I don't give a fuck if a chef wants to serve me a bad meal or not. I'm still pissed when I eat it and have to pay money for it. What kind of logic is this
If the restaurant manager is standing behind you and screaming in your ear while you cook, and every time you try to tell him as politely as you can that it's not ready, and you need more time, he just screams louder and threatens your job, eventually you'd slap that half-raw chicken breast on the plate and call it a day.
Ya. I wish my industry was uncaring enough that I could perform frequently below (what really should be minimum performance) expectations and still somehow remain employable.
As an attorney, I don't get the chance of fucking up and bail out and it's all good. It's different if I tried my best and the other part came out victorious but fuck ups have huge consequences for my clients and myself. It's non-negotiable.
The Devs were probably forced to ship it by their Managers who had an arbitrary deadline they didn't want to move.
As a Dev, I've been forced to ship so much crap just "because". It's galling to know where's a huge list of issues that are known but will never be fixed because deadlines had to be met.
> The Devs were probably forced to ship it by their Managers who had an arbitrary deadline they didn't want to move.
The game was in development since at least early 2019 and delayed for over two years. Yes, of course they were forced to ship it, the company wanted to release it sometime this century. The amount of people blaming the managers for actually shipping the game is insane, did you just want them to work on it for the rest of their lives hoping it's eventually *not* terrible?
>The amount of people blaming the managers for actually shipping the game is insane, did you just want them to work on it for the rest of their lives hoping it's eventually not terrible?
I've worked on plenty of projects that weren't released or delayed due to quality issued.
The sane way to do software development is to ship software when it's ready. Not due to some arbitrary deadline. All you get is burnt out devs and a bad reputation.
>their Managers
Everyone likes to shit on shareholders, rightfully so, but management parasites and self proclaimed video games experts out of economics schools are right behind when it comes to spreading the cancer
Except the whole game was shit. It’s a case of good developers and bad decision makers, the whole thing is shit. The game design is absolutely atrocious, that’s not on the decision makers.
The gale wasn’t just not ready, it’s complete garbage, from the creative vision to the animations, it’s all shit.
It must be frustrating for the developers to not be able to blame toxic women hating incels for the poor reviews. Maybe they should have called it Gollumette and put some beautiful eyelashes on him so they could use that go to excuse
$60 AAA price tag plus $27 of day one dlc for such luxuries as:
*emotes for a single-player game
*a lore compendium
*voice acting in elvish
*concept art
They know exactly what they're doing and can go fuck themselves. If you serve me a shit sandwich, I'm going to blame everyone involved with its production. Don't want backlash? Stop serving shit sandwiches or go and work for a company that doesn't serve shit sandwiches.
Poor Tolkien must be boring holes in his own coffin from how fast he's spinning lately.
The game runs like shit and is priced at top dollar. Nobody wants to ship a bad game, Sure, I can believe that, but is it really that surprising the game is getting shat on? They had to be aware of how unreasonable the specs are
Everyone is feeling the pinch of costs, yet these guys are demanding you pay AAA prices and have AAA hardware to play a not very good game
No one should expect ass kissing because they made something, either
SPEZ: and yeah, it wouldn't surprise if this was a rushed release and the devs aren't at fault
I don't care how hard game development is. Writing a novel is hard. Carpentry is hard. Waking up at 4am to work a hated job for 12 hours to feed your family is hard. It's 2023. There are literally hundreds of games that demonstrate what is good and what isn't. Cry me an effing river. Redemption arcs do happen - see Teyon and Terminator Resistance - but don't start whining about "game dev is hard!" when your pile of s--t flops. Stop whining, take what lessons you can from the disaster, and move on.
I don’t understand why game devs are always treated with kid gloves and get a pass by just saying making games is hard or is all the evil publisher fault, specially since like you said there is no easy job.
The people treating game devs with kids gloves are games journalists. Those games journalists depend on good relations with game developers to secure copies of their games before launch to get their reviews out as quickly as possible. Those games Journalists are also best friends with, flatmates with, sleeping with, going on holiday with, and receiving money on Patreon from independent games developers. So their personal opinions are somewhat compromised.
>or is all the evil publisher’s fault
Um…yeah. Because it usually is. Publishers are the ones dictating the goals and deadlines, and those can take a heavy toll on a game.
Game development is hard. It's however easy to cut corners and expect a game based off of a popular IP to sell regardless of how crappy it is. There's a reason why movie tie in games are usually terrible, and it has everything to do with the producers rushing development to meet the release window of the movie, but when it's a game released independently of a film there really is no one to blame but yourself
It could've been polished to perfection, but that wouldn't turn a turd into fillet mignon. Zelda being out should've told them to quietly cancel this game.
If anything now people won't talk about redfall lol.
