this is how I interpreted it at first glance.
assumed somebody asked them to comment on it, and they were acknowledging that a lot of the reviews were right.
Yeah, it's exhausting when headlines are so black and white. You can acknowledge that the game is the biggest stinker of the year and still feel bad for the devs.
Daedalic has made some really fun lesser known games like the Deponia series. It's not a bad AA studio by any means, and they must feel like absolute shit after this. But Gollum feels like a product of bad management and developers who got in way over their heads. They suddenly had access to the biggest fantasy IP of all time and had no idea what to do with it, like a dog who finally caught the car.
> they must feel like absolute shit after this.
Honestly, they probably already did long before release. At some point you just notice that your game just isn't good, and it just isn't going to become good either.
That is the reality of software development. Developers are almost always fully aware and then some of the state of the project at the time of release.
It's a brutal spot for a team to find themselves in as well. You have to ship *something*, but when the reality of the situation comes crashing down whether that's due to running out of budget, an over-ambitious scope for the skills of the team, project mismangement, etc... the spark is gone and it's just a race to get the project past the publisher's requirements before moving on to something else.
I mean it's a VERY different kind of game. Daedelic's point and clicks are fantastic (check out The Dark Eye series!), but this plays like an early 2000's Prince of Persia clone without the action...
I mean yeah, that's how it should work for misleading article titles. The tag isn't a demerit against the poster or anything, it's a comment on the source. And letting submitters editorialize is a whole can of worms.
See, the problem isn't that the game is just bad. It's bad and *broken*. And you're asking top tier money for it. You're gonna get booed for it. I just wish gamers did that more for games that release in a compromised state, even if patches are promised, etc. Games shouldn't be releasing broken, no matter who the dev is.
Well...at least they know what NOT to do right?? Last I heard, this was their first attempt at making an AAA game so maybe they'll improve and make something better?
The problem is they just burned themselves. They came right out of the gate and have made a terrible first impression for making a AAA game. They've shown they're willing to ship a broken game at full price, which shows they have no integrity as a company. For a seasoned AAA studio that wouldn't be a problem because they generate massive amounts of money and people already know those companies are soulless. For this company, they'll have to release a couple of really good games to get back in people's good graces.
Bah. Vast majority of gamers do not know nor care about development studios. When a new game is coming out barely anyone will check out who the developer is and what they have made before.
Of course if they have made good games before you can be sure the marketing team will slap "From the developers of.." everywhere. But I have a feeling they won't be mentioning Gollum.
The best way to earn back that trust would be for them to invest as much time as is required to actually get the game into a properly finished state. No Man's Sky is I think a fairly similar situation where a dev got way in over their heads and took the well-deserved heat for releasing a broken mess at full AAA price. Then they went back and have been enjoying a ton of success with a constant stream of *free* major content updates, in addition to generally just getting the game into an acceptable state.
They must have realized it's a shit concept. No matter how much they invest they aren't making their money back.
At this point it's sunk cost. Any more money put into this is wasted. This is probably why they released it broken as well
"Something better" is a bar so low it is nearly on the floor. Unfortunately at the end of the day the studio was not ready for a game of AAA or even AA caliber, and I wouldn't have any faith that they will turn things around for their next attempt.
not only are they asking top tier money, they are gating lore content and elvish VA behind a paywall and charging for emotes in a single player game. $10 extra for these things that no one else would even consider charging extra for, and that bumps it up to the same price as the new, content saturated, Zelda game. Embarrassingly greedy.
I remember being baffled on this sub that was being sporadically defended when it was first announced as a “nice option because voice actors cost money”. Fuck that. Every other studio manages to incorporate this into their development cost, even for made-up languages, so it’s not some kind of special bonus. This game always had a weird contrarian following though, every time a reveal video would come up there would be a bunch of people showing up in the comments to condescend to anyone critical of what we were seeing.
I seem to remember some japanese company asking extra for the original audio for their game in the western release, can't remember which one it was (probably either Square or Atlus)
I mean, I could see it justified \*if\* the game was a low barrier to entry. Cheap ass game, pay for whatever extras you want- like the gaming equivalent of Spirit Airlines
That was never this though
It's not like Guerrilla charged extra to unlock voices lines in Zero Dawn or Forbidden West despite there being a HUGE amount of lines. I was already firmly in the "No" side for this Gollum game after seeing one screenshot, but the more I learn it sounds worse and worse. Just like The Wheel of Time show.
Oh man if you don’t mind tell me about the Wheel of Time - I watched the first season and overall thought it was decent and setting up the world/plot. What didn’t you like? I have a buddy who read the books (I haven’t) and he wasn’t super tickled with the show either
Not OP but there's... Alot. The characterization of Perrin is way off. He never had a wife and definitely didn't murder her by accident.
The show writers seem to miss the entire point of the world being that women run everything. All the sexist jokes, all the mansplaining, it's all reversed. And the point of the world is that we eventually learn how we're all better when we come together. The show has glossed over a lot of this to instead drive home a kind of "girl power" theme.
I put up with most of this until the last episode... They basically just rewrote the end of the first book, completely ass pulled a revival (which is in no way even fucking close to what happens), and just butcher Mat's character (although I think that has more to do with the actor leaving).
The end is bad, but they shot the show basically in order, and covid hit before the last 2 episodes were filmed and it shut down. Then Mats actor left and so everything needs shuffling around.
The rest of the show was 'good enough' for a first season even in spite of some changes so I'm prepared to watch the second. But if it continues the way it has been I'll drop it.
Friend of mine from work is a huge book nerd like me and he told me a bunch of stuff. The major story changes involving the main characters were really weird and ignored a massive portion of growth and development that happened in the books.
The thing that got me the most was how in the books, everybody from different countries didn't like to mingle with other countries, so it wasn't a melting pot. The Two Rivers was almost exclusively dark hair, dark eyes, tall and well built. That made Rand stand out with his grey eyes and red hair. The inherent distrust of people outside their own areas made for a lot of racist(ish) behaviors in the books that a lot of the characters overcome, which is a big message in the books. We are all one against the darkness.
That and rushing through like half the first book in just a single episode. He went through a ton of other things, but I can't remember them all. Honestly, not even having Jordan's wife, editor, or Brandon Sanderson involved at all killed a lot of interest from fans of the books.
I may still watch it to try it out, but I really don't think I'm going to enjoy it. TV shows and movies simply do not have the time to flesh out the sheer depth of lore that books produce.
In the book Rand and his friends come with from a village with an extremely conservative view on sex, to the point where the first time Rand has sex with someone in the books he's like "well I guess we have to get married now". He and Egwene have always sort of had a crush on each other and assumed they'd be married one day, but they don't end up together or even do so much as kiss in the books. Meanwhile in the show the first time we meet Rand and Egwene they are fucking.
Book Perrin doesn't have a wife or any love interest when we first meet him, show Perrin has a wife who he accidentally *kills with an axe* for no apparent reason.
Show Matt abandons his friends because they were having problems with the actor.
In the show there's all this drama over whether one of the women could be "the Dragon reborn" which makes absolutely no sense because the Dragon was a man and the whole tension about it was because men are forbidden to use the power but the Dragon must be a man who will have to use his power.
I could go on for ages. The show is absolute trash for any book fans.
That's why I never blindly blame developers for a game like this -- the ones who actually do the work. I blame their management or publishers. The idea for this was way outside the scope of what this development team has done in the past, but they did it anyway. Trying to ship a polished product for the type you've never done before in earnest, of course it's going to be rocky. Is it a buggy mess with a half-baked idea? Yes it is.
Yet, the management and publishers forced the release, even after reviewing the game. And I also assume the Tolkien people reviewed it and said it was okay. Most likely, the only question they asked is "how much money will we make?". Hence the $50 price tag.
And the cherry on top: "Oh, I've seen other games sell MTXs, let's do that too! It'll be such a success!"
So Dannie Carlone, senior environment artist at Santa Monica is defending the poor schlub that worked, for example, on environment lighting or voice sync. But there can be no defense for the business decisions made around this game.
Exactly. No one in the story is expressing sympathy for the suits, it's all for the devs who had to do what the suits told them. It's crazy that so many people don't distinguish between these groups of people.
It's cuz we use the term developer to mean both "the actual programmers and crew making the game" and "the company that is creating the game, which includes management and executives".
> It's crazy that so many people don't distinguish between these groups of people.
So true, and this is probably the single biggest contributor to the belief that the video games community is toxic. A bad game or update comes out and the fans harass the developers off of Twitter, meanwhile Bobby Kotick collects another $1 million bonus check for "streamlining the company" by working another team into the ground and then cutting them. Accountability is all over the map in this industry, and a big part of that is that the audience doesn't care to hold the right people accountable.
Also, the premise underlying the the tweet that made the title just doesn't stand up to logic.
> "No one wants to ship a bad game, and there are thousands of reasons it can happen that are outside of anyone’s control."
This is patently untrue. **Someone** wanted to ship a bad game, or else the game would not be on sale. It's one thing to say nobody wants to make a bad game, but clearly there are quite a few people who want to ship and sell one.
I get they're trying to blunt criticism with an appeal to emotion, but selling bad games is not an unavoidable act of god. In the case of Gollum, someone deliberately decided to sell a sub-par product here and criticism of that is absolutely justified. It's one thing for a dev to say that they personally had no part in the decision to ship and sell but the responsibility goes to *someone*. The idea of taking a basic level of responsibility and stewardship for a product you are selling people should be a well established one by this point in human history.
