My bet is he's gonna betray main protagonist at the end anyways.

Ratbag acts like a 8-year-old who's pretending to be a superhero........

The trailer is very interesting, it certainly gets your attention and raises your eyebrows. And I believe that is its whole point. Looks okay. Even if the orc-friend seems more of a contemporary comic effect than an actual Mordor grunt. And the hero seems very... I do not know, bland? generic?. But that is just 1:30 of footage, so no real conclusions there.

As to the whole concept of orc cooperation... where to even start? I actually heard that Tolkien in his later years did have some second thoughts on how he had portrayed the orcs from a too simple perspective. In the trilogy they are merely this evil cannon fodder who deserve nothing but a sword to the head. Whether it i trues that the Professor actually felt like that, I cannot really know. Though it feels it might be true and justified: from all the creatures of the middle-earth orcs seem to be the only ones not being able to redeem themselves in any way (and even Gollum or Saruman had their chance, perhaps because once they were good or at least not at all corrupted). So perhaps it is good the game tackles this idea. Could it enrich the universum rather than spoil it? We can hope. But it is more estel than amdir.

I will be buying the game for sure. I cannot see how I couldn't, if only to see how the designers did the characters and environment.

Also, this whole video game pre-release hype is just barf-worthy. Awards? Opinions? Already? the game has not been released yet and it is already showered in prizes. bull, this whole AAA video game market. Still... I cannot say I am not tempted. It is as if Grima was the head of marketing there.

Well, who knows, maybe he is.

On a side note:

>that feel when you wish for some passed author to live longer to explore something in his work that he couldn't during his life.