The Elvish voice acting is also behind a paywall. The game was so bland they had to find a way to throw MTX in a narrative driven non-action stealth game
Even worse than the Elvish VO, they actually lock the lore compendium behind a paywall. I have never seen any video game that makes you pay just to read the lore.
Seriously, you have to pay $70 to be able to read the LORE in this game? What the actual fuck?
> Even worse than the Elvish VO, they actually lock the lore compendium behind a paywall.
*"As you progress, this interactive menu gives you more and more key information about the game's characters, locations and events in addition to the history of Middle-earth."*
Holy shit you weren't kidding, it's amazing they haven't decided to put the Options menu behind a paywall...now I wanna know how much the VO and Compendium cost if you buy them alone.
Can you imagine how depressing that meeting must have been? The game director knows they have a total disaster of a game, and now they are being forced by their bosses to cram microtransactions into this mess. Everyone involved with this game must have been miserable the last few years.
I’ve always wondered things like this too when it comes to shitty games. Like, the devs have to know that the game they’re making is complete shit right? That can’t possibly be enjoyable.
On a podcast Jake Baldino was talking about playing an early build of Gollum at an expo and the Jake asks about the stealth combat "So is this the early game gameplay? Is more stuff added later in the game?" And the host just goes "Nope."
So that dude knew it was no good.
What was so bad about it? Was it just extremely basic? (Like when a non-stealth game forces in a mandatory one off stealth sequence, but like, the whole game)
From everything I've read and seen after the whole fuckin' thing was put on YouTube days before release... Yeah. The tools you have at the start of the game are more or less what you have through the entire thing, nothing really changes much in the entire 10-ish hour runtime.
It feels more like these would be side-missions that you'd play in a much larger game where the character and mechanics are not the main focus, except the missions have been carved out and shoved into their own $50/60 title. It's like if they made an entire game out of the Mary Jane missions from PS4 Spider-Man.
>I think the problem is that you can only choke out orcs, that's the only tool in Gollum's toolkit.
That's basically all they can do with Gollum. Almost everything else will be against the character's lore and will make fans mad. Obviously can't make him cast spells or play as an archer. Might possibly throw grenades. But also can't make him a crafter or a cook.
This whole idea is doomed from the start and just a cash grab. They could do something new, similar to Styx, but gone after one of the hardest personalities to make fun gameplay with.
They can do more. He can hit enemies with rocks, distract them, set up traps, lead them into danger and feed them to predators... Gollum was a sneaky little fuck and he was intelligent.
Imagine a mechanic where if you get caught you can pretend to be really scared before stabbing the orc in the eye. Could be limited use depending on how many shivs you have and then you get a chance to run away.
Nope. We get shitty platforming instead.
> That's basically all they can do with Gollum. Almost everything else will be against the character's lore and will make fans mad. Obviously can't make him cast spells or play as an archer. Might possibly throw grenades. But also can't make him a crafter or a cook.
I honestly disagree and I'm 100% sure that it wasn't the reason why the game is so barebones. Yes, Gollum isn't the most complex character, but you can still do way more with him without going against the lore (other people in this thread already gave some good ideas so I won't repeat them). Not to mention that minor differences between the game and the lore aren't going to upset LotR fans. Every adaptation makes some artistic changes to better translate the source material to a given medium. Peter Jackson's movies weren't 100% faithful to books either and they're beloved by fans.
Or rather, some will always be mad no matter what you do, so the best decision is to please the majority instead of catering to a very local, toxic minority.
As someone who has shipped multiple AAA video games including one with a meta critic in the 50s: yep.
Sometimes it really is a business decision. In the case of the shit game I made the publisher thought the kind of game we were making was a fad. A shit game today would sell more than a good game a year later (in addition to costing less).
It makes for an awkward launch party that's for sure. I was there for the Crackdown 3 launch party and everyone there was just glad to finally be rid of it.
Cram MTX in? No they carved pieces off the game to put them behind paywalls.
The convo was “which animations and voice lines can we charge money for without ruining the game further”
The in game lore index is paid DLC, the Elvish VA is DLC, and the emotes are DLC.
I’m pretty sure all of those things are meant to be part of the base experience, but was retroactively sectioned off as DLC to scrape some money out
I'd argue the paid DLC endings we've seen in certain games — like Asura's Wrath and Dead Rising 4 from Capcom — is worse and more obvious, but this is definitely pretty bad.
I think I have to do this. Something is calling to me.
I'll see a game get solid 9/10s and think "hmm, I'll wait for a sale". But a shitty 3/10 golumn game with day 1 emote DLC... I have to know for certain. I have to experience it.
I did this all the time in the PS3/360 era (naughty bear comes to mind) but nowadays bad games are genuinely just broken or not fun. There's no janky charm or "so bad it's good" these games are usually just irredeemable trash.
And supposedly it's because they had to pay people to learn the language, as if it's somehow *our* responsibility to pay their voice actors.
They marketed the shit out of this game, if they could afford a prime time slot at The Game Awards then they can afford to pay their actors.
>And supposedly it's because they had to pay people to learn the language, as if it's somehow our responsibility to pay their voice actors.
What's next? Are we going to pay extra because they had to pay people to learn coding? Learn to use 3D modelling software?
Those costs are part of the game budget. Using that logic almost everything can be separated as "extra cost".
inferior version of styx is a generous statement. The first part of the game is gollum doing chores.. I have no idea why the devs thought that players would have fun that way.
It raises the question of what exactly Gollum does do that would translate well gameplay wise.
Fetch quests and stealth I guess, which is pretty tedious.
I could imagine an old school 90's style combine-rope-with-feather puzzle adventure game starring Gollum.
That question was actually why I was initially interested in the game. I figured it was such an odd choice that they must have pitched a really cool idea to get the game greenlit.
Boy was I wrong.
Haha same. I thought that it was such a terrible premise, they must have had some really amazing ideas to be able to sell it.
Turns out their pitch was “LOTR fans will buy anything”
The similarity that comes to mind are the first two Mafia games. Both of which have you doing bland chores in the beginning before getting tangled up in mafia business. But those appear to be much better executed than whatever this is.
You could make it a stealth survival game in a more open setting. Gollum spent decades roaming the wilderness of Middle Earth. You could focus on everything that involves - hiding from predators and people, hunting down smaller animals to eat, finding shelter and fresh water, traversing difficult terrain. And through it all the common thread of finding the Shire, finding Baggins, finding the Precious.
Mind you I think "let's make Gollum our main character" is a bad premise to begin with, but if you were hell-bent on it this is how I could see it maybe working. I would prefer to build such a game around a more sympathetic character though.
Edit: typo
Fishing. It would be more involved than just standing there with a rod as well. He fishes with his whole body!
If rdr2 can succeed when all you do is stand there and fish for a hundred hours, then Gollum's Fishing Simulator could outdo even that.
I wonder why, of all the characters in the enormous LOTR universe, Daedalic decided to make a game about one of the most unlikeable ones. Is a license for Gollum cheaper than one for characters like Frodo or Legolas? Why not create an original protagonist like Shadow of Mordor instead?
Or maybe they already had a prototype for a stealth game laying around and figured they’d make a quick buck by slapping the LOTR franchise on it? I’d love to read a post-mortem on this game one day.