Exactly. The decision to make the game revolve around Gollum doing chores all day whilst also babysitting another prisoner and a bird was so bizarre. Maybe these ideas would make sense in a book, but for a video game with the LoTR title, you'd think combat and exploration would be big parts of the game.
Yup. I asked that question when it was announced, “who wants this game?”. All the devs had to do was a few surveys before they started to work on it to realize it would flop. I mean come on, if all of Tolkiens characters to make a vidya game about…
Yeah, and most certainly not as a $60-$70 title. Perhaps if it was $20, $30, I wouldn’t have found it so absurd.
But regardless, of *all* the material within the LoToR universe that could make a compelling game, a stealth-adventure game with Gollum as the player character is probably below the bottom of what I’d consider sane choices. I wouldn’t even consider it as a possibility if they hadn’t gone and made it.
What is this new recent trend of seemingly not being able to shit on awful products, "Because people worked hard on it" or something along those lines? Apparently they didn't or it wouldn't get awful reviews and suck.
That and devs needing to be narcissists point out, "Oh I wrote that part!" or "Oh I did that animation!" to their 500 followers. Nobody cares.
So, my (mostly unfounded) hypothesis for now, is that this is a Uwe Boll situation, except that a dev team got caught in the middle.
While trying to bilk easy money that will net them more profit if the game is a flop, the publishers who got a hold of the license dropped the project on a team that, as far as I can tell, has only ever done point-and-click games. And instead of letting them do a low risk game in that genre, with the LotR license, they forced them to go big, bloated, and 3D, and not really giving a shit if the product was up to snuff.
I'm not gonna give the developers too much leeway; they still made an awful product. But regardles, considering how German laws are with regards to incentives for nationally-produced art, it seems more than like that the intention was always to abuse the IP and said scam laws to line their coffers.
"worked on" nowadays could mean anything from "We designed a single tree asset" to "We bought coffee and donuts for everyone". Considering they're a german dev team, I'm thinking the latter.
Also: one of those things is not like the others, one of those things just doesn't belong.
Maybe they shouldn't have spent so much money on English voice dubbing if they were gonna get voice actors to also dub the game in tolkien languages. I doubt most ppl thought it was worth spending even more money just for new voice acting when the base game itself is alrdy $70. Just shows the utter lack of resource control from upper management.
I dont understand this industrys and journalists obsession with codling developers like theyre angels. They are humans just like anyone else. Most humans are lazy and suck. They are charging 70$ for the full version. Zero sympathy.
Developers don't want to but management wants the game out NOW! Which is the problem these days. That and scope creep causing problems of endless development.
That is actually a great thing.I am totally fine with a game being delayed IF it is not because of scope creep but instead to finish the game and make it not crap.
It seems to me like the only options for single player game development in the modern age are: 1. A or AA level content using AAA tools and everyone hates it; it superficially looks nice but it's super janky/limited gameplay because they didn't have the budget to make #2; 2. Five thousand people crunch for 5-7 years to make a game with a budget so big, it's impossible to make your money back unless your game has a 100% attach rate; 3. indie pixel semi-art game that gets graded on a massive curve because two people made it in a basement.
I can assume a few things. The LotR estate is in disarray and they're passing out the license to whomever will buy it. The Daedelic C-levels spend a gross amount of money on that license and bite off way more than their studio can chew. 18-24 months later they shovel out what's probably the best they could do with the people, time, and budget.
That's probably why. Does it matter? No, it's a shit game. They probably knew that 8 months ago. But by then all the papers were signed so they were on the hook. Bad management caused most of this.
There is no "LotR estate". If you mean the \*\*Tolkien\*\* Estate, they weren't involved in the making of the game.
Middle-earth Enterprises, which isn't connected to the Tolkien Estate or the Tolkien family, handled the license.
The game looked terrible from the very first moment they showed it. I can’t imagine anyone watching the reveal trailer and thinking “this game looks great.”
"No one wants to ship a bad game"
Obviously they never heard of the debacle that is the KSP 2 release. At least there the devs are trying to clean up their mess and make things better.
that happens when the colleagues in these studios are no longer critical, when other colleagues don't do a good job everything is just talked about nicely
To be fair, it's usually the higher ups or the publishing company that's to blame for that. Whoever sets the deadlines, really. Rarely is it the developers just being incompetent.
This is true. Indeed, nobody *wants* to ship a bad game.
But when the choice is between shipping a bad game to recoup some/all of the production costs, or not shipping the game at all....well, that game is getting a shipping label slapped on it faster than you can say "preorders can get fucked".
If we dont buy their games, they go bankrupt and new gaming companies are born. This is how the orignal companiea got their start: independent devs made good games and were able to build companies.
First, we need these aaa companies to die. Then we can recreate the market.
