having been hinted as part of Shelob's capabilities by Tolkien.
This reignited the debate surrounding Monolith's more than liberal use of the Lord of the Rings lore. In an interview with Metro GameCentral, Design Director Bob Roberts commented that Monolith has "huge fans" of the fantasy world created by JRR Tolkien and they don't propose "things that are insane and unjustified".
[...] we run everything through Middle-earth Enterprises. They vet all of our ideas and we get feedback from them on specific details. Like, for example, if there’s an enemy who’s evil his blood must be black. So all of these things have to be consistent and we are huge fans, so we don’t propose things that are insane and unjustified.
Yeah, she’s sort of demigod. And we give our justifications when we pass this stuff along for approvals, to say, ‘This is where we pulled the rationale for doing this thing that wasn’t in the books but we think makes sense in this context’.
We have to do what we think makes for the best game, the best story, and telling some new stories and not just rehashing the only existing things that have been written. So, we do enjoy bringing something new to the table, and we do feel that’s worth a little bit of trouble. But, obviously, it’s a huge world with a massive fanbase and they don’t always agree with each other either.
Frankly, I'm finding it hard to justify this one, even though I'm far from a lore zealot. It's equally hard to shake the feeling that this wasn't simply done to add sex appeal to the mix.
Let's hope this narrative arc will turn out to be coherent unto itself, at least.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
