People actually still care about this game?
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was a video game that prioritized profit over quality, your generic cash grab game release relying on the popularity of the franchise to sell subpar content to fanatics and unsuspecting consumers.
Given how Daedalic Entertainment’s reputation consists of no-name video games that came and went without much notice, what the studio is apparently most known for are point and click adventure games, so anyway Daedalic Entertainment suddenly announced and released “Gollum”, a 3D action adventure game based on one of the world’s most notorious franchises created by J. R. R. Tolkien.
And they somehow managed to achieve the impossible, bastardizing The Lord of the Rings to an even worse extent than what Amazon managed to achieve with their “Rings of Power” TV series.
The game was a masterclass in pure unadulterated garbage, graphically speaking for a 2023 title it looked like absolute dogshit and yet somehow managed to play even worse, not even the most notorious video game shills (IGN) could rectify Gollum as anything other than mediocre with a score of 4, while other outlets and individuals, those who don’t have brain damage couldn’t muster scores higher than either a 1 or 2.
Metacritic knows what’s up, with the user score for the game holding firm as one of the lowest if not the lowest received game of all time with an average rating of 1.2/10.
Because in all honesty nobody asked for this piece of shit, who the flying fuck wants to play a Lord of the Rings video game that stars Gollum as the main character?
The game was seemingly rushed by a third rate studio, banking on a profitable franchise and yet flopped spectacularly, so much so that the developers themselves rushed out one of those corporate PR public apology letters that have become all too familiar in modern times.
A corporate apology letter that misspells “The Lord of the Ring”, the franchise of which the fucking game is based on.
And now we apparently know why the apology from Daedalic Entertainment seemed emotionless (like every other) and had grammar anomalies, because allegedly it was written by Chat GPT.
I’d believe it.
Gollum was so universally praised for its awfulness the studio rightfully closed down its developmental division back at the end of June, barely a month after the game released to universal hatred.
According to interviews with several former Daedalic developers, it was revealed that the apology regarding The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was not actually written by the team, but by the publisher Nacon instead. Additionally, Game Two reports that the apology itself was written using ChatGPT and was not double-checked before being published.
Which perfectly explains how they managed to butcher the pronunciation of the games actual name.
Furthermore, the developers disclosed that the budget for the game was approximately 15 million Euros, significantly lower than the costs associated with many AAA games but that’s only because Gollum wasn’t even close to be considered a AA game, it had the unmistaken characteristics of an overly ambitious indie game that failed on all levels, because that’s exactly what it was.
Former Daedalic senior developer Paul Schulze highlighted the situation, stating, “There were experienced developers with 10, 15, 20 years of experience working on the game, and they were talented, but they were limited by the lack of sufficient funding. You can’t just throw more money at something like that, hang on for another year, and then everything will be fine. That’s unrealistic because the game underneath it doesn’t support it.”
A team known for producing POINT AND CLICK games, such as Deponia, The Whispered World and Blackguards now being tasked with producing a 3D action stealth game based on The Lord of the Rings franchise?
Would you honestly expect anything less than complete and utter failure, I am guessing that Daedalic Entertainment was their second choice of studio for producing this lovely video game, the first being Telltale before they went bust.
The notion of lack of “Funding” does not directly correlate with developer incompetence or the challenges of developing complex 3D games on a significant scale, Gollum was destined to fail.