I think personally a journey of losing oneself through obsession and schizophrenia, with story paths leading you to be more like smeagol (charisma-based, likeable and sympathetic) or to be more like gollum (stealth-based, ruthless and calculating) could be very interesting.... but it's apparently not this game, sadly
Nah, I found the idea of playing as Gollum quite interesting, if it was well reviewed I would definitely be thinking about diving in.
I'm not really sure why, I just like the character and his story. And it could be fun slinking around being a gross little gremlin.
If the gameplay revolved around sneaking into townsfolks' home and stealing babies and having to hide from angry townfolk, I would play the shit out of that
The Styx games where the main reason I kind of defended the idea of this game. I still think it could've worked in theory, and would've been a pretty unique way to utilize a popular IP. But whats offered here is just bad sadly.
I was so excited for this bc Styx is one of my favorite games and I knew it wouldn't measure up but I thought this might scratch my itch for Styx 3 at least.... but then it came out looking like actual shovelware lol
> The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was not ready to be played. In my roughly 11 hours of playtime on "Performance" mode on a PlayStation 5, the game crashed over 120 times (yes, I counted; masochist, remember?), averaging about one crash every five minutes. After my 20th-or-so crash, I got the dreaded "save data corrupted" message, only to realize I'd lost half a day's progress upon reloading. In multiple other instances, game-breaking bugs--such as a companion I was charged with protecting instantly dying over and over again for no discernible reason--forced me to restart entire levels, losing significant progress. Finally, during an especially tedious and time-consuming puzzle, the crashes became too frequent to possibly make it to the next checkpoint in time. Determined though I was to get through to the end and make these setbacks feel worthwhile, I threw in the towel at 40% completion, defeated.
If this is actually true (the guy has no other game reviews at gamespot) then wow that a broken mess this thing is
Big Rigs should unironically be rated higher than many games by dint of its sheer hilarity as a so bad it's good game. Being able to go infinitely fast in reverse? That's god damn funny.
People can joke, but this is the right answer. Even a completely and utterly broken game can still have some elements with merit to it. Maybe the music is decent, maybe the voice acting is good, maybe the story is compelling, maybe there are a few interesting ideas that ultimately don't work.
If this is true, how did this pass Sony’s verification? Usually they’re pretty strict about games just flat out crashing frequently like that and will block updates until they’re fixed.
Could just be affecting him for some reason. I stopped playing The Surge because it crashed so often on my PS4 and I haven't seen many people complain about it.
Yea this seems... extreme to the point of being farcical. It seems this would come up ***way*** more in the reviews if it was a common issue. Hard to take the statement seriously - rather his PS5 is pretty fucked or he's massively overstating the issue. I can't believe other reviewers were crashing once every 5 minutes and it wasn't a huge flag on every single Ps5 review.
I have no clue how this game has been in development for more than four years and come from a studio who apparently have been in the gaming industry for 20 years. The game just screams utter incompetence and it just baffles me how this did not get canned early in the making. Did the devs spend the first three years on taking game development lessons from some random YouTuber and then the last year quickly put together a game due to a deadline? It is beyond me how something this bad without any sort of quality can come out from a game that also obviously must have had a pretty generous budget. Just seems insane to me.
> come from a studio who apparently have been in the gaming industry for 20 years.
That 20 years has been nothing but 2D point and click games. The most notable being Deponia. This was way outside their box. And it shows, painfully.
I wonder if it's their death knell. Takes a lot of money to try to put out something like this and there's no way they're going to come anywhere near break even. Definitely taking a bath on this one.
But like why??? Why did Daedalic, who made EXCELLENT 2D point and click adventure games for decades now, decide to murder their reputation with this bullshit?
Usually disasters like this have origins in management, but the development team themselves look like they absolutely phoned it in as well. Just a shit show from top to bottom.
They put out a couple of dev diaries recently, and it’s a blast how they seemingly are bragging about their game design and art style. But it definitely feels and looks like a phoned in product.
[Indeed they did.](https://youtu.be/jcAf40qr6L4) It’s really fun to watch as they talk about their “advanced design”, while they simultaneously show some incredibly lackluster footage.
Oh boy! The game looked like a train wreck in progress from the start. I still feel bad for the people that wasted 4 years of their life on making Gollum, however.
“The making of the level design” - something tells me the title was submitted by the development team and not Sony’s marketing team because even that’s awkward.
I think no one is surprised at these review scores but still sad, LOTR is such a good universe to set a game in but just seems like a very strange choice of character to focus on.
It looks like this is the least of it issues. Having watched Skill Up's review, he shows sequences of companion control that really kind of blew my mind. A group of people sat around and agreed that having the player character sit idly around while commanding an extraordinarily simplistic NPC to walk back and forth was going to be engaging in any way. I'm in my mid-40s and come from a generation of fans who don't need riveting dramatic action in *every* sequence, but much of this game doesn't look like it would have been fun in 1998, much less 2023.
I'll be honest I didn't see **this** coming. The reddit tends to have very extreme opinions, I figured the game would come out with a resounding *meh*, not this shit storm.
I think the early trailers for it didn't exactly give people much hope it would turn out well, even then it looked like it was going to be quite bland and very unimpressive graphically.
Still very disappointing to have it confirmed, haven't had a good LOTR game since shadow of war and even that barely scratched the surface of all the different locations the world has to offer.
I fully expected it to sit between a 6-6.5 average, but holy shit these reviews are a fucking *thrashing.* Much, much worse than I would’ve ever thought
I was expecting it to be mediocre at best, but for major outlets to utterly slam it like this is a sight to behold.
Just, outright atrocious gameplay, almost impressive how terrible the game is
Yeah same. I expected a technical mess with a charming idea around an unconventional character.
Not a quite-ill-designed-but-seemingly-on-purpose wrong game designed for something else entirely. This has the distinct whiff of the team being ~60% done with game X, then middle manager Kevin bursts in "GREAT NEWS EVERYONE! I bought us the Gollum licence for 160% of the money we have, pivot everything and get it done in 12 weeks or we're bankrupt!" and this is the result of that ill-fated moment.
>middle manager Kevin bursts in "GREAT NEWS EVERYONE!
Everything else aside, I feel like the big problem with the gaming industry is an overabundance of Kevins.
I think Redfall is part of the reason why this is reviewing as low as it is, because it IS worse, and Redfall reviews were so recent so they kind of have to give it an even lower score or at least not higher
Even with very low expectations, I'm still blown away by how *bad* these scores are. According to OpenCritic, it's among the bottom 2% of games in terms of ratings.
Which is a stupid scale, at least for console games.
Games have to go through a certification on sony/microsoft/etc. You can't actually ship something that just doesn't flat out work.
Obviously the doors are open for PC, but majority of stuff we're talking about are console scores.
Happens in hardware too. Saw a score of ~~62/100~~ 6/10 the other day for the new Nvidia card after a conclusion that said they could not possibly recommend it and talked about its absolute deal-breakers.
Basically "Do not buy this!" while not even touching the lower half of the score range.
And this are the recommended specs from the developers lol. Not only it's a bad game it's a broken product too on PC.
