You might recall that Monolith Productions and Warner Bros. announced a few days ago that Middle-earth: Shadow of War would be delayed on all platforms from its original August 22nd launch date to October 10th.

　　The developers have been hosting a regular Twitch live stream on Fridays and the latest, twelfth episode provided some information regarding the delay.

　　VP of Creative Micheal de Plater said:

　　This build is old, there's a bunch of stuff we fixed already. We're embarrassed to even show it, our E3 build is light years ahead. The thing that we've learned during the course of making this game, is how much Shadow of War is bigger than the previous game in every dimension. The size of the game, the number of enemies, the complexity of the combat system, the Nemesis system...

　　The process of actually testing, debugging, fixing bugs is just absolutely massive. We know that when this game ships, the level of polish and stability and balance has to be that of Shadow of Mordor, so there's a really high bar that we have to meet.

　　This makes perfect sense and it's exactly why I wrote an op-ed stating that delaying Middle-earth: Shadow of War was an excellent choice by Warner Bros. in terms of release window and additional time for Monolith to polish the whole experience, given the massive scope and more prominent RPG elements added to this sequel.

　　Shadow of War will be showcased in all likelihood at Microsoft's E3 Briefing, scheduled for next Sunday at 2PM Pacific Time. Given that it was the first game to announce official support for Scorpio, we could be looking at Scorpio footage showcasing this improved E3 build aforementioned by the developers.

　　The full stream is now available for playback via YouTube and we've embedded it below. They showcased some pretty cool new combat abilities, so if you're into that you might want to watch it.