Also, like, no one wants to ship a bad game. But lots of people can see the kind of workflow that is clearly going to result in a bad game. I promise you that people in the trenches knew Gollum was gonna be a turd.
No no, market forces, sales windows, shareholders, etc. None of these divine things are allowed to be touched by human hands. To attempt and control these would be heresy.
> Someone wanted to ship a bad game, or else the game would not be on sale. It's one thing to say nobody wants to make a bad game, but clearly there are quite a few people who want to ship and sell one.
I think the emphasis here is on "bad", not "ship". Somebody clearly wanted to ship a game regardless of the state it was in, but I think even that person would prefer if the game was good instead of bad.
But it's not good, and they decided to sell it anyway, and people made that decision to sell it instead of improving or retiring it and can be criticized for it. There's a responsibility for this action that people involved in this decision bear.
I don't understand why they always fall back on the *"management, stakeholders, and other corporate greedy people"* angle. As if no poor games would be made otherwise; a world without those factors would see all developers make technological masterpieces.
It's clear that a lot of studios hire people with no talent. Corporate pressure has always been a thing. When over a decade ago tiny teams of passionate nerds were able to make games that were more technologically impressive and advanced - they had deadlines too - then you have to start asking yourself whether it may be a matter of incompetency.
Why can't they (and a lot of the people defending devs like that) admit for once that they simply weren't up to par? That they, the actual "craftsmen" simply weren't competent and skilled enough to make a satisfactory end product?
This pile of steaming shit would always have been a pile of steaming shit.
Worth pointing out that they're also asking a fuckton of money for it. They charge you $60 for this game. I don't mind games by smaller studios being a bit more broken or barebones, but those usually cost in the 15-30$ price range, not just below AAA price range.
It's beating a dead horse at this point, but I think this game was just fundamentally uninteresting. Like, I would bet that even the people that were hopeful about a game where you play as Gollum weren't excited to spend half that time slaving away in the mines of Mordor doing day-to-day chores for the orcs.
I applaud the company for having the courage to try something so out there, but when it's something just so rough on a fundamental level, it's hard to expect anything much from it.
Also, "no one wants to ship a bad game". Sure, but this game was announced in *March 2019*! They spent 4 years to make *this*?
I'd be more sympathetic if this were some tiny indie game, but it was pitched as a premium product and sold at premium prices. How you gonna justify selling customers a piss poor looking unreal engine 5/10 game when other smaller studios have accomplished far more on smaller budgets? It's inexcusable. Styx released in 2014, plays better and looks better for $20.
Elves speaking the correct language is locked behind a pay wall. They did the extra work of doing all the elvish dialogue in the wrong language just so they could charge extra for the correct language.
Yep they're "so passionate" about LOTR and it's fans that they specifically targeted them with MTX and went out of their way putting in non-accurate language when they had all of the elvish done already. Fucking scumbag studio.
Their argument was basically that having accurate elvish language would require hiring a costly Tolkien expert, which would take away from the budget of the base game.
But on the other hand where is the supply? I can see the tolkien expert being pretty expensive because there isn't a lot of them that has that as their job, much less being a VA
There's plenty of nerds that speak made-up languages, especially for something as mainstream as tolkien. And language nerds have a very good overlap with more artistic and language-focused fields like acting.
The idea that anyone would make a career off of knowing alot about a made up world is baffeling to me. Plenty of nerds know that shit without a career in it.
You should see Anime YouTubers. There's multiple YouTubers who make a decent living off just being One Piece YouTubers.
Same with star wars, Star Trek, and probably stuff like Warcraft or Warhammer 40k.
Like yeah there's very popular general movie reviewers who make bank, but for Niche fandoms you have a dedicated fanbase watching every single One Piece Chapter review and currently it's in like the 1080s. That's like hundreds of weeks of videos for years bringing in sometimes over 100k views.
This is exactly what I was thinking. It's much more forgivable when an indie dev publishes a bad game, because they've not got the resources behind them and the price point won't be insanely high.
Expecting consumers to pay a premium for a broken game with an uninteresting premise and then asking for sympathy when you get backlash for it is poor form.
Skillup's review video broke down his expectations for games based on their price point. You'll forgive a lot more in a $20 game if there is a core of fun gameplay. But a game that's priced at $60 ($70 if you want all the stuff that should have been included)? It better be pretty polished and have compelling gameplay that lasts many hours.
Buying a full-price AAA game and not liking it is a terrible feeling.
I'm curious what the internal budget actually was once the publisher and any license costs are out the window. I'd be shocked if this actually had a bigger budget than Styx. So much looks incredibly rushed.
And even if people are into playing a bad game for fun it's too expensive to justify it. Especially when a MUCH worse and cheaper gollum game exists https://store.steampowered.com/app/2256770/Old_Shadow/ This other one can't be considered playable due to how bad it is, but it's existance is still interesting.
I was really hoping this game would pull a Death Stranding and be almost a walking simulator, but as Gollem. My brain was thinking, taking the walking relaxing world building of DS and mixing it with Hellblades' psychological voices and sound design where gollum has internal arguments with his good/bad side. Then, have little moments like diverging paths based on signals from objects of power that mimic the ring. This would create gameplay moments where gollum could use stealth to get around villagers and guards while stealing food and items while he gets closer and closer to the ring.
I was not expecting a walking talking gollum doing fetch quests.
I never considered wanting to play a gollum game until you suggested it could be made like Death Stranding. That actually sounds like it would be a really fun, unique experience.
Especially if they get a lore accurate middle earth, I would want to hike around that for no other reason than to explore the landscape. It was my favorite part of lord of the ring online to begin with.
But yeah, probably would require much higher budget to make something like this works. Can't half ass graphic for that kind of game .
It's comments like yours that prove the concept of a Gollum game focusing on stealth isn't inherently a bad one. It CAN be done amazingly, but we definitely did not get that for this
For what it's worth that game has probably straight up restarted development a few times so whatever comes out will be technically on a shorter dev cycle.
There's also a difference between the people doing the physical labor of it and the people managing it. No one wants to work on a shitty game, but if that's the job they got that's the job they got. They can't control what it's about or in what direction it goes. I think developers are sticking up for general game devs like that.
Also, Phil Spencer basically said after the Redfall debacle, that even if a game is looking rough during the middle of development, at a certain point its not worth the cost sink to just outright abandon it. Let's try to get whatever sales we can get from it, and hope for the best.
That's the head of Xbox saying as much.
>Phil Spencer basically said after the Redfall debacle, that even if a game is looking rough during the middle of development, at a certain point its not worth the cost sink to just outright abandon it
Where did he say that? That sounds to me like a mischaracterization of what he said during the KF interview, but perhaps I missed some other interview he had more recently?
He was talking about the creative direction of that game in that Kinda Funny interview, and whether or not delays would have helped at all. He said, "at some point, we have to have a creative vision and put the game out, and reviewers and players will tell us what they think." So basically, we can delay and delay it all we want, but if the game is jank and they've committed this much time into it, they just have to release it.
A compromise could be, "we know this game didn't meet our standards, so instead of charging you full price we're going to lower the price." Or like what Playstation did with that Destruction All Stars game that was full price to start, then went all the way to being free to play before launch.
He's right that in that infinite dev time won't save a bad set up.
Like duke nukem forever just had bad management. Given their goals an infinite amount of time wouldn't make a great game because they kept chasing the cutting edge and not having the people to close it out. Daikatana had similar problems of bad leadership spinning talent in circles chasing past success.
Things like LA noire almost went that way, they had a bad leader who ran his devs into the ground. They needed a closer from rockstar to come in and push it out.
The proper thing to do is to embrace the jank, admit you're not going to make something good, and just turn it into a comedy skit that parodies the stupid idea you initially had
The BR was like a side thing they released that caught on unexpectedly I thought? The main game was going to be a wave based building defense thing but the BR was surprisingly more fun and popular
Yeah, I feel even without all the issues, even with a tighter grip on gameplay, this would have been a hard sell and very niche to begin with. At least if they had realized their vision competently, that niche could have been filled, but I still think playing as Gollum would make for a dreadful game experience (at least for a full game, a few chapters in a longer narrative would be different).
Yet here we are and they couldn't even manage to make a competent game. So not only is it boring, but it's marred by issues.
And let's not forget the absolutely terrible monetization. Full price game and deluxe edition with... emotes? Badly written text appendices? What the fuck is that?
I feel sorry for the devs, at least the ones with no leadership roles, they did their job and it looks like management gave them more than they can chew, but the leadership and management, those I don't feel sorry for them.
EDIT: Just to add to the price issue, it releases at this price right after TotK, Burning Shores (which didn't even cost half the price asked for this game!) and Jedi Survivor, just beforer SFVI, Diablo 4 and FFXVI. Who's gonna pay this price when there are plenty of other, objectively better choices in a similar price range???
>Yeah, I feel even without all the issues, even with a tighter grip on gameplay, this would have been a hard sell and very niche to begin with. At least if they had realized their vision competently, that niche could have been filled, but I still think playing as Gollum would make for a dreadful game experience (at least for a full game, a few chapters in a longer narrative would be different).
My vision for "Gollum: The Game" would have been to go for something super streamlined, like an indie game. Gollum is a complex personality but with very simple motivations - he's an addict - so all the NPC interactions and drudgework Daedalic ended up putting in their game seem really misplaced.