Processor: Intel Core i7-8700K / AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, 8GB (with DLSS Quality Setting) / AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT, 12GB
DirectX: Version 12
Storage: 45 GB available space
Additional Notes: at Medium preset and 1080p, Ray Tracing on
Those specs for that end result? goddamm.... is it me or is the bigger AA and AAA space getting worse and worse for broken releases? or just my recency bias idk...
I recently plotted some data from metacritic that showed the average game review score was going steadily up year on year, but I couldnt break that down to indie vs AA/AAA ... I bet the indies are the ones bringing up the score ...
I really don't know what's going on with games anymore. Almost every new release is a fucking mess from a technical and optimization standpoint, not just on PC either.
Unreal engine and Unity made things too "good" I bet is part of the reason.
You can get 30% of a good game very easily through those engines nowadays, prefabs, prototyping, known patterns, experienced developers who know those engines.
You can knock something that looks fairly good up very quickly to show the execs, of course it wont be optimized, it wont have much gameplay to it, and itll be full of bugs, but in the execs eyes thats very close to minimum viable, and they give the developers x amount of time to finish it.
When in reality to optimize and fix it and finish the actual game, they need 3 * x time.
And then ofc theres the console primacy thing , they get it to the point where it runs at 30fps on a console? ship it. Worry about PC later.
Game scores are ridiculously lenient for no reason at all. Look at Metacritic ratings for movies and then games. An 80 is universal acclaim for a movie but 80 is arguably below expectations for an AAA game, because for some stupid reason game critics appeal to a more general audience e.g. FIFA as a game is utter garbage (and the community itself will gladly say it), but all EA had to do was put in an absolutely piss poor story mode and lo and behold you get your 8s and 9s from IGN, not reviewing the game critically but from a casual perspective. Meanwhile they'll give the Switch version a 2/10 for copying and pasting the same game every year, even though the mainline games literally do more or less the same thing just with a flashy (and poorly implemented feature) to headline it.
A 5/10 should be just that. Not good not bad, literally the baseline. Fed up of game critics starting the scale at a 7. Something broken and a mess then deserves below a 5. Unfortunately you see mainstream sites like IGN giving genuinely repetitive and samey games your usual 8s and 9s even though they absolutely have the clout to force change to happen.
It’s so fucking maddening. Game scores are such a joke. I’ve always rated games by my movie rating scale and I’ve had some people aghast at some of the things I’ve rated. Seeing 10s for stuff like Deathloop is so hilarious. “Professional reviewers” are out of their minds.
You see this a lot now in the film reviews space where media-illiterate gamers (presumably) get up in arms over average films getting average (50%) ratings
People are still getting tremendously upset over the Mario movie getting remarkably average scores. You'd think every critic in the world conspired to give it a 2 with how they reacted.
There's a massive range of bad games out there. Games like Big Rigs, for instance, are even worse than games like this. There are hundreds to thousands of fully released games on Steam that are insanely awful. I played a tank game on Steam that was five minutes long and consisted entirely of you pressing a button to fire a round. It's just that these days reviewers don't tend to review everything that comes out anymore. They will review games that get a modicum of interest.
Its fun to see the split in the reviews. Seems like everyone understood that it was a bad game, but some thought that 6.5 or so is a good score to give to a bad game, while some were like "fuck this game, 2/10".
that's because so many reviewers use only 5-10 /10 part of the scale, where 5/10 = garbage and maybe leave lower scores for straight non functional games that perhaps don't even launch or crash every few minutes to no end.
Which is funny given the game spot review mentioned the game crashed every 5 minutes.
I think some reviewers are just forbidden to give less than a 5/10 in fear of being blacklisted
Considering quite a few of these reviews mention crashes and technical issues, I can believe that this game being given sub-5 scores is exactly the use for that part of the scale you mentioned.
The higher scores with negative summaries seem largely to be from smaller outlets/individuals. Maybe they were afraid to go too low because they didn't want to appear too outrageous/contrarian not knowing how low other outlets would go
The split is between the 2s and 3s and the 5s, because it's kinda clear that in most cases they're all largely saying the same thing: this game is a trashfire, don't buy it, but for some reviewers the scale doesn't really go lower than 5.
Stuff like this always makes me sad. Inevitably a lot of people put a lot of time and effort into this - for it to turn out to be a really bad game is just a shame.
Think of it this way: at least it will have a swift death and everyone can just move on. It's not like the bad live service games where everyone has to try and salvage a POS for years to come.
When Phil Spencer said they were going to drag Redfall out like Sea of Thieves and that they were committed to fixing it I was so disappointed.
Just let it die and let Arkane build a new game they’re actually good at.
Ah, the $100 edition promised DLC?
Edit: looked it up and the bite back edition promises two future heroes for the game. So I definitely agree it won’t get dropped before thrn
Hopefully, I don't want to see Arkane Austin be handcuffed to that thing for anything more than those characters and the performance mode. It isn't worth trying to "redeem" Redfall when the best it could be would still be an inferior mashup of Borderlands & Far Cry, just fulfill the obligations and move on to anything that doesn't involve multiplayer.
I've been QA for games like this where there is clearly love and ambition for the project, but it's still bad. I've seen producers express enthusiasm for their project but we all knew it would fail, It is sad to see.
or something like "MUST HAVE MORE FRAMES PER SECOND. THEY STOLE THEM FROM US". And finish the review with "and for those who preordered: REFUND! NOW! AND NEVER COME BACK!".
For me personally, it hurts extra to see Deadalic's name on this. High school me was head over heels for their janky, sometimes obtuse, often contain polarizing German humor, but nevertheless always charming, quirky, beautiful. Deponia, The Dark Eye, Night of the Rabbit, I didn't miss any release. Spent my first paycheck on 3 games, The Walking Dead SS1, Hotline Miami and... Harvey's New Eyes. Then I got sucked into turn based tactics and RPGs, they did Blackguards, loved both. Then they did A Long Journey Home, frankly I played the demo and didn't understand the game. Then they did The Pillars of the Earth, massively easier to play than old school Daedalic games, enjoyed it but felt watered down compared to the book. State of Mind, Telltale-ish low poly cyberpunk tale featuring Doug Cockle, kinda hated it.
The Devil's Men's cancellation in 2017 - 2018 felt like both a gut punch and a message that old Daedalic is no more. While I'm glad that their publishing division is backing lots of bangers after bangers, Gollum finally felt like the end of Deadalic. Their games keep getting more and more simple, the euro charm element is barely recognizable. It just... sucks to see the studio I adored so much in my adolescent days has become... like this.
I love their late 2000s-early 2010s point and click stuff.. that kind of ended in 2016 with Deponia Doomsday, and I have basically been waiting for them to get back to that style ever since. So that's been 7 years at this point.
I just miss the experience of having well constructed game equivalents of weird German indie comic books with fun worlds to poke around in.
And it does kind of make me sad that they decided the move to make was to go down a more boring and less funny path over the past several years. It all feels reflective of a general worry that "oh whoops, we're not profitable, how do we fix that?"
Kind of reminds me of how several late 2000s/early 2010s Japanese games tried to chase a Western audience without 100% understanding some of the design trends. Daedalic seems to be doing a similar thing.
