Warner Bros. axes three studios ahead of update to investors

Plus: The changing tastes of VR gamers, according to Skydance's Shawn Kittelsen

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. Screenshot: Monolith Productions, WB Games

The recent history of Warner Bros. Games, which took a bleak turn today, can be told through the parallel history of a gaming idea called The Nemesis System.

It’s a brief history: a burst of greatness that, over time, seemed to be oddly squandered.

• It’s 2014, and the esteemed studio Monolith Productions (No One Lives Forever, F.E.A.R.) has ben owned by Warner Bros. for a decade. Monolith releases Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, a third-person action adventure that has a whiff of the then-hot Assassin’s Creed franchise. It also contains a brilliant idea that makes combat with even the lowliest orc the potential starting point of a game-long quest for vengeance. The “nemesis system” networks all of the game’s quirky and loathsome enemy orcs into a hierarchical web. When any of these fellows kill your character during the ordinary course of action-game melee combat, they become more powerful and move up the command chain. That orc becomes the player’s nemesis, a more significant foe for her to defeat once she respawns and continues her adventure. From this system emerges scores of unexpected in-game feuds, as players hunt down the enemies who most bedeviled them. It’s great. Monolith is celebrated.

• It’s 2016, and WB is so proud and protective of the excellent the nemesis system that it applies to patent it.