Monolith want to "weave" the sandbox and story together

Middle-earth: Shadow of War has been in the limelight recently, for reasons both bad, but last month we spoke to design director on the game, Bob Roberts, about the sandbox elements.

"We've shown a lot of the fort assaults and when people get hands on, they can do whatever they want, we want to give them the sandbox to explore and play around in," Roberts explained. Shortly after he went on to say that "it's not just fort assaults; it's an epic, middle-earth story, and we've got this huge campaign to compliment all the procedural stuff that's going on and try to weave things together better between the procedural sandbox and the main story missions."

Despite some of the recent news, Shadow of War is still shaping up to be a heavy hitter next month. Will you be picking the game up? Check out the rest of the interview below and let us know in the comments.