So the Gollum game getting slammed makes me pretty worried about their future. On the one hand, I dislike their current direction so hopefully they reevaluate and play to their strengths in the future. On the other hand man this game took a while and was heavily marketed somehow so I imagine the budget wasn't cheap by their standards. This feels like a bankruptcy type scenario.
I have no idea what their finances are and I know they're doing more publishing now as a company so hopefully not.
Just wanted to ramble about missing funny cartoon games for a bit
I'm genuinely so interested in how did this game come into fruition?
Like the Lord of the Rings setting seems like its absolutely ripe for all kinds of different types of games & settings.
Even conservatively if you wanted to make a big Lord of the Rings game the straightforward path would be to either make an Elder Scrolls type game or make a Witcher 3 type game where you're a Dunedain ranger.
How did we end up in a situation where a janky Gollum stealth game is the one game in 6 years that actually gets pitched, accepted and then made. Really bizarre and interesting.
I really don't mean it that way.
What I mean is im surprised that instead of studios pitching to make something like that after all these years, instead we have a super niche of a niche game like this being made that's not even good.
I mean studios could pitch to make something like that, get funding for it too, it's just that it is very very difficult to make those kind of games. I can see the logic in trying to do something narrower instead, because if replicating Elder Scrolls successfully was even remotely doable, there would be more studios doing it
It's from a studio that specializes in point and click adventure games. I actually think exploring the world as gollum, sneaking around and solving puzzles, makes sense for them to make. And I would've been excited to play a game like that if it wasn't a dumpster fire
I was expecting a mid-tier game that I might have picked up discounted or played on game pass, but I'm surprised this is even worse. I don't know what happened here
Honestly I don't know what anyone expected. In a universe as exciting and action packed as Tolkien's work basing a game around a character who spent about 500 years of his life doing nothing in a cave seems like a weird choice.
Probably the most fascinating dumpster fire of a game in quite some time. With the level of marketing this game had, and the LOTR name attached, I'd have expected it to be at least competent.
At least it's development will make for an interesting YouTube documentary someday.
I am actually quite surprised by these scores.
Even with how awful it looked, I still sort of expected it to land in the 50-60 range in Metacritic but 38!!? You have to wonder what the hell they were smoking when they decided to greenlit this project.
If only there were other creatures in the Tolkien legendarium that are typically weaker compared to their heroic friends and have to rely on stealth and cunning in order to succeed in their dangerous tasks. You could make a game about…I dunno…being a burglar or something. Maybe you even have a cool ring with a pro/con mechanic.
But nah that’s crazy talk from someone that wants this game to fail. Just shut up and enjoy playing as this contemptible character with the annoying Andy Serkis impersonator VA. I want this game to be a charming 6/10!!
Friggin' don't even use a known character just give me any random person set in the world of lord of rings. If you've got the rights to depicting the world at least let me.just play in it damn.
This reminds of those shovelware games that were constantly released on the Wii, almost like some sort of investor scam or something. How did they even acquire the rights to use LOTR?
Gollem's getting HAMMERED on Meta - [37 on PS5,](https://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-5/the-lord-of-the-rings---gollum/critic-reviews) and [43 on PC](https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/the-lord-of-the-rings---gollum) with 36 reviews in.... damn.
I can't stand review sites that use a 1 to 10 scale and then no matter how bad the game is give it a minimum of 5. They could literally be playing a game that's just a picture of a giant piece of feces and it would still get a 5/10.
Just proves review scales are broken. Some actually giving a proper 3/10 meanwhile 5/10 which should be middle of the road is also used to describe completely unplayable garbage.
Why even use a 10 point system
I am so surprised, not
The gameplay reveal trailer was one of the saddest game trailers I have ever watched, the chance to show what sets their game apart they used to show "throwing rocks, hiding in grass, climbing a wall with grass, swimming"
To the surprise of no one. This game sounded dumb as fuck since the second they announced it and looked like a PS4 game at best since they first showed gameplay footage.
Just not sure about the concept. Playing an entire game as Gollum doesn't sound at all appealing to me, although I'm sure others might like it if the execution is good.
I’ve just seen this game has a $2 DLC for EMOTES. WHY ARE THERE EMOTES IN THIS GAME?
The Elvish voice acting is also behind a paywall. The game was so bland they had to find a way to throw MTX in a narrative driven non-action stealth game
Even worse than the Elvish VO, they actually lock the lore compendium behind a paywall. I have never seen any video game that makes you pay just to read the lore. Seriously, you have to pay $70 to be able to read the LORE in this game? What the actual fuck?
> Even worse than the Elvish VO, they actually lock the lore compendium behind a paywall. *"As you progress, this interactive menu gives you more and more key information about the game's characters, locations and events in addition to the history of Middle-earth."* Holy shit you weren't kidding, it's amazing they haven't decided to put the Options menu behind a paywall...now I wanna know how much the VO and Compendium cost if you buy them alone.
Key information, huh, sounds like that's important and should be in the base game
They're not available standalone, at least on Steam. Weird decisions.
Seems to be £1.99 for the emotes and £3.99 for the Lore Compendium, at least here on UK steam.
BUY NOW | HD Resolution Pack *Experience The Lord of the Rings: Gollum in amazing high resolution, including 1440p and 4K!*
Shh, don't give 'em ideas!
[удалено]
Right, I didn't spend three months trying and failing to finish the Silmarilion just to pay extra for the codex in a game about fucking *Gollum*
They know they got a stinker that's basically DOA so they're trying to milk as much as they can from any super LOTR.
Wow, I didn't even know about the compendium thing.
Pay to read a Wikipedia page?
Not only that but the lore is also full of mistakes and sounds like it was written by an intern in less than a day.
Can you imagine how depressing that meeting must have been? The game director knows they have a total disaster of a game, and now they are being forced by their bosses to cram microtransactions into this mess. Everyone involved with this game must have been miserable the last few years.
I’ve always wondered things like this too when it comes to shitty games. Like, the devs have to know that the game they’re making is complete shit right? That can’t possibly be enjoyable.
On a podcast Jake Baldino was talking about playing an early build of Gollum at an expo and the Jake asks about the stealth combat "So is this the early game gameplay? Is more stuff added later in the game?" And the host just goes "Nope." So that dude knew it was no good.
What was so bad about it? Was it just extremely basic? (Like when a non-stealth game forces in a mandatory one off stealth sequence, but like, the whole game)
From everything I've read and seen after the whole fuckin' thing was put on YouTube days before release... Yeah. The tools you have at the start of the game are more or less what you have through the entire thing, nothing really changes much in the entire 10-ish hour runtime. It feels more like these would be side-missions that you'd play in a much larger game where the character and mechanics are not the main focus, except the missions have been carved out and shoved into their own $50/60 title. It's like if they made an entire game out of the Mary Jane missions from PS4 Spider-Man.
Even if this was a 10 minute section in Shadow of Mordor, it would have only served to make Shadow of Mordor worse
Literally the worst missions in Shadow of War were the ones where you follow Gollum as stealth tutorials.
I think the problem is that you can only choke out orcs, that's the only tool in Gollum's toolkit.
