With ‘Wonder Woman’ Axed, WB’s Nemesis System Is In Jail For A Decade – Forbes
Wonder Woman WB Games just took a cleaver to a number of studios, shutting down Monolith, Player First Games and WB San Diego. The first of which means that Monolith’s long-gestating Wonder Woman game is now officially cancelled after the public heard nothing about its progress for years, outside of insider reporting.But that reporting? It painted a picture of a game struggling for years and perhaps for years to come after a reboot. One item was that the game was supposed to use Monolith’s famed Nemesis System from its Shadow of Mordor days, albeit this time tweaking it for allies of Diana, though that was later changed back to enemies.The existence of the Nemesis System is a wildly frustrating pain point in the industry given that WB owns the copyright to the concept of killing enemies, them coming back and evolving under a hierarchy of bad guys to face you again, which made its Mordor games stand out (at least until the sequel started selling Orcs as microtransactions).Shadow of MordorNow the fate of the system is unclear, as the studio using it has been shut down, and according to Insider Gaming, WB owns the patent for the Nemesis System until the year 2036, meaning no other publisher or developer can use it if WB keeps paying to hold onto it, and there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t.It’s an incredibly interesting system that has been painfully unexplored given these stipulations, and whatever happened with this upcoming Wonder Woman game, at the very least, players were excited to see it come back to life in some form or another just to see how it could be utilized and how it might evolve. Now, that’s not happening, and it’s not clear when it will even be seen again. My thoughts turn to a supposed new Arkham game that Rocksteady is working on after the disastrous Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, as who knows if somehow that could be worked into a Batman game if the plan was to make it work for Wonder Woman.WB Games has been in a strange spot, with corporate leadership saying they want to lean more heavily into live service (which apparently Wonder Woman was not) even though Hogwarts Legacy was a massive single player hit with 25+ million copies sold, and Suicide Squad, a live looter shooter, lost $200 million.WB’s David Zaslav has spoken about wanting to lean hard into “billion dollar” franchises, namely DC, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones for new games, but right now, there does not seem to be all that much of a method to the madness, and now we have loads of layoffs and shutdowns as all this continues.Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