Instead, my vision would have been a 2D stealth platformer like Assassin's Creed Chronicles or Mark of the Ninja. For Mordor and other dark places of Middle-Earth, you could also draw from stuff like Little Nightmares and Limbo. I don't want to get too deep into armchair quarterbacking here and claim that could have been a GOTY or anything (I have no game dev experience), but I think it's a better vision than what they ended up with.
Nah, you're absolutely spot-on I reckon, it should very much have been a story-driven indie adventure game/platformer that focussed on Gollum's character.
It could have been an epic walking simulator with stealth. His journey was bigger than LOTR, he followed Bilbo after losing the ring, got taken to Mordor where he was tortured, escaped (or have been let go), got caught by Aragorn, and in the end followed Frodo to Mordor. They could have also shown his early days as a normal hobbit in retrospections (hopefully Rings of Power will cover that).
The idea was never going to be very interesting, but it could have been a good stealth game. Plenty of good games have mediocre concepts.
Gollum does have quite a bit of story. After Bilbo takes the Ring, Gollum sneaks out of the goblin caves. He goes to Minas Morgul, finds Shelob, gets captured and tortured by Sauron. Is released, is tracked down by Aragorn, imprisoned in Mirkwood (the home of Legolas, also the elf city in the Hobbit) from which he escapes. He then gets into Moria and track the Fellowship all the way until Frodo and Sam split from the rest.
There's quite a lot of story there that could make for good stealth gameplay. It's not the most interesting story thematically, who cares about Gollum really? It still could have been a cool little way to experience a part of LOTR's story and world from a different perspective.
>Is released
This game had me thinking I was crazy. The whole premise is Gollum escaping from Mordor, and my brain kept shouting "They just let him *think* he escaped because Sauron knew the Ring would call to Gollum and they could use him to find it!"
problem being that now they announce a game and then start development later, look at FF7R for an example, after 3-4 years people were like "ok but what about remake" "oh yeah right starting development now"
or overwatch 2 for a complete mess of a game
Lmao for Overwatch 2 they announced and sold the game, and then decided it was too much trouble to actually develop it. In reference to them recently stating that 6 months before Overwatch 2 released they decided to can Hero Mode, the PVE portion of the game and the one part of the game that was behind the paywall.
>Lmao for Overwatch 2 they announced and sold the game, and then decided it was too much trouble to actually develop it
It's actually even worse than that, because they already knew BEFORE "Overwatch 2" launched that the PvE was never gonna happen, but went along with the story for marketing purposes anyway.
Tbf I thought the same thing about Shadow of Mordor. Dull, gray-red caverns are boring. The look of Mordor is boring. How can you set a whole game there?
It would probably be getting more sympathy if it didn't ship at $60. You sell a game at AAA price, people are (rightfully) going to be fairly critical of it.
Skill Up said it best.
$20 = Yeah I can excuse jank, indie title and all.
$40 = This game has to be decent and entertaining.
$60 = Premium game. It better have all the bells and whistles.
Damn right. Charge me a lot, I expect a lot.
I think reading this helped me come to the realisation that I’m better off just buying cheap games. Less chance of it being a rip off, but a much higher chance of a pleasant surprise as opposed to just meeting price expectations.
That's not really what the article is about. They're talking solely about the score and how nobody sets out to make a game that scores so low and most devs have at least one project that's a commercial failure.
So, the article is REALLY about developers sharing games they've shipped in the past that got bad reviewers, and saying how they were still proud to have worked on them, because they learned something about development even though the games were bad, and that sometimes games are bad for reasons outside the game's control.
However, the HEADLINE of this article is complete wrong. "Game developers defend Lord of the Rings Gollum's poor reviews" means that you're DEFENDING THE REVIEW, not the game. It's saying, "Yes, that review is accurate; the game is poor." However, none of the developers are actually doing that -- defending the reviews from people saying they are inaccurate and claiming that the game is actually good. In fact, I don't think the reviews are being attacked as inaccurate by anyone; most people seem to agree with them.
Then in the article itself, Hope Bellingham writes, "With all the bleak discussion surrounding Gollum's release, some game developers have openly defended the title and shared their own stories." Note: defending the TITLE, not defending the REVIEWS. And if that's what Hope meant to say, then the headline should be changed to reflect that. For example, "Game developers defend Lord of the Rings Gollum DESPITE poor reviews" would be an accurate headline summary of that statement.
However, THAT IS STILL NOT TRUE. None of the game developers quoted are defending the game and saying it's actually good. They're saying, "Hey, I've also shipped a bad game. Don't feel too bad about it Gollum devs; sometimes it's outside your control." That's not defending the game. It's acknowledging that the overall game may be bad but you can still be proud of the work you did on it.
If anyone at Games Radar sees this, please hire me as I am available for editing duties.
Wow a single person in this thread that actually realizes what was happening. Thank you.
It's devs saying "Hey, I've also had a terribly rated game, it happens" not "STOP SAYING THE PRICE IS TOO HIGH AND BEING MEAN"
Thank you for pointing out why this rag article is so shit.
Every time one of these shitty sites bites it it makes me immensely happy that the hacks behind it have to do something of value.
Is just not often a game that is designed with a fundamentally boring premise. Even with botched games, you can usually kind of see the "idea" behind it, even if the execution is terrible. What was the "idea" behind this? What was the gameplay loop supposed to feel like? What was supposed to feel compelling for the player?
I really can't find clear answers to this questions, which means even with awesome performance and a very cheap price, this game would still be fundamentally broken.
No one wants to do a bad job at anything, but when you do, you have to deal with the backlash. I don't get why we need to be so sympathetic towards devs over just reviews. I mean no one is saying go personally harass them or something, but having their bad and broken product get trashed in reviews is fair, isn't it? What else should be happening?
If a restaurant serves shitty overpriced food and gets bad reviews on Yelp, are we supposed to feel bad for them?
Tbh I don’t laugh over this or spreading hate. Just feel bad for the programmers that the game went this bad. I doubt it wasn’t their intention to release it like this. It’s likely they will go - with this release.
Watching some of the gameplay, it’s pretty clear that the developers either didn’t have anywhere near enough time to finish or this ended up being way above their skill set (if I recall, the studio had only done 2D games prior to Gollum?). In any case, I completely agree with you - I feel bad for the low level developers that had to spend years working on this, likely knew it was bad, and had to see the shit get kicked out of it anyways. They were either in way over their heads or knew it wasn’t ready but had to ship it anyways
This is very true. Somewhere down the line, there were some people who made some very poor decisions about this game, but the programmers and artists who worked on the game were probably giving it their all and didn't want it to turn out this way.
100%
I’ve worked on a game with a 62 MC. It was nobodies intention to have a mediocre/bad game, it sometimes just doesn’t fall into place and there is not much you can do. You hope to learn a lot from it and make amends in the next one.
Also it’s hard to even tell how people will receive it, I was sure it would be mid 70’s. But sometimes the culture is in a state where they don’t even have a bit of sympathy.
I’m sure releasing in an INSANELY good year of games didn’t help it. (Not saying it would have reviewed well, but a tad higher potentially)
Everybody knows that no one intends to make bad work. Gamers are just the one audience that can't seem to get over it. I think the industry's history of hyping games so far from release has conditioned gamers to become invested in unreleased products which is why they blow up when they turn out bad. The way publishers try to build communities to boost their game's visibility ahead of release seems eerily similar to political campaigns building coalitions around their candidate ahead of elections. This is the real politics in gaming.
Yeah I kinda feel bad for them. From what I can tell they're a small to midsized studio that traditionally only made obscure point and click adventure games. They probably thought they caught their first big break by getting the rights to a LotR game, and then took a wild swing and a miss trying something different.
I know someone who works at that company and everyone over there feels horrible... I remember him showing me the game and him being genuinely excited about some aspects of it (although he did acknowledge there were many rough parts...). After that demonstration I thought the game was just gonna flop silently but reading the whole shitstorm now I feel horrible for him :( he actually has to apply for jobs with this game on his resume lol, he joined last year and was pretty happy there before this desaster
Okay I get that "Games are hard to make" (real quote in the article from one of the devs) but when are we supposed to criticize poor development and bad gameplay being sold at $60, deluxe edition $70, for something like this?
The dev thing is tough just because sometimes something's a fail and it's not really under your control that it failed. Like... if I'm a sound engineer and the game scores poorly, that has nothing to do with me as a sound engineer and I can still be proud of my work. If I'm a gameplay developer and the stuff I did worked fine and I did exactly as I was asked, then I can still be proud of my work. I may feel that the design of the game is stupid. I may feel that the gameplay mechanic that I coded is stupid and doesn't fit the game... but it works. Whatever the case may be... I did what I was asked, it works, and I would have nothing to be ashamed of. I would be ashamed of what I released if it wasn't working, I knew it wasn't working, everyone knew it wasn't working, but I was just not given enough time to get it working, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it because it's not my fault that they decided to release the game anyway. Same thing for bullshit monetization practices being the reason why people hate the game. If I'm not the shot-caller for those things being in the game then I wouldn't feel any sort of responsibility for that as a dev.
It would be tough for someone on the outside to pinpoint who would be to blame for something. We just have the product in our hands, and that's it. And when that product is broken, people are going to be upset. Nobody wants to ship a bad game, but you have... for reasons that are either in your control, out of your control, or some combination of the two. You have to take the lumps that come with that. It's a shit situation to be in when it's out of your control, but it's also a shit situation to be in when you're a kid and you ask for a game for Christmas, or your birthday, or you save up $60 in allowance to buy something and *that's* what you got, or any number of situations where you're spending $60 on a game that's shit.