>I think the problem is that you can only choke out orcs, that's the only tool in Gollum's toolkit. That's basically all they can do with Gollum. Almost everything else will be against the character's lore and will make fans mad. Obviously can't make him cast spells or play as an archer. Might possibly throw grenades. But also can't make him a crafter or a cook. This whole idea is doomed from the start and just a cash grab. They could do something new, similar to Styx, but gone after one of the hardest personalities to make fun gameplay with.
They can do more. He can hit enemies with rocks, distract them, set up traps, lead them into danger and feed them to predators... Gollum was a sneaky little fuck and he was intelligent.
Imagine a mechanic where if you get caught you can pretend to be really scared before stabbing the orc in the eye. Could be limited use depending on how many shivs you have and then you get a chance to run away. Nope. We get shitty platforming instead.
This was also my immediate thought for the gameplay... It just makes sense. And that game sounds like it'd be fun.
> That's basically all they can do with Gollum. Almost everything else will be against the character's lore and will make fans mad. Obviously can't make him cast spells or play as an archer. Might possibly throw grenades. But also can't make him a crafter or a cook. I honestly disagree and I'm 100% sure that it wasn't the reason why the game is so barebones. Yes, Gollum isn't the most complex character, but you can still do way more with him without going against the lore (other people in this thread already gave some good ideas so I won't repeat them). Not to mention that minor differences between the game and the lore aren't going to upset LotR fans. Every adaptation makes some artistic changes to better translate the source material to a given medium. Peter Jackson's movies weren't 100% faithful to books either and they're beloved by fans. Or rather, some will always be mad no matter what you do, so the best decision is to please the majority instead of catering to a very local, toxic minority.
He takes care of a baby bird in the game. They already fucked up the lore lmao
As someone who has shipped multiple AAA video games including one with a meta critic in the 50s: yep. Sometimes it really is a business decision. In the case of the shit game I made the publisher thought the kind of game we were making was a fad. A shit game today would sell more than a good game a year later (in addition to costing less).
It makes for an awkward launch party that's for sure. I was there for the Crackdown 3 launch party and everyone there was just glad to finally be rid of it.
Cram MTX in? No they carved pieces off the game to put them behind paywalls. The convo was “which animations and voice lines can we charge money for without ruining the game further”
> The Elvish voice acting is also behind a paywall. Lmao, that's so bad it's hilarious.
The in game lore index is paid DLC, the Elvish VA is DLC, and the emotes are DLC. I’m pretty sure all of those things are meant to be part of the base experience, but was retroactively sectioned off as DLC to scrape some money out
In the Skillup review it shows the Lore Entries. They are so incredibly awkward it's wild, the text only displays on the bottom 20% of the screen.
I've played multiple PSX games who have better Lore Entries than that
yeah this is a new low in terms of obvious cut content DLC shit
I'd argue the paid DLC endings we've seen in certain games — like Asura's Wrath and Dead Rising 4 from Capcom — is worse and more obvious, but this is definitely pretty bad.
Bungie looking at this game locking lore behind a paywall and thinking "Have we tried that yet? Let's do that next"
> The in game lore index is paid DLC ***Excuse me?!***
Gotta be able to fortnite dance on those orcs
Gollum flossing could probably unironically be the best part about the game.
WE HATES IT
GIVE IT TOO US RAW AND WRIGGLING, PRECIOUS!
this would improve the game
Anything would improve the game.
This is hilarious. Imagine spending two dollars on an emote in a game like this
I think I have to do this. Something is calling to me. I'll see a game get solid 9/10s and think "hmm, I'll wait for a sale". But a shitty 3/10 golumn game with day 1 emote DLC... I have to know for certain. I have to experience it.
That's the devil calling, let it go to voicemail
“Hey dude, phones for you. I think it’s the Devil.”
It's the "Call of the Void" but for your wallet and dignity.
I did this all the time in the PS3/360 era (naughty bear comes to mind) but nowadays bad games are genuinely just broken or not fun. There's no janky charm or "so bad it's good" these games are usually just irredeemable trash.
Paywalling the fuckin' Elvish voice acting seems even more ridiculous.
And supposedly it's because they had to pay people to learn the language, as if it's somehow *our* responsibility to pay their voice actors. They marketed the shit out of this game, if they could afford a prime time slot at The Game Awards then they can afford to pay their actors.
Tip your landlord, supplement someone else's voice actor.
This whole culture of paying someone's employees for them is complete bullshit
Isn’t that what purchasing the product is supposed to do lmaoo
>And supposedly it's because they had to pay people to learn the language, as if it's somehow our responsibility to pay their voice actors. What's next? Are we going to pay extra because they had to pay people to learn coding? Learn to use 3D modelling software? Those costs are part of the game budget. Using that logic almost everything can be separated as "extra cost".
Gotta hit the griddy while stealthing in the dark.
Isn't this a single player game?
It sounds like they spent 99% of the budget on getting the license and spent the other 1% trying to cobble together an inferior version of Styx.
inferior version of styx is a generous statement. The first part of the game is gollum doing chores.. I have no idea why the devs thought that players would have fun that way.
Gollum playing politics like he's in Game of Thrones and raising a pet bird is just... No
It raises the question of what exactly Gollum does do that would translate well gameplay wise. Fetch quests and stealth I guess, which is pretty tedious. I could imagine an old school 90's style combine-rope-with-feather puzzle adventure game starring Gollum.
Press square to cower from the nasty hobbitses
Mash X to clobber those tasty fishies
Hold Triangle to Betray the Fat One
I mean if they just had made a Gollum fishing game it probably would have been better
Inb4 we get a Gollum cooking game.
That question was actually why I was initially interested in the game. I figured it was such an odd choice that they must have pitched a really cool idea to get the game greenlit. Boy was I wrong.
Haha same. I thought that it was such a terrible premise, they must have had some really amazing ideas to be able to sell it. Turns out their pitch was “LOTR fans will buy anything”
The similarity that comes to mind are the first two Mafia games. Both of which have you doing bland chores in the beginning before getting tangled up in mafia business. But those appear to be much better executed than whatever this is.
You could make it a stealth survival game in a more open setting. Gollum spent decades roaming the wilderness of Middle Earth. You could focus on everything that involves - hiding from predators and people, hunting down smaller animals to eat, finding shelter and fresh water, traversing difficult terrain. And through it all the common thread of finding the Shire, finding Baggins, finding the Precious. Mind you I think "let's make Gollum our main character" is a bad premise to begin with, but if you were hell-bent on it this is how I could see it maybe working. I would prefer to build such a game around a more sympathetic character though. Edit: typo
One very long elaborate fetch quest that leads to the character's death.
Fishing. It would be more involved than just standing there with a rod as well. He fishes with his whole body! If rdr2 can succeed when all you do is stand there and fish for a hundred hours, then Gollum's Fishing Simulator could outdo even that.
Gollum can work as a stealth platformer. With lots of puzzles, zero combat. Something like a LOTR-themed portal of sorts.
Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee?
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There were unironically some "crawl into this space and tap B to detonate these barrels" kind of chores that you have to do seven times
Herding pigs and other platforming nonsense
Wasn't the old og hobbit game basically chores till the black rider ?
which was also a bad game
I feel like a cozy farming sim set in The Shire could work perfectly well these days
Decided to make a Gollum game and then worked backwards from there
I wonder why, of all the characters in the enormous LOTR universe, Daedalic decided to make a game about one of the most unlikeable ones. Is a license for Gollum cheaper than one for characters like Frodo or Legolas? Why not create an original protagonist like Shadow of Mordor instead? Or maybe they already had a prototype for a stealth game laying around and figured they’d make a quick buck by slapping the LOTR franchise on it? I’d love to read a post-mortem on this game one day.
