Warner Bros. officially announced it with a trailer today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__N7mt5Clwg

It's just a CG trailer, the story is pretty much what I said on the OP, there's nothing to inform the gameplay in the trailer.

The one significant information in it is the confirmation of the release date as the 27th of August, and that it is indeed coming to Steam.

still have to play the first one here :). But guess it's good news for people who already finished it and liked it as it is/was a decent enough game i guess

So yeah, the trailer basically confirmed all my thoughts about this. The whole thing kinda reminds me of those russian sequels to LotR- could have been great if it was it's own thing, but trying to attach it to Tolkien's legendarium ruins it.

They're able to circumvent the estate by basing the games on the movies.

So it's a license of a license? How is this even legally feasible?

Can't wait!!!

No, seriously, I can't wait. I know next to nothing about the game and I haven't played the first game so I have much better things to do with my time than just wait for a game in which I have no real interest at this point.

Such as making forum posts about games you don't care about? :P

Exactly! If I was waiting for that game, I wouldn't have had time to write the earlier message! Or this one, for that matter!

Well, yeah, the whole concept of the game is kinda heretic ^^

But once you ignore the whole "Tolkien's Mordor" deal (and the Gollum cameos), the first game was a pretty cool Arkham-like.

Not perfect, mind : The story was meh, the countryside pretty ugly, and I found the Batman and Mad Max games more engaging and exciting.
But it has its cool moments, like the assassination gameplay

or the Nemesis system. The orcish warlords and lieutenants evolve : They gain XP and new abilities when they survive an encounter with you (by killing you, forcing you to retreat or fleeing themselves) or when they manage to get the upper hand against another warlord, they plot, help and betray each other, they rise from the ranks when their leader got killed, sometime an orc you killed a few hours ago comes back from the dead heavily disfigured...
All of them have different abilities (call reinforcement, immune to sneak attacks...) and weaknesses (fear of fire attacks, lone wolf without bodyguards...) and get new ones as they get experience
End result is that you get to know them, and "organically" have your own enemies. Like that guy you simply don't manage to defeat head on and that killed you 4 times already, and became a respected warlord because of it... Until you corrupt his two bodyguards, or set up an ambush to exploit his only weakness.

Really cool system. I didn't care about the story nor about the good guys (because they only get to appear in the meh campaign missions), but I did care about those ugly bastards, especially that master hunter who made an habit to one-shot me with a javelin and then make some bad poetry about how he had killed me again and again.

The most I got out of the Nemesis system was running into an Uruk captain three times in the first few hours. Only because I didn't chop his stupid head off during the first two encounters, and that was kind of it as far as I remember.

Uruk Captain: "You see this scar?"
Me: "Who are you?"
Uruk Captain: "You're the one who did this to me!"
Me: "Oh yeah. Didn't I kill you already?"

I also remember it being pretty easy throughout, which kind of made the game a slog at times.

Meh, it was an alright game for the most part.

This and new Batman. I'm excited.

I've heard of a creature that's referred to as "lawyer" that would probably be able to explain how something like that is legally feasible. I'm certain I'd fail at giving an apt description of lawyers and of their legendary, if not absolutely incredible, capabilities. Perhaps there's some information on the Internet about them.

It looks awesome! sadly, the DLC policies killed my interest on it at short-term, $100 for the complete game is a huge ripoff.

Well, I'm not a lawyer but my understanding of this sort of thing is it's more like a spin-off than a license of a license. WB owns both the movie studio that made the movies and Monolith, who create these games. You'll note that everything in the games looks either exactly like the movies or looks like it's extrapolated from the movies' style. So that's how they justify the games - they're not based on the book itself but on the movies they adapted from the book, and they're not based on or even similar to anything in The Silmarillion or any of Tolkien's other books, which are not available for licensing and probably would make Christopher Tolkien lawyer up.