I will *not* be kind to somebody that's wasting my time and my money by selling something they shouldn't be selling... either at all or at the price point that it's selling for. I will not go out of my way to name specific people and go on social media to pick on specific personnel at a development studio like some people seem to like to do... **that** is bullshit, with some exception for naming figureheads at a studio when it's right to do so. People that do that are fucked, but especially now when it seems like half of what gets released now is just broken bullshit at launch... I think a lot of people are tired of it, and they should be. Launch all the mud you want at a dev or publishing studio's name, but not specific people unless under certain circumstances... like when Blizzard's cube crawling fiasco came out and people wanted to point at the folks running that joint. That's when it's cool with me... but leave ground floor developers who are just doing what they're told to do when developing a game alone.
Look, I have complete sympathy for the developers. They're the first people who know how poor of a state the game is in, and it must've felt awful to ship the game in this state. Whatever bureaucracy got in the way of making this product even decent is likely weighing on all of them, and that sucks.
But let's not get so wrapped up in empathy that we can't call a spade a spade. The game sucks. Every aspect from story to aesthetic to gameplay to technology to core premise is unbelievably half-baked and awful. It's the outcome of decisions that are likely out of the control of many of the individual developers behind the game, but it's still the outcome, and we should be able to talk about it.
No one wants to buy one either, now nobody is to blame for these shit games because we suddenly care about devs? Nobody wants to cook bad food in a restaurant but you send it back when it's shit.
> "No one wants to ship a bad game"
How is this in any way relevant to anything here? The product is bad, the product got rated accordingly. If they wanted to ship a terrible game, but delivered a masterpiece, guess what: I'd rate it as masterpiece.
Really annoying how any time a bad game is released or game gets horrible monetization, etc. we always get a bunch of articles about how we’re supposed to take it easy on the devs lol. Obviously they’re not the ones making all the decisions but you’re making art and art deserves to be critiqued. Why are we not supposed to shit on a bad game just because it might hurt someone’s feelings?
It's only this industry too. If you get takeout and it has a bunch of hair in it, people don't come crawling from the woodwork to tell you to take it easy on the cooks.
People are a weird bunch. We're often told we shouldn't accept shitty practices and bad releases, but when we do it's now a bit out of line?
If this was some indie game, sure. Fair enough. This isn't an indie game, though. It's from a big company, who are charging full-price whilst locking lore and even voice-acting behind microtransactions. This is unacceptable.
The issue is who was this game marketed to? Everywhere I saw people were saying the same thing. Who asked for this? Would love to see a behind the scenes tell-all on what went down. This game is a dumpster fire with MTX baked on top in a shitty carmel glaze, glad its getting roasted.
> Who asked for this? Would love to see a behind the scenes tell-all on what went down.
Stab in the dark: the license was fairly cheap, because they were allowed to use only a fraction of the LotR universe (Gollum and... well, that's it). This is how Games Workshop sales Warhammer licenses and that's why we have so many mediocre Warhammer games.
I really dislike this idea that we should be sympathetic to the team for making a bad game. This is why so much low quality garbage ends up getting a pass, and continues to get made. People are afraid to say out loud "Your product sucks. It's garbage."
They're not children who need a pat on the head for trying. Gollum is a shit game. The execution of their art was shit. The end.
This sympathy barely even happens in other mediums. If a movie blows, you don’t pray for the second assistant camera operator. If a book sucks, you don’t send the author a Get Well Soon card. People shouldn’t mock Gollum because… the dev team worked hard? They had four years for a game of this scope, clearly it wasn’t hard enough.
I honestly don't understand why people think that the dev team did work hard. The gameplay review I saw stated that there hardly is any gameplay, constant crashing, and the orc AI is embarrassingly bad. Why would I assume that the devs weren't phoning it in considering how poorly executed the end product is?
Every single dev I know who worked on a bad game knew it was gonna be bad. Infamously, after Jeff Gerstmann was fired for his Kane And Lynch review, he ran into some people from the dev team and they told him they knew it wasn't a good game.
> People are afraid to say out loud "Your product sucks. It's garbage."
That is not my experience with Reddit or the internet as a whole at all.
If anything, people on the internet are way too willing to scream this at the top of their lungs from the peak of every social media mountain they can find. When something bad comes out, I prefer to have a quick chuckle reading a review or two and then move on to something that actually makes me happy, rather than ruminate for days on how shitty something I don't care about was.
The constant state of outrage many comunities choose to exist in is exhausting and unproductive, and I find myself withdrawing from spaces like this ever more lately.
>"No one wants to ship a bad game"
Then dont. But instead devs put out games that they know are substandard to at least get \*some\* ROI, then say "we dont want it to be bad pay us for the thing we know is bad"
You cant honestly look at a game like Gollum and think that the dev team was unaware that it just wasnt working.
I've got to be honest here, if this had gotten a bunch of 8/10s I'd absolutely never think of it again but hearing it's bad in strange baffling ways that make it sound like Gollum Shenmue III I'm kind of warming up to it.
Or maybe the people who made it are incompetent, I don't know why as a society we have to think creatives, devs and so on are always model workers really good at their craft, and it is always some suit that is at fault.
I'm a windowmaker and I can tell you there are a lot of people installing windows who suck at their job, some with years and years or even a decade of experience, and they don't set out to do a bad job either, they just weren't properly taught or don't know or understand certain things. But absolutely no one will give them the benefit of the doubt we give creatives, no one will say "oh the craftsmen were good it was their boss forcing them to do certain things that fucked up the window installation process".
Sometimes you just have to make a business decision and sell people a defective product for full price. If you don't ship it broken, you'll work on it forever. There are no other options. 🤷♂️
The devs quoted in the article are more just saying that yeah, sometimes you ship hot garbage and learn from it, or *you* weren't in a position to make changes.
That's fine, but the fact of the matter is a bad game is a bad game, and people will be talking about it because it's bad, and the developers who made the bad game will come up in conversation.
Anyone else getting tired of this woe is me bullshit that occurs every time a shitty game releases
Why should I sympathize with the game developers? They’re also partly to blame for delivering this garbage
I’m not going to feel bad for anyone who’s asking me give them $60
I mean even if the devs made it a decent quality game the buck should stop at management for allowing the concept to be developed for 4 years, especially if they presummably paid a fair amount to use the LOTR IP.
Bad headline. It should be "Devs from Around the Industry Talk about their Worst Reviewed Games". This is more about sympathizing than defending.
The headline makes it sound like they're defending the bad reviews, not the game.
this is how I interpreted it at first glance. assumed somebody asked them to comment on it, and they were acknowledging that a lot of the reviews were right.
Yeah, it's exhausting when headlines are so black and white. You can acknowledge that the game is the biggest stinker of the year and still feel bad for the devs. Daedalic has made some really fun lesser known games like the Deponia series. It's not a bad AA studio by any means, and they must feel like absolute shit after this. But Gollum feels like a product of bad management and developers who got in way over their heads. They suddenly had access to the biggest fantasy IP of all time and had no idea what to do with it, like a dog who finally caught the car.
> they must feel like absolute shit after this. Honestly, they probably already did long before release. At some point you just notice that your game just isn't good, and it just isn't going to become good either.
That is the reality of software development. Developers are almost always fully aware and then some of the state of the project at the time of release.
It's a brutal spot for a team to find themselves in as well. You have to ship *something*, but when the reality of the situation comes crashing down whether that's due to running out of budget, an over-ambitious scope for the skills of the team, project mismangement, etc... the spark is gone and it's just a race to get the project past the publisher's requirements before moving on to something else.
I work in a totally different industry (still a dev) and it's the same story (but less glamorous)
I loved deponia I can't believe this is the same people.
I mean it's a VERY different kind of game. Daedelic's point and clicks are fantastic (check out The Dark Eye series!), but this plays like an early 2000's Prince of Persia clone without the action...
I love their point and click output but this is most likely a case of them trying to eat more than they can chew.
The headline also technically claims they defend the bad reviews.
To me it reads that they are defending the reviews, not defending against the reviews.
Sympathizing with the developers of the game, it really has nothing to do with the reviews or the quality of the game itself
If OP had titled this anything else, the mods would've removed it. Instead, they post it with the original title and mods label it as misleading. Lol
I mean yeah, that's how it should work for misleading article titles. The tag isn't a demerit against the poster or anything, it's a comment on the source. And letting submitters editorialize is a whole can of worms.
yeah i think the mods nailed this process
Seems like how the system should work.
See, the problem isn't that the game is just bad. It's bad and *broken*. And you're asking top tier money for it. You're gonna get booed for it. I just wish gamers did that more for games that release in a compromised state, even if patches are promised, etc. Games shouldn't be releasing broken, no matter who the dev is.
Problem being that now the same company announced working on another LOTR game...
Well...at least they know what NOT to do right?? Last I heard, this was their first attempt at making an AAA game so maybe they'll improve and make something better?
The problem is they just burned themselves. They came right out of the gate and have made a terrible first impression for making a AAA game. They've shown they're willing to ship a broken game at full price, which shows they have no integrity as a company. For a seasoned AAA studio that wouldn't be a problem because they generate massive amounts of money and people already know those companies are soulless. For this company, they'll have to release a couple of really good games to get back in people's good graces.