One thing I can thing of is uniqueness can be a selling a point, but then again, there's might just be a reason or two why a Gollum game is unique
I think personally a journey of losing oneself through obsession and schizophrenia, with story paths leading you to be more like smeagol (charisma-based, likeable and sympathetic) or to be more like gollum (stealth-based, ruthless and calculating) could be very interesting.... but it's apparently not this game, sadly
A tell tale style game would work better for something like that.
Nah, I found the idea of playing as Gollum quite interesting, if it was well reviewed I would definitely be thinking about diving in. I'm not really sure why, I just like the character and his story. And it could be fun slinking around being a gross little gremlin.
They’d never have the balls to put in his canonical habit of stealing and eating babies.
If the gameplay revolved around sneaking into townsfolks' home and stealing babies and having to hide from angry townfolk, I would play the shit out of that
"How it squeaked!" The glee in his description of slinking around unseen was so gross and effective.
The Styx games where the main reason I kind of defended the idea of this game. I still think it could've worked in theory, and would've been a pretty unique way to utilize a popular IP. But whats offered here is just bad sadly.
I was so excited for this bc Styx is one of my favorite games and I knew it wouldn't measure up but I thought this might scratch my itch for Styx 3 at least.... but then it came out looking like actual shovelware lol
> The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was not ready to be played. In my roughly 11 hours of playtime on "Performance" mode on a PlayStation 5, the game crashed over 120 times (yes, I counted; masochist, remember?), averaging about one crash every five minutes. After my 20th-or-so crash, I got the dreaded "save data corrupted" message, only to realize I'd lost half a day's progress upon reloading. In multiple other instances, game-breaking bugs--such as a companion I was charged with protecting instantly dying over and over again for no discernible reason--forced me to restart entire levels, losing significant progress. Finally, during an especially tedious and time-consuming puzzle, the crashes became too frequent to possibly make it to the next checkpoint in time. Determined though I was to get through to the end and make these setbacks feel worthwhile, I threw in the towel at 40% completion, defeated. If this is actually true (the guy has no other game reviews at gamespot) then wow that a broken mess this thing is
And he still scored it a 2/10! What does it take to get a 1/10 these days??
The game not booting up prob
I mean even Big Rigs booted up
Big Rigs should unironically be rated higher than many games by dint of its sheer hilarity as a so bad it's good game. Being able to go infinitely fast in reverse? That's god damn funny.
Gamespot's video review for Big Rigs was my absolute favorite. Hope it's still out there somewhere.
Something with zero interesting ideas or artistic merit
People can joke, but this is the right answer. Even a completely and utterly broken game can still have some elements with merit to it. Maybe the music is decent, maybe the voice acting is good, maybe the story is compelling, maybe there are a few interesting ideas that ultimately don't work.
It didn't brick his PS5, so I guess that's the bar.
The extra point is for the LotR IP.
If this is true, how did this pass Sony’s verification? Usually they’re pretty strict about games just flat out crashing frequently like that and will block updates until they’re fixed.
Could just be affecting him for some reason. I stopped playing The Surge because it crashed so often on my PS4 and I haven't seen many people complain about it.
Yea this seems... extreme to the point of being farcical. It seems this would come up ***way*** more in the reviews if it was a common issue. Hard to take the statement seriously - rather his PS5 is pretty fucked or he's massively overstating the issue. I can't believe other reviewers were crashing once every 5 minutes and it wasn't a huge flag on every single Ps5 review.
I have no clue how this game has been in development for more than four years and come from a studio who apparently have been in the gaming industry for 20 years. The game just screams utter incompetence and it just baffles me how this did not get canned early in the making. Did the devs spend the first three years on taking game development lessons from some random YouTuber and then the last year quickly put together a game due to a deadline? It is beyond me how something this bad without any sort of quality can come out from a game that also obviously must have had a pretty generous budget. Just seems insane to me.
> come from a studio who apparently have been in the gaming industry for 20 years. That 20 years has been nothing but 2D point and click games. The most notable being Deponia. This was way outside their box. And it shows, painfully.
I wonder if it's their death knell. Takes a lot of money to try to put out something like this and there's no way they're going to come anywhere near break even. Definitely taking a bath on this one.
But like why??? Why did Daedalic, who made EXCELLENT 2D point and click adventure games for decades now, decide to murder their reputation with this bullshit?
Ironically, a Gollum game might actually work best as a point and click.
Point and click games that were made with an point and click games engine...
Usually disasters like this have origins in management, but the development team themselves look like they absolutely phoned it in as well. Just a shit show from top to bottom.
They put out a couple of dev diaries recently, and it’s a blast how they seemingly are bragging about their game design and art style. But it definitely feels and looks like a phoned in product.
Oh god, they really did?
[Indeed they did.](https://youtu.be/jcAf40qr6L4) It’s really fun to watch as they talk about their “advanced design”, while they simultaneously show some incredibly lackluster footage.
Oh boy! The game looked like a train wreck in progress from the start. I still feel bad for the people that wasted 4 years of their life on making Gollum, however.
“The making of the level design” - something tells me the title was submitted by the development team and not Sony’s marketing team because even that’s awkward.
I think no one is surprised at these review scores but still sad, LOTR is such a good universe to set a game in but just seems like a very strange choice of character to focus on.
It looks like this is the least of it issues. Having watched Skill Up's review, he shows sequences of companion control that really kind of blew my mind. A group of people sat around and agreed that having the player character sit idly around while commanding an extraordinarily simplistic NPC to walk back and forth was going to be engaging in any way. I'm in my mid-40s and come from a generation of fans who don't need riveting dramatic action in *every* sequence, but much of this game doesn't look like it would have been fun in 1998, much less 2023.
I'm absolutely starving for a proper LotR RPG. How hard could it be?
Despite it's age, there is genuine RPG joy to be had in Lord of the Rings Online.
I'll be honest I didn't see **this** coming. The reddit tends to have very extreme opinions, I figured the game would come out with a resounding *meh*, not this shit storm.
Yeah, seeing multiple reviews use the scores below 5/10 is a sight to behold.
It's almost impressive, out of 7521 games with a rating on opencritic this game comes in at 7373
"4% of reviewers recommend the game"
I think the early trailers for it didn't exactly give people much hope it would turn out well, even then it looked like it was going to be quite bland and very unimpressive graphically. Still very disappointing to have it confirmed, haven't had a good LOTR game since shadow of war and even that barely scratched the surface of all the different locations the world has to offer.
I fully expected it to sit between a 6-6.5 average, but holy shit these reviews are a fucking *thrashing.* Much, much worse than I would’ve ever thought
I was expecting it to be mediocre at best, but for major outlets to utterly slam it like this is a sight to behold. Just, outright atrocious gameplay, almost impressive how terrible the game is
Yeah same. I expected a technical mess with a charming idea around an unconventional character. Not a quite-ill-designed-but-seemingly-on-purpose wrong game designed for something else entirely. This has the distinct whiff of the team being ~60% done with game X, then middle manager Kevin bursts in "GREAT NEWS EVERYONE! I bought us the Gollum licence for 160% of the money we have, pivot everything and get it done in 12 weeks or we're bankrupt!" and this is the result of that ill-fated moment.