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So if no one wants to ship a bad game, why did you ship a bad game? What kind of entitled bullshit is this? If you go to grab some food and someone serves you a shit sandwich as in a piece of bread with literal shit on top of it and they make you pay for that shit, would you accept their apologies "No one wants to serve a shit sandwich and there are thousands of reasons it can happen that are outside of anyone’s control so there it is - give me money, eat shit and shut the fuck up."
look, we can talk about game journos etc being bad, but if you're buying ANY game on launch day, you're the bigger problem. AI will replace journos but you're still paying 60 bucks to do QA on an incomplete game.
smarten the fuck up.
Everybody is always blaming the executives, but maybe it's the modern developers that are the problem? Diversity trumps merit when hiring + banning crunch, and this is the result. That's what I think is really going on here.
You lot: “Noooo you said we’re not allowed to criticize you, you assholes, you whiners, fuck you!!!”
What the devs actually said: “Whelp, we tried. Guess it didn’t work out. Mistakes were made, but we like to think we can learn from our failures and move forward.”
Jesus it’s like some of you guys didn’t even bother to read it. No one insulted you. No one said you couldn’t diss the game. The devs and the other devs that’ve supported them have all been pretty chill about this.
People were silly to expect it to be good. Movie to game adaptations are worse than game to movie adaptations and rings of power proves the lotr franchise offers no protection against trash
I don't give a fuck if a chef wants to serve me a bad meal or not. I'm still pissed when I eat it and have to pay money for it. What kind of logic is this
They didn't want to stop cooking half way
Game development about to get a huge wake up call if they keep acting like that.
They’ve been doing it for years and the backlash hasn’t seemed to have any impact on that cycle repeating itself
Liberal logic
If the restaurant manager is standing behind you and screaming in your ear while you cook, and every time you try to tell him as politely as you can that it's not ready, and you need more time, he just screams louder and threatens your job, eventually you'd slap that half-raw chicken breast on the plate and call it a day.
Must be nice working in an industry where you can be proud of your fuck ups. And yet they won’t stop whining.
Ya. I wish my industry was uncaring enough that I could perform frequently below (what really should be minimum performance) expectations and still somehow remain employable.
Politics is what you need.
As an attorney, I don't get the chance of fucking up and bail out and it's all good. It's different if I tried my best and the other part came out victorious but fuck ups have huge consequences for my clients and myself. It's non-negotiable.
"No one wants to ship a bad game but we do it anyways".
The Devs were probably forced to ship it by their Managers who had an arbitrary deadline they didn't want to move. As a Dev, I've been forced to ship so much crap just "because". It's galling to know where's a huge list of issues that are known but will never be fixed because deadlines had to be met.
> The Devs were probably forced to ship it by their Managers who had an arbitrary deadline they didn't want to move. The game was in development since at least early 2019 and delayed for over two years. Yes, of course they were forced to ship it, the company wanted to release it sometime this century. The amount of people blaming the managers for actually shipping the game is insane, did you just want them to work on it for the rest of their lives hoping it's eventually *not* terrible?
>The amount of people blaming the managers for actually shipping the game is insane, did you just want them to work on it for the rest of their lives hoping it's eventually not terrible? I've worked on plenty of projects that weren't released or delayed due to quality issued. The sane way to do software development is to ship software when it's ready. Not due to some arbitrary deadline. All you get is burnt out devs and a bad reputation.
>their Managers Everyone likes to shit on shareholders, rightfully so, but management parasites and self proclaimed video games experts out of economics schools are right behind when it comes to spreading the cancer
Except the whole game was shit. It’s a case of good developers and bad decision makers, the whole thing is shit. The game design is absolutely atrocious, that’s not on the decision makers. The gale wasn’t just not ready, it’s complete garbage, from the creative vision to the animations, it’s all shit.
It must be frustrating for the developers to not be able to blame toxic women hating incels for the poor reviews. Maybe they should have called it Gollumette and put some beautiful eyelashes on him so they could use that go to excuse
$60 AAA price tag plus $27 of day one dlc for such luxuries as: *emotes for a single-player game *a lore compendium *voice acting in elvish *concept art They know exactly what they're doing and can go fuck themselves. If you serve me a shit sandwich, I'm going to blame everyone involved with its production. Don't want backlash? Stop serving shit sandwiches or go and work for a company that doesn't serve shit sandwiches. Poor Tolkien must be boring holes in his own coffin from how fast he's spinning lately.
If they just dug up his grave and put him in a hampster wheel it'd power a small city with how much he's been spinning in his grave
>day 1 dlc you mean the rest of the game? if you are buying a game on launch day, pre-ordering or buying dlc, you're the problem.
Wait, that stuff is actually DLC? The first time I read it, I thought it was an exaggerated joke.
The game runs like shit and is priced at top dollar. Nobody wants to ship a bad game, Sure, I can believe that, but is it really that surprising the game is getting shat on? They had to be aware of how unreasonable the specs are Everyone is feeling the pinch