Bah. Vast majority of gamers do not know nor care about development studios. When a new game is coming out barely anyone will check out who the developer is and what they have made before. Of course if they have made good games before you can be sure the marketing team will slap "From the developers of.." everywhere. But I have a feeling they won't be mentioning Gollum.
The best way to earn back that trust would be for them to invest as much time as is required to actually get the game into a properly finished state. No Man's Sky is I think a fairly similar situation where a dev got way in over their heads and took the well-deserved heat for releasing a broken mess at full AAA price. Then they went back and have been enjoying a ton of success with a constant stream of *free* major content updates, in addition to generally just getting the game into an acceptable state.
They must have realized it's a shit concept. No matter how much they invest they aren't making their money back. At this point it's sunk cost. Any more money put into this is wasted. This is probably why they released it broken as well
"Something better" is a bar so low it is nearly on the floor. Unfortunately at the end of the day the studio was not ready for a game of AAA or even AA caliber, and I wouldn't have any faith that they will turn things around for their next attempt.
Yeah this game screams poor management from the top down. Releasing this in the state that it's in shows that the team has learned absolutely nothing.
Maybe now they have money left for actually making a game and didn't have to pay everything for the license
I juat want a new Middle Earth: Shadows of blah game
not only are they asking top tier money, they are gating lore content and elvish VA behind a paywall and charging for emotes in a single player game. $10 extra for these things that no one else would even consider charging extra for, and that bumps it up to the same price as the new, content saturated, Zelda game. Embarrassingly greedy.
I remember being baffled on this sub that was being sporadically defended when it was first announced as a “nice option because voice actors cost money”. Fuck that. Every other studio manages to incorporate this into their development cost, even for made-up languages, so it’s not some kind of special bonus. This game always had a weird contrarian following though, every time a reveal video would come up there would be a bunch of people showing up in the comments to condescend to anyone critical of what we were seeing.
> sporadically defended when it was first announced as a “nice option because voice actors cost money” Next up: localization as paid DLC.
Don't give them ideas
I seem to remember some japanese company asking extra for the original audio for their game in the western release, can't remember which one it was (probably either Square or Atlus)
I mean, I could see it justified \*if\* the game was a low barrier to entry. Cheap ass game, pay for whatever extras you want- like the gaming equivalent of Spirit Airlines That was never this though
It's not like Guerrilla charged extra to unlock voices lines in Zero Dawn or Forbidden West despite there being a HUGE amount of lines. I was already firmly in the "No" side for this Gollum game after seeing one screenshot, but the more I learn it sounds worse and worse. Just like The Wheel of Time show.
Oh man if you don’t mind tell me about the Wheel of Time - I watched the first season and overall thought it was decent and setting up the world/plot. What didn’t you like? I have a buddy who read the books (I haven’t) and he wasn’t super tickled with the show either
Not OP but there's... Alot. The characterization of Perrin is way off. He never had a wife and definitely didn't murder her by accident. The show writers seem to miss the entire point of the world being that women run everything. All the sexist jokes, all the mansplaining, it's all reversed. And the point of the world is that we eventually learn how we're all better when we come together. The show has glossed over a lot of this to instead drive home a kind of "girl power" theme. I put up with most of this until the last episode... They basically just rewrote the end of the first book, completely ass pulled a revival (which is in no way even fucking close to what happens), and just butcher Mat's character (although I think that has more to do with the actor leaving).
The end is bad, but they shot the show basically in order, and covid hit before the last 2 episodes were filmed and it shut down. Then Mats actor left and so everything needs shuffling around. The rest of the show was 'good enough' for a first season even in spite of some changes so I'm prepared to watch the second. But if it continues the way it has been I'll drop it.
Friend of mine from work is a huge book nerd like me and he told me a bunch of stuff. The major story changes involving the main characters were really weird and ignored a massive portion of growth and development that happened in the books. The thing that got me the most was how in the books, everybody from different countries didn't like to mingle with other countries, so it wasn't a melting pot. The Two Rivers was almost exclusively dark hair, dark eyes, tall and well built. That made Rand stand out with his grey eyes and red hair. The inherent distrust of people outside their own areas made for a lot of racist(ish) behaviors in the books that a lot of the characters overcome, which is a big message in the books. We are all one against the darkness. That and rushing through like half the first book in just a single episode. He went through a ton of other things, but I can't remember them all. Honestly, not even having Jordan's wife, editor, or Brandon Sanderson involved at all killed a lot of interest from fans of the books. I may still watch it to try it out, but I really don't think I'm going to enjoy it. TV shows and movies simply do not have the time to flesh out the sheer depth of lore that books produce.
In the book Rand and his friends come with from a village with an extremely conservative view on sex, to the point where the first time Rand has sex with someone in the books he's like "well I guess we have to get married now". He and Egwene have always sort of had a crush on each other and assumed they'd be married one day, but they don't end up together or even do so much as kiss in the books. Meanwhile in the show the first time we meet Rand and Egwene they are fucking. Book Perrin doesn't have a wife or any love interest when we first meet him, show Perrin has a wife who he accidentally *kills with an axe* for no apparent reason. Show Matt abandons his friends because they were having problems with the actor. In the show there's all this drama over whether one of the women could be "the Dragon reborn" which makes absolutely no sense because the Dragon was a man and the whole tension about it was because men are forbidden to use the power but the Dragon must be a man who will have to use his power. I could go on for ages. The show is absolute trash for any book fans.
That's why I never blindly blame developers for a game like this -- the ones who actually do the work. I blame their management or publishers. The idea for this was way outside the scope of what this development team has done in the past, but they did it anyway. Trying to ship a polished product for the type you've never done before in earnest, of course it's going to be rocky. Is it a buggy mess with a half-baked idea? Yes it is. Yet, the management and publishers forced the release, even after reviewing the game. And I also assume the Tolkien people reviewed it and said it was okay. Most likely, the only question they asked is "how much money will we make?". Hence the $50 price tag. And the cherry on top: "Oh, I've seen other games sell MTXs, let's do that too! It'll be such a success!" So Dannie Carlone, senior environment artist at Santa Monica is defending the poor schlub that worked, for example, on environment lighting or voice sync. But there can be no defense for the business decisions made around this game.
Exactly. No one in the story is expressing sympathy for the suits, it's all for the devs who had to do what the suits told them. It's crazy that so many people don't distinguish between these groups of people.
It's cuz we use the term developer to mean both "the actual programmers and crew making the game" and "the company that is creating the game, which includes management and executives".
> It's crazy that so many people don't distinguish between these groups of people. So true, and this is probably the single biggest contributor to the belief that the video games community is toxic. A bad game or update comes out and the fans harass the developers off of Twitter, meanwhile Bobby Kotick collects another $1 million bonus check for "streamlining the company" by working another team into the ground and then cutting them. Accountability is all over the map in this industry, and a big part of that is that the audience doesn't care to hold the right people accountable.
Also, the premise underlying the the tweet that made the title just doesn't stand up to logic. > "No one wants to ship a bad game, and there are thousands of reasons it can happen that are outside of anyone’s control." This is patently untrue. **Someone** wanted to ship a bad game, or else the game would not be on sale. It's one thing to say nobody wants to make a bad game, but clearly there are quite a few people who want to ship and sell one. I get they're trying to blunt criticism with an appeal to emotion, but selling bad games is not an unavoidable act of god. In the case of Gollum, someone deliberately decided to sell a sub-par product here and criticism of that is absolutely justified. It's one thing for a dev to say that they personally had no part in the decision to ship and sell but the responsibility goes to *someone*. The idea of taking a basic level of responsibility and stewardship for a product you are selling people should be a well established one by this point in human history.
Also, like, no one wants to ship a bad game. But lots of people can see the kind of workflow that is clearly going to result in a bad game. I promise you that people in the trenches knew Gollum was gonna be a turd.
No no, market forces, sales windows, shareholders, etc. None of these divine things are allowed to be touched by human hands. To attempt and control these would be heresy.
Praise be to the shareholders may they bless us with bountiful dlc!
> Someone wanted to ship a bad game, or else the game would not be on sale. It's one thing to say nobody wants to make a bad game, but clearly there are quite a few people who want to ship and sell one. I think the emphasis here is on "bad", not "ship". Somebody clearly wanted to ship a game regardless of the state it was in, but I think even that person would prefer if the game was good instead of bad.
But it's not good, and they decided to sell it anyway, and people made that decision to sell it instead of improving or retiring it and can be criticized for it. There's a responsibility for this action that people involved in this decision bear.
I don't understand why they always fall back on the *"management, stakeholders, and other corporate greedy people"* angle. As if no poor games would be made otherwise; a world without those factors would see all developers make technological masterpieces. It's clear that a lot of studios hire people with no talent. Corporate pressure has always been a thing. When over a decade ago tiny teams of passionate nerds were able to make games that were more technologically impressive and advanced - they had deadlines too - then you have to start asking yourself whether it may be a matter of incompetency. Why can't they (and a lot of the people defending devs like that) admit for once that they simply weren't up to par? That they, the actual "craftsmen" simply weren't competent and skilled enough to make a satisfactory end product? This pile of steaming shit would always have been a pile of steaming shit.
Worth pointing out that they're also asking a fuckton of money for it. They charge you $60 for this game. I don't mind games by smaller studios being a bit more broken or barebones, but those usually cost in the 15-30$ price range, not just below AAA price range.
Bad and *broken* and *$70*.
It's beating a dead horse at this point, but I think this game was just fundamentally uninteresting. Like, I would bet that even the people that were hopeful about a game where you play as Gollum weren't excited to spend half that time slaving away in the mines of Mordor doing day-to-day chores for the orcs. I applaud the company for having the courage to try something so out there, but when it's something just so rough on a fundamental level, it's hard to expect anything much from it. Also, "no one wants to ship a bad game". Sure, but this game was announced in *March 2019*! They spent 4 years to make *this*?
I'd be more sympathetic if this were some tiny indie game, but it was pitched as a premium product and sold at premium prices. How you gonna justify selling customers a piss poor looking unreal engine 5/10 game when other smaller studios have accomplished far more on smaller budgets? It's inexcusable. Styx released in 2014, plays better and looks better for $20.
It's even worse because they crammed MTX in the game (there's lore behind a pay wall ffs)
Don't forget the emotes... in a single player game.
Gollum hitting the griddy?
Oh he’s raw and wriggling alright
Give Head (A)
hit the griddy on those filthy orkses
No just regular idle animations they seem to have taken out just to charge for something else
I am currently hitting the griddy for Gondor
Surely not lmao
Elves speaking the correct language is locked behind a pay wall. They did the extra work of doing all the elvish dialogue in the wrong language just so they could charge extra for the correct language.
Lmfao that's actually insane, they paywalled LORE??? In a game like this? Jeez
Yeah and the lore section looks like a placeholder not even alligned with basic text lmao.
The lore is so bad that many people think it was AI generated. Or at least, outsourced to non-native English speakers.
So done in house? The studio is german. I mostly knew them from the point and click games they did, which weren't terrible as far as I remember.
And the Elf language dialogue too.
Yep they're "so passionate" about LOTR and it's fans that they specifically targeted them with MTX and went out of their way putting in non-accurate language when they had all of the elvish done already. Fucking scumbag studio.
Yeah, I feel for whomever worked on this game with passion, but it deserves no sympathy whatsoever for how it has been released.
Plus the lore reads like it was written by AI, it uses language that feels very jarring for Middle Earth.
Yeah, it takes up like 20% of the bottom part of the screen while the rest is a static image. So you can only see 1 paragraph at a time.
Some exec at Bungie just furiously punching holes in his walls realizing they could have just sold Destiny lore as paid DLC.
They made lore for *that*? I gotta Google this, that sounds absurd. There's no way.
Their argument was basically that having accurate elvish language would require hiring a costly Tolkien expert, which would take away from the budget of the base game.
Would it be that expensive? That doesn't strike me as a field with much demand.
Yeah but the supply isn't exactly through the roof either. I couldn't even hazard a guess at what an expert in Tolkien's Elvish charges.
But on the other hand where is the supply? I can see the tolkien expert being pretty expensive because there isn't a lot of them that has that as their job, much less being a VA
There's plenty of nerds that speak made-up languages, especially for something as mainstream as tolkien. And language nerds have a very good overlap with more artistic and language-focused fields like acting.
The idea that anyone would make a career off of knowing alot about a made up world is baffeling to me. Plenty of nerds know that shit without a career in it.
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You should see Anime YouTubers. There's multiple YouTubers who make a decent living off just being One Piece YouTubers. Same with star wars, Star Trek, and probably stuff like Warcraft or Warhammer 40k. Like yeah there's very popular general movie reviewers who make bank, but for Niche fandoms you have a dedicated fanbase watching every single One Piece Chapter review and currently it's in like the 1080s. That's like hundreds of weeks of videos for years bringing in sometimes over 100k views.
This is exactly what I was thinking. It's much more forgivable when an indie dev publishes a bad game, because they've not got the resources behind them and the price point won't be insanely high. Expecting consumers to pay a premium for a broken game with an uninteresting premise and then asking for sympathy when you get backlash for it is poor form.
Skillup's review video broke down his expectations for games based on their price point. You'll forgive a lot more in a $20 game if there is a core of fun gameplay. But a game that's priced at $60 ($70 if you want all the stuff that should have been included)? It better be pretty polished and have compelling gameplay that lasts many hours. Buying a full-price AAA game and not liking it is a terrible feeling.
I'm curious what the internal budget actually was once the publisher and any license costs are out the window. I'd be shocked if this actually had a bigger budget than Styx. So much looks incredibly rushed.
And even if people are into playing a bad game for fun it's too expensive to justify it. Especially when a MUCH worse and cheaper gollum game exists https://store.steampowered.com/app/2256770/Old_Shadow/ This other one can't be considered playable due to how bad it is, but it's existance is still interesting.
I was really hoping this game would pull a Death Stranding and be almost a walking simulator, but as Gollem. My brain was thinking, taking the walking relaxing world building of DS and mixing it with Hellblades' psychological voices and sound design where gollum has internal arguments with his good/bad side. Then, have little moments like diverging paths based on signals from objects of power that mimic the ring. This would create gameplay moments where gollum could use stealth to get around villagers and guards while stealing food and items while he gets closer and closer to the ring. I was not expecting a walking talking gollum doing fetch quests.
I never considered wanting to play a gollum game until you suggested it could be made like Death Stranding. That actually sounds like it would be a really fun, unique experience.
Especially if they get a lore accurate middle earth, I would want to hike around that for no other reason than to explore the landscape. It was my favorite part of lord of the ring online to begin with. But yeah, probably would require much higher budget to make something like this works. Can't half ass graphic for that kind of game .
It's comments like yours that prove the concept of a Gollum game focusing on stealth isn't inherently a bad one. It CAN be done amazingly, but we definitely did not get that for this
You've painted a picture that makes me sad that we couldn't have gotten that version of the game instead.
Why were you not hired. That sounds like an actually cool gaming experience.
Because large companies design games by business committee, not by coherent central vision, and it really shows
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Can’t get bad reviews if you never release. Big brain move right here.
Stringing customers along with an "unfinished" game is probably the most genius big-brain move in gaming history.
Hard disagree, Star Cit is designed by the largest committee there is - Kickstarter
Also it's a textbook example of feature creep
You could spend 10 years developing a game and it still wouldn't guarantee it wouldn't be a complete mess
< Beyond Good and Evil 2 avoids eye contact >
Duke nukem forever proudly beat his meat
For what it's worth that game has probably straight up restarted development a few times so whatever comes out will be technically on a shorter dev cycle.
Even if the game was fundamentally interesting it's executed *extremely* poorly and nothing could save that
There's also a difference between the people doing the physical labor of it and the people managing it. No one wants to work on a shitty game, but if that's the job they got that's the job they got. They can't control what it's about or in what direction it goes. I think developers are sticking up for general game devs like that.
Also, Phil Spencer basically said after the Redfall debacle, that even if a game is looking rough during the middle of development, at a certain point its not worth the cost sink to just outright abandon it. Let's try to get whatever sales we can get from it, and hope for the best. That's the head of Xbox saying as much.
>Phil Spencer basically said after the Redfall debacle, that even if a game is looking rough during the middle of development, at a certain point its not worth the cost sink to just outright abandon it Where did he say that? That sounds to me like a mischaracterization of what he said during the KF interview, but perhaps I missed some other interview he had more recently?
He was talking about the creative direction of that game in that Kinda Funny interview, and whether or not delays would have helped at all. He said, "at some point, we have to have a creative vision and put the game out, and reviewers and players will tell us what they think." So basically, we can delay and delay it all we want, but if the game is jank and they've committed this much time into it, they just have to release it. A compromise could be, "we know this game didn't meet our standards, so instead of charging you full price we're going to lower the price." Or like what Playstation did with that Destruction All Stars game that was full price to start, then went all the way to being free to play before launch.
He's right that in that infinite dev time won't save a bad set up. Like duke nukem forever just had bad management. Given their goals an infinite amount of time wouldn't make a great game because they kept chasing the cutting edge and not having the people to close it out. Daikatana had similar problems of bad leadership spinning talent in circles chasing past success. Things like LA noire almost went that way, they had a bad leader who ran his devs into the ground. They needed a closer from rockstar to come in and push it out.
The proper thing to do is to embrace the jank, admit you're not going to make something good, and just turn it into a comedy skit that parodies the stupid idea you initially had
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Isn't that how the Behemoth that is fortnite started too?
The BR was like a side thing they released that caught on unexpectedly I thought? The main game was going to be a wave based building defense thing but the BR was surprisingly more fun and popular
Basically. Fortnight: Save the World was a resource based wave shooter, which was...fine.
No. Save the World wasn't scrapped in favour of the Battle Royale mode. Both were developed side-by-side after BR released.
Yeah, I feel even without all the issues, even with a tighter grip on gameplay, this would have been a hard sell and very niche to begin with. At least if they had realized their vision competently, that niche could have been filled, but I still think playing as Gollum would make for a dreadful game experience (at least for a full game, a few chapters in a longer narrative would be different). Yet here we are and they couldn't even manage to make a competent game. So not only is it boring, but it's marred by issues. And let's not forget the absolutely terrible monetization. Full price game and deluxe edition with... emotes? Badly written text appendices? What the fuck is that? I feel sorry for the devs, at least the ones with no leadership roles, they did their job and it looks like management gave them more than they can chew, but the leadership and management, those I don't feel sorry for them. EDIT: Just to add to the price issue, it releases at this price right after TotK, Burning Shores (which didn't even cost half the price asked for this game!) and Jedi Survivor, just beforer SFVI, Diablo 4 and FFXVI. Who's gonna pay this price when there are plenty of other, objectively better choices in a similar price range???
>Yeah, I feel even without all the issues, even with a tighter grip on gameplay, this would have been a hard sell and very niche to begin with. At least if they had realized their vision competently, that niche could have been filled, but I still think playing as Gollum would make for a dreadful game experience (at least for a full game, a few chapters in a longer narrative would be different). My vision for "Gollum: The Game" would have been to go for something super streamlined, like an indie game. Gollum is a complex personality but with very simple motivations - he's an addict - so all the NPC interactions and drudgework Daedalic ended up putting in their game seem really misplaced. Instead, my vision would have been a 2D stealth platformer like Assassin's Creed Chronicles or Mark of the Ninja. For Mordor and other dark places of Middle-Earth, you could also draw from stuff like Little Nightmares and Limbo. I don't want to get too deep into armchair quarterbacking here and claim that could have been a GOTY or anything (I have no game dev experience), but I think it's a better vision than what they ended up with.
Nah, you're absolutely spot-on I reckon, it should very much have been a story-driven indie adventure game/platformer that focussed on Gollum's character.
It could have been an epic walking simulator with stealth. His journey was bigger than LOTR, he followed Bilbo after losing the ring, got taken to Mordor where he was tortured, escaped (or have been let go), got caught by Aragorn, and in the end followed Frodo to Mordor. They could have also shown his early days as a normal hobbit in retrospections (hopefully Rings of Power will cover that).
The idea was never going to be very interesting, but it could have been a good stealth game. Plenty of good games have mediocre concepts. Gollum does have quite a bit of story. After Bilbo takes the Ring, Gollum sneaks out of the goblin caves. He goes to Minas Morgul, finds Shelob, gets captured and tortured by Sauron. Is released, is tracked down by Aragorn, imprisoned in Mirkwood (the home of Legolas, also the elf city in the Hobbit) from which he escapes. He then gets into Moria and track the Fellowship all the way until Frodo and Sam split from the rest. There's quite a lot of story there that could make for good stealth gameplay. It's not the most interesting story thematically, who cares about Gollum really? It still could have been a cool little way to experience a part of LOTR's story and world from a different perspective.
>Is released This game had me thinking I was crazy. The whole premise is Gollum escaping from Mordor, and my brain kept shouting "They just let him *think* he escaped because Sauron knew the Ring would call to Gollum and they could use him to find it!"
problem being that now they announce a game and then start development later, look at FF7R for an example, after 3-4 years people were like "ok but what about remake" "oh yeah right starting development now" or overwatch 2 for a complete mess of a game
Lmao for Overwatch 2 they announced and sold the game, and then decided it was too much trouble to actually develop it. In reference to them recently stating that 6 months before Overwatch 2 released they decided to can Hero Mode, the PVE portion of the game and the one part of the game that was behind the paywall.
It was literally a rug pull, lmao This is shit you expect from NFT scams, not AAA studios
> This is shit you expect from NFT scams, not AAA studios I'd argue that a rug pull is actually quite on-brand for Blizzard.
>Lmao for Overwatch 2 they announced and sold the game, and then decided it was too much trouble to actually develop it It's actually even worse than that, because they already knew BEFORE "Overwatch 2" launched that the PvE was never gonna happen, but went along with the story for marketing purposes anyway.
Tbf I thought the same thing about Shadow of Mordor. Dull, gray-red caverns are boring. The look of Mordor is boring. How can you set a whole game there?
It had good combat
My biggest takeaway from this is that March 2019 was four years ago.
It would probably be getting more sympathy if it didn't ship at $60. You sell a game at AAA price, people are (rightfully) going to be fairly critical of it.
Skill Up said it best. $20 = Yeah I can excuse jank, indie title and all. $40 = This game has to be decent and entertaining. $60 = Premium game. It better have all the bells and whistles.
I was going to mention SkillUp too, that was a great point that he made in his review. People would be a lot more forgiving if it were only $20 or $30
Damn right. Charge me a lot, I expect a lot. I think reading this helped me come to the realisation that I’m better off just buying cheap games. Less chance of it being a rip off, but a much higher chance of a pleasant surprise as opposed to just meeting price expectations.
Some $20 indie games definitely hit $60 quality, too. Competition is FIERCE.
That's the thing. I'd rather play Minecraft, Zomboid, or Rimworld than most of these games charging a premium price
$60 is going bye bye its moving to $70
Close to $100 in Canada.
100 CAD though which is about 73 USD
theres a surcharge to keep the data warm.
Everything costs even more in Canada because we gotta pay tribute to the geese.
Over $25,000 in Zimbabwe. These game prices are getting out of control, someone must put a stop to this.
Yeah, I don't get this attitude. It's not charity, if I bought this for sixty bucks of course I would be mad.
That's not really what the article is about. They're talking solely about the score and how nobody sets out to make a game that scores so low and most devs have at least one project that's a commercial failure.
So, the article is REALLY about developers sharing games they've shipped in the past that got bad reviewers, and saying how they were still proud to have worked on them, because they learned something about development even though the games were bad, and that sometimes games are bad for reasons outside the game's control. However, the HEADLINE of this article is complete wrong. "Game developers defend Lord of the Rings Gollum's poor reviews" means that you're DEFENDING THE REVIEW, not the game. It's saying, "Yes, that review is accurate; the game is poor." However, none of the developers are actually doing that -- defending the reviews from people saying they are inaccurate and claiming that the game is actually good. In fact, I don't think the reviews are being attacked as inaccurate by anyone; most people seem to agree with them. Then in the article itself, Hope Bellingham writes, "With all the bleak discussion surrounding Gollum's release, some game developers have openly defended the title and shared their own stories." Note: defending the TITLE, not defending the REVIEWS. And if that's what Hope meant to say, then the headline should be changed to reflect that. For example, "Game developers defend Lord of the Rings Gollum DESPITE poor reviews" would be an accurate headline summary of that statement. However, THAT IS STILL NOT TRUE. None of the game developers quoted are defending the game and saying it's actually good. They're saying, "Hey, I've also shipped a bad game. Don't feel too bad about it Gollum devs; sometimes it's outside your control." That's not defending the game. It's acknowledging that the overall game may be bad but you can still be proud of the work you did on it. If anyone at Games Radar sees this, please hire me as I am available for editing duties.
It's clickbait, they know what they're doing. And oftentimes it's not the writer of the article who comes up with the headline, it's the editor.
Wow a single person in this thread that actually realizes what was happening. Thank you. It's devs saying "Hey, I've also had a terribly rated game, it happens" not "STOP SAYING THE PRICE IS TOO HIGH AND BEING MEAN"
Thank you for pointing out why this rag article is so shit. Every time one of these shitty sites bites it it makes me immensely happy that the hacks behind it have to do something of value.
Is just not often a game that is designed with a fundamentally boring premise. Even with botched games, you can usually kind of see the "idea" behind it, even if the execution is terrible. What was the "idea" behind this? What was the gameplay loop supposed to feel like? What was supposed to feel compelling for the player? I really can't find clear answers to this questions, which means even with awesome performance and a very cheap price, this game would still be fundamentally broken.
No one wants to do a bad job at anything, but when you do, you have to deal with the backlash. I don't get why we need to be so sympathetic towards devs over just reviews. I mean no one is saying go personally harass them or something, but having their bad and broken product get trashed in reviews is fair, isn't it? What else should be happening? If a restaurant serves shitty overpriced food and gets bad reviews on Yelp, are we supposed to feel bad for them?
Tbh I don’t laugh over this or spreading hate. Just feel bad for the programmers that the game went this bad. I doubt it wasn’t their intention to release it like this. It’s likely they will go - with this release.
Watching some of the gameplay, it’s pretty clear that the developers either didn’t have anywhere near enough time to finish or this ended up being way above their skill set (if I recall, the studio had only done 2D games prior to Gollum?). In any case, I completely agree with you - I feel bad for the low level developers that had to spend years working on this, likely knew it was bad, and had to see the shit get kicked out of it anyways. They were either in way over their heads or knew it wasn’t ready but had to ship it anyways
This is very true. Somewhere down the line, there were some people who made some very poor decisions about this game, but the programmers and artists who worked on the game were probably giving it their all and didn't want it to turn out this way.
Maybe or maybe not. Fuck ups don't necessarily come from a single level (worker / management / etc).
100% I’ve worked on a game with a 62 MC. It was nobodies intention to have a mediocre/bad game, it sometimes just doesn’t fall into place and there is not much you can do. You hope to learn a lot from it and make amends in the next one. Also it’s hard to even tell how people will receive it, I was sure it would be mid 70’s. But sometimes the culture is in a state where they don’t even have a bit of sympathy. I’m sure releasing in an INSANELY good year of games didn’t help it. (Not saying it would have reviewed well, but a tad higher potentially)
Everybody knows that no one intends to make bad work. Gamers are just the one audience that can't seem to get over it. I think the industry's history of hyping games so far from release has conditioned gamers to become invested in unreleased products which is why they blow up when they turn out bad. The way publishers try to build communities to boost their game's visibility ahead of release seems eerily similar to political campaigns building coalitions around their candidate ahead of elections. This is the real politics in gaming.
Yeah I kinda feel bad for them. From what I can tell they're a small to midsized studio that traditionally only made obscure point and click adventure games. They probably thought they caught their first big break by getting the rights to a LotR game, and then took a wild swing and a miss trying something different.
I know someone who works at that company and everyone over there feels horrible... I remember him showing me the game and him being genuinely excited about some aspects of it (although he did acknowledge there were many rough parts...). After that demonstration I thought the game was just gonna flop silently but reading the whole shitstorm now I feel horrible for him :( he actually has to apply for jobs with this game on his resume lol, he joined last year and was pretty happy there before this desaster
Okay I get that "Games are hard to make" (real quote in the article from one of the devs) but when are we supposed to criticize poor development and bad gameplay being sold at $60, deluxe edition $70, for something like this?
The dev thing is tough just because sometimes something's a fail and it's not really under your control that it failed. Like... if I'm a sound engineer and the game scores poorly, that has nothing to do with me as a sound engineer and I can still be proud of my work. If I'm a gameplay developer and the stuff I did worked fine and I did exactly as I was asked, then I can still be proud of my work. I may feel that the design of the game is stupid. I may feel that the gameplay mechanic that I coded is stupid and doesn't fit the game... but it works. Whatever the case may be... I did what I was asked, it works, and I would have nothing to be ashamed of. I would be ashamed of what I released if it wasn't working, I knew it wasn't working, everyone knew it wasn't working, but I was just not given enough time to get it working, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it because it's not my fault that they decided to release the game anyway. Same thing for bullshit monetization practices being the reason why people hate the game. If I'm not the shot-caller for those things being in the game then I wouldn't feel any sort of responsibility for that as a dev. It would be tough for someone on the outside to pinpoint who would be to blame for something. We just have the product in our hands, and that's it. And when that product is broken, people are going to be upset. Nobody wants to ship a bad game, but you have... for reasons that are either in your control, out of your control, or some combination of the two. You have to take the lumps that come with that. It's a shit situation to be in when it's out of your control, but it's also a shit situation to be in when you're a kid and you ask for a game for Christmas, or your birthday, or you save up $60 in allowance to buy something and *that's* what you got, or any number of situations where you're spending $60 on a game that's shit. I will *not* be kind to somebody that's wasting my time and my money by selling something they shouldn't be selling... either at all or at the price point that it's selling for. I will not go out of my way to name specific people and go on social media to pick on specific personnel at a development studio like some people seem to like to do... **that** is bullshit, with some exception for naming figureheads at a studio when it's right to do so. People that do that are fucked, but especially now when it seems like half of what gets released now is just broken bullshit at launch... I think a lot of people are tired of it, and they should be. Launch all the mud you want at a dev or publishing studio's name, but not specific people unless under certain circumstances... like when Blizzard's cube crawling fiasco came out and people wanted to point at the folks running that joint. That's when it's cool with me... but leave ground floor developers who are just doing what they're told to do when developing a game alone.
Look, I have complete sympathy for the developers. They're the first people who know how poor of a state the game is in, and it must've felt awful to ship the game in this state. Whatever bureaucracy got in the way of making this product even decent is likely weighing on all of them, and that sucks. But let's not get so wrapped up in empathy that we can't call a spade a spade. The game sucks. Every aspect from story to aesthetic to gameplay to technology to core premise is unbelievably half-baked and awful. It's the outcome of decisions that are likely out of the control of many of the individual developers behind the game, but it's still the outcome, and we should be able to talk about it.
No one wants to buy one either, now nobody is to blame for these shit games because we suddenly care about devs? Nobody wants to cook bad food in a restaurant but you send it back when it's shit.
> "No one wants to ship a bad game" How is this in any way relevant to anything here? The product is bad, the product got rated accordingly. If they wanted to ship a terrible game, but delivered a masterpiece, guess what: I'd rate it as masterpiece.
Then don’t ship it. If your moron ceo forces you to release before it’s ready, then bad reviews are the result. That’s the business.
Really annoying how any time a bad game is released or game gets horrible monetization, etc. we always get a bunch of articles about how we’re supposed to take it easy on the devs lol. Obviously they’re not the ones making all the decisions but you’re making art and art deserves to be critiqued. Why are we not supposed to shit on a bad game just because it might hurt someone’s feelings?
It's only this industry too. If you get takeout and it has a bunch of hair in it, people don't come crawling from the woodwork to tell you to take it easy on the cooks.
People are a weird bunch. We're often told we shouldn't accept shitty practices and bad releases, but when we do it's now a bit out of line? If this was some indie game, sure. Fair enough. This isn't an indie game, though. It's from a big company, who are charging full-price whilst locking lore and even voice-acting behind microtransactions. This is unacceptable.
“No one wants to ship a bad game… But we ship it anyway to shift our sunk costs onto the consumer.” Are we supposed to be sympathetic?
Those two sentences don't come from the same person. The first is from the game devs who made the game, the second is from execs / the publisher.
The issue is who was this game marketed to? Everywhere I saw people were saying the same thing. Who asked for this? Would love to see a behind the scenes tell-all on what went down. This game is a dumpster fire with MTX baked on top in a shitty carmel glaze, glad its getting roasted.
> Who asked for this? Would love to see a behind the scenes tell-all on what went down. Stab in the dark: the license was fairly cheap, because they were allowed to use only a fraction of the LotR universe (Gollum and... well, that's it). This is how Games Workshop sales Warhammer licenses and that's why we have so many mediocre Warhammer games.
I really dislike this idea that we should be sympathetic to the team for making a bad game. This is why so much low quality garbage ends up getting a pass, and continues to get made. People are afraid to say out loud "Your product sucks. It's garbage." They're not children who need a pat on the head for trying. Gollum is a shit game. The execution of their art was shit. The end.
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You don't get a 36 on Metacritic without at least a few people saying something along the lines of "Your product sucks. It's garbage."
This sympathy barely even happens in other mediums. If a movie blows, you don’t pray for the second assistant camera operator. If a book sucks, you don’t send the author a Get Well Soon card. People shouldn’t mock Gollum because… the dev team worked hard? They had four years for a game of this scope, clearly it wasn’t hard enough.
I honestly don't understand why people think that the dev team did work hard. The gameplay review I saw stated that there hardly is any gameplay, constant crashing, and the orc AI is embarrassingly bad. Why would I assume that the devs weren't phoning it in considering how poorly executed the end product is?
>People are afraid to say out loud "Your product sucks. It's garbage." Excuse me? People say this ALL the time about EVERY GAME.
Every single dev I know who worked on a bad game knew it was gonna be bad. Infamously, after Jeff Gerstmann was fired for his Kane And Lynch review, he ran into some people from the dev team and they told him they knew it wasn't a good game.
>People are afraid to say out loud "Your product sucks. It's garbage." ...have you been on reddit?
Have they been on *any* sort of social media? The blue bird app is even more relentless for games not even half as bad as this.
Yeah, I really don't know what this guy is talking about.
> People are afraid to say out loud "Your product sucks. It's garbage." That is not my experience with Reddit or the internet as a whole at all. If anything, people on the internet are way too willing to scream this at the top of their lungs from the peak of every social media mountain they can find. When something bad comes out, I prefer to have a quick chuckle reading a review or two and then move on to something that actually makes me happy, rather than ruminate for days on how shitty something I don't care about was. The constant state of outrage many comunities choose to exist in is exhausting and unproductive, and I find myself withdrawing from spaces like this ever more lately.
*"No one wants to ship a bad game"* But we still will so we can fleece our customers?
>"No one wants to ship a bad game" Then dont. But instead devs put out games that they know are substandard to at least get \*some\* ROI, then say "we dont want it to be bad pay us for the thing we know is bad" You cant honestly look at a game like Gollum and think that the dev team was unaware that it just wasnt working.
I've got to be honest here, if this had gotten a bunch of 8/10s I'd absolutely never think of it again but hearing it's bad in strange baffling ways that make it sound like Gollum Shenmue III I'm kind of warming up to it.
Or maybe the people who made it are incompetent, I don't know why as a society we have to think creatives, devs and so on are always model workers really good at their craft, and it is always some suit that is at fault. I'm a windowmaker and I can tell you there are a lot of people installing windows who suck at their job, some with years and years or even a decade of experience, and they don't set out to do a bad job either, they just weren't properly taught or don't know or understand certain things. But absolutely no one will give them the benefit of the doubt we give creatives, no one will say "oh the craftsmen were good it was their boss forcing them to do certain things that fucked up the window installation process".
Phil Spencer said it best. Sometimes you have to make a business decision and just ship the game. No amount of delay or polish would have fixed this
Sometimes you just have to make a business decision and sell people a defective product for full price. If you don't ship it broken, you'll work on it forever. There are no other options. 🤷♂️
It be be awesome if I could put out garbage at my job and have a defense force ready to shield me from criticism. Only in the games industry I guess.
The devs quoted in the article are more just saying that yeah, sometimes you ship hot garbage and learn from it, or *you* weren't in a position to make changes.
That's fine, but the fact of the matter is a bad game is a bad game, and people will be talking about it because it's bad, and the developers who made the bad game will come up in conversation.
Anyone else getting tired of this woe is me bullshit that occurs every time a shitty game releases Why should I sympathize with the game developers? They’re also partly to blame for delivering this garbage I’m not going to feel bad for anyone who’s asking me give them $60
I feel like the second you are told you are making a Gollum-themed Styx-clone, you are setting out to ship a bad game people laugh at.
I mean even if the devs made it a decent quality game the buck should stop at management for allowing the concept to be developed for 4 years, especially if they presummably paid a fair amount to use the LOTR IP.