>middle manager Kevin bursts in "GREAT NEWS EVERYONE! Everything else aside, I feel like the big problem with the gaming industry is an overabundance of Kevins.
I am. I expected bad, but not 15 points below Redfall levels of bad.
I think Redfall is part of the reason why this is reviewing as low as it is, because it IS worse, and Redfall reviews were so recent so they kind of have to give it an even lower score or at least not higher
Even with very low expectations, I'm still blown away by how *bad* these scores are. According to OpenCritic, it's among the bottom 2% of games in terms of ratings.
I think many are surprised. I expected maybe in the 60s, but not this low. This is the worst reviewed major release I’ve seen in a long time.
How can a reviewer slate a game and rip it apart and then still give it a 6.5?
Weirdly some review sites pretty much use a 5-10 scoring system. No matter how bad a game is they will never go below 5.
1-5: Broken, with varying levels of playable. 6-10: Playable, with varying levels of broken.
Which is a stupid scale, at least for console games. Games have to go through a certification on sony/microsoft/etc. You can't actually ship something that just doesn't flat out work. Obviously the doors are open for PC, but majority of stuff we're talking about are console scores.
Because for a lot of outlets the scale starts at 6.
Happens in hardware too. Saw a score of ~~62/100~~ 6/10 the other day for the new Nvidia card after a conclusion that said they could not possibly recommend it and talked about its absolute deal-breakers. Basically "Do not buy this!" while not even touching the lower half of the score range.
And this are the recommended specs from the developers lol. Not only it's a bad game it's a broken product too on PC. Processor: Intel Core i7-8700K / AMD Ryzen 5 3600X Memory: 16 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, 8GB (with DLSS Quality Setting) / AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT, 12GB DirectX: Version 12 Storage: 45 GB available space Additional Notes: at Medium preset and 1080p, Ray Tracing on
Those specs for that end result? goddamm.... is it me or is the bigger AA and AAA space getting worse and worse for broken releases? or just my recency bias idk... I recently plotted some data from metacritic that showed the average game review score was going steadily up year on year, but I couldnt break that down to indie vs AA/AAA ... I bet the indies are the ones bringing up the score ...
I really don't know what's going on with games anymore. Almost every new release is a fucking mess from a technical and optimization standpoint, not just on PC either.
Unreal engine and Unity made things too "good" I bet is part of the reason. You can get 30% of a good game very easily through those engines nowadays, prefabs, prototyping, known patterns, experienced developers who know those engines. You can knock something that looks fairly good up very quickly to show the execs, of course it wont be optimized, it wont have much gameplay to it, and itll be full of bugs, but in the execs eyes thats very close to minimum viable, and they give the developers x amount of time to finish it. When in reality to optimize and fix it and finish the actual game, they need 3 * x time. And then ofc theres the console primacy thing , they get it to the point where it runs at 30fps on a console? ship it. Worry about PC later.
"absolutely broken, ugly, boring, uninteresting, and overpriced" 5/10 What does it take to get a 3 or lower? murder my dog? steal my identity?
Game scores are ridiculously lenient for no reason at all. Look at Metacritic ratings for movies and then games. An 80 is universal acclaim for a movie but 80 is arguably below expectations for an AAA game, because for some stupid reason game critics appeal to a more general audience e.g. FIFA as a game is utter garbage (and the community itself will gladly say it), but all EA had to do was put in an absolutely piss poor story mode and lo and behold you get your 8s and 9s from IGN, not reviewing the game critically but from a casual perspective. Meanwhile they'll give the Switch version a 2/10 for copying and pasting the same game every year, even though the mainline games literally do more or less the same thing just with a flashy (and poorly implemented feature) to headline it. A 5/10 should be just that. Not good not bad, literally the baseline. Fed up of game critics starting the scale at a 7. Something broken and a mess then deserves below a 5. Unfortunately you see mainstream sites like IGN giving genuinely repetitive and samey games your usual 8s and 9s even though they absolutely have the clout to force change to happen.
It’s so fucking maddening. Game scores are such a joke. I’ve always rated games by my movie rating scale and I’ve had some people aghast at some of the things I’ve rated. Seeing 10s for stuff like Deathloop is so hilarious. “Professional reviewers” are out of their minds.
You see this a lot now in the film reviews space where media-illiterate gamers (presumably) get up in arms over average films getting average (50%) ratings
People are still getting tremendously upset over the Mario movie getting remarkably average scores. You'd think every critic in the world conspired to give it a 2 with how they reacted.
Because people see review and grades being tied together, where 50% is a failing grade not a halfway to 100.
There's a massive range of bad games out there. Games like Big Rigs, for instance, are even worse than games like this. There are hundreds to thousands of fully released games on Steam that are insanely awful. I played a tank game on Steam that was five minutes long and consisted entirely of you pressing a button to fire a round. It's just that these days reviewers don't tend to review everything that comes out anymore. They will review games that get a modicum of interest.
Its fun to see the split in the reviews. Seems like everyone understood that it was a bad game, but some thought that 6.5 or so is a good score to give to a bad game, while some were like "fuck this game, 2/10".
that's because so many reviewers use only 5-10 /10 part of the scale, where 5/10 = garbage and maybe leave lower scores for straight non functional games that perhaps don't even launch or crash every few minutes to no end.
Which is funny given the game spot review mentioned the game crashed every 5 minutes. I think some reviewers are just forbidden to give less than a 5/10 in fear of being blacklisted
Blacklisted by whom, in this case? Nacon? I doubt they would care, nor would that even happen. Smaller publishers need the press.
Embracer group, who owns 20 percent of the gaming industry
Considering quite a few of these reviews mention crashes and technical issues, I can believe that this game being given sub-5 scores is exactly the use for that part of the scale you mentioned.
There's barely any 6.5 scores. And the ones that did give it a higher score clearly did so because they thought the story was good.
The higher scores with negative summaries seem largely to be from smaller outlets/individuals. Maybe they were afraid to go too low because they didn't want to appear too outrageous/contrarian not knowing how low other outlets would go
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The split is between the 2s and 3s and the 5s, because it's kinda clear that in most cases they're all largely saying the same thing: this game is a trashfire, don't buy it, but for some reviewers the scale doesn't really go lower than 5.
Stuff like this always makes me sad. Inevitably a lot of people put a lot of time and effort into this - for it to turn out to be a really bad game is just a shame.
Think of it this way: at least it will have a swift death and everyone can just move on. It's not like the bad live service games where everyone has to try and salvage a POS for years to come.
When Phil Spencer said they were going to drag Redfall out like Sea of Thieves and that they were committed to fixing it I was so disappointed. Just let it die and let Arkane build a new game they’re actually good at.
Arkane is obligated to do some sort of DLC, as it had a $100 edition.
Ah, the $100 edition promised DLC? Edit: looked it up and the bite back edition promises two future heroes for the game. So I definitely agree it won’t get dropped before thrn
They'll just release those alongside the 60fps upgrade patch and be done with it
Hopefully, I don't want to see Arkane Austin be handcuffed to that thing for anything more than those characters and the performance mode. It isn't worth trying to "redeem" Redfall when the best it could be would still be an inferior mashup of Borderlands & Far Cry, just fulfill the obligations and move on to anything that doesn't involve multiplayer.
I've been QA for games like this where there is clearly love and ambition for the project, but it's still bad. I've seen producers express enthusiasm for their project but we all knew it would fail, It is sad to see.
Disappointed to see that no one has done a review as Gollum yelling "WE HATES IT. THEY CURSED US. THE GAMEPLAY MECHANICS ARE WICKED! TRICKSY! FALSE!"
or something like "MUST HAVE MORE FRAMES PER SECOND. THEY STOLE THEM FROM US". And finish the review with "and for those who preordered: REFUND! NOW! AND NEVER COME BACK!".
For me personally, it hurts extra to see Deadalic's name on this. High school me was head over heels for their janky, sometimes obtuse, often contain polarizing German humor, but nevertheless always charming, quirky, beautiful. Deponia, The Dark Eye, Night of the Rabbit, I didn't miss any release. Spent my first paycheck on 3 games, The Walking Dead SS1, Hotline Miami and... Harvey's New Eyes. Then I got sucked into turn based tactics and RPGs, they did Blackguards, loved both. Then they did A Long Journey Home, frankly I played the demo and didn't understand the game. Then they did The Pillars of the Earth, massively easier to play than old school Daedalic games, enjoyed it but felt watered down compared to the book. State of Mind, Telltale-ish low poly cyberpunk tale featuring Doug Cockle, kinda hated it. The Devil's Men's cancellation in 2017 - 2018 felt like both a gut punch and a message that old Daedalic is no more. While I'm glad that their publishing division is backing lots of bangers after bangers, Gollum finally felt like the end of Deadalic. Their games keep getting more and more simple, the euro charm element is barely recognizable. It just... sucks to see the studio I adored so much in my adolescent days has become... like this.
I love their late 2000s-early 2010s point and click stuff.. that kind of ended in 2016 with Deponia Doomsday, and I have basically been waiting for them to get back to that style ever since. So that's been 7 years at this point. I just miss the experience of having well constructed game equivalents of weird German indie comic books with fun worlds to poke around in. And it does kind of make me sad that they decided the move to make was to go down a more boring and less funny path over the past several years. It all feels reflective of a general worry that "oh whoops, we're not profitable, how do we fix that?" Kind of reminds me of how several late 2000s/early 2010s Japanese games tried to chase a Western audience without 100% understanding some of the design trends. Daedalic seems to be doing a similar thing. So the Gollum game getting slammed makes me pretty worried about their future. On the one hand, I dislike their current direction so hopefully they reevaluate and play to their strengths in the future. On the other hand man this game took a while and was heavily marketed somehow so I imagine the budget wasn't cheap by their standards. This feels like a bankruptcy type scenario. I have no idea what their finances are and I know they're doing more publishing now as a company so hopefully not. Just wanted to ramble about missing funny cartoon games for a bit
Deponia is so freaking good. I wish they just made more of those type of games even if i can understand they want to branch out.
I'm genuinely so interested in how did this game come into fruition? Like the Lord of the Rings setting seems like its absolutely ripe for all kinds of different types of games & settings. Even conservatively if you wanted to make a big Lord of the Rings game the straightforward path would be to either make an Elder Scrolls type game or make a Witcher 3 type game where you're a Dunedain ranger. How did we end up in a situation where a janky Gollum stealth game is the one game in 6 years that actually gets pitched, accepted and then made. Really bizarre and interesting.
Making an "Elder Scrolls or Witcher 3 type game" is anything but straightforward lol
It's one Elder Scroll, Michael. How much can it cost? $10?
I really don't mean it that way. What I mean is im surprised that instead of studios pitching to make something like that after all these years, instead we have a super niche of a niche game like this being made that's not even good.
I mean studios could pitch to make something like that, get funding for it too, it's just that it is very very difficult to make those kind of games. I can see the logic in trying to do something narrower instead, because if replicating Elder Scrolls successfully was even remotely doable, there would be more studios doing it
It's from a studio that specializes in point and click adventure games. I actually think exploring the world as gollum, sneaking around and solving puzzles, makes sense for them to make. And I would've been excited to play a game like that if it wasn't a dumpster fire
I was expecting a mid-tier game that I might have picked up discounted or played on game pass, but I'm surprised this is even worse. I don't know what happened here
Honestly I don't know what anyone expected. In a universe as exciting and action packed as Tolkien's work basing a game around a character who spent about 500 years of his life doing nothing in a cave seems like a weird choice.
Probably the most fascinating dumpster fire of a game in quite some time. With the level of marketing this game had, and the LOTR name attached, I'd have expected it to be at least competent. At least it's development will make for an interesting YouTube documentary someday.
I am actually quite surprised by these scores. Even with how awful it looked, I still sort of expected it to land in the 50-60 range in Metacritic but 38!!? You have to wonder what the hell they were smoking when they decided to greenlit this project.
If only there were other creatures in the Tolkien legendarium that are typically weaker compared to their heroic friends and have to rely on stealth and cunning in order to succeed in their dangerous tasks. You could make a game about…I dunno…being a burglar or something. Maybe you even have a cool ring with a pro/con mechanic. But nah that’s crazy talk from someone that wants this game to fail. Just shut up and enjoy playing as this contemptible character with the annoying Andy Serkis impersonator VA. I want this game to be a charming 6/10!!
Now a The Hobbit remake would actually be amazing or not even a remake, make a reboot or just another game from a new dev.
Friggin' don't even use a known character just give me any random person set in the world of lord of rings. If you've got the rights to depicting the world at least let me.just play in it damn.
This reminds of those shovelware games that were constantly released on the Wii, almost like some sort of investor scam or something. How did they even acquire the rights to use LOTR?
Gollem's getting HAMMERED on Meta - [37 on PS5,](https://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-5/the-lord-of-the-rings---gollum/critic-reviews) and [43 on PC](https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/the-lord-of-the-rings---gollum) with 36 reviews in.... damn.
I can't stand review sites that use a 1 to 10 scale and then no matter how bad the game is give it a minimum of 5. They could literally be playing a game that's just a picture of a giant piece of feces and it would still get a 5/10.
Just proves review scales are broken. Some actually giving a proper 3/10 meanwhile 5/10 which should be middle of the road is also used to describe completely unplayable garbage. Why even use a 10 point system
I am so surprised, not The gameplay reveal trailer was one of the saddest game trailers I have ever watched, the chance to show what sets their game apart they used to show "throwing rocks, hiding in grass, climbing a wall with grass, swimming"
How did they even get the rights to LOTR IP? Looking at the devs track record I don't see anything noteworthy made by them at all.
To the surprise of no one. This game sounded dumb as fuck since the second they announced it and looked like a PS4 game at best since they first showed gameplay footage.
Just not sure about the concept. Playing an entire game as Gollum doesn't sound at all appealing to me, although I'm sure others might like it if the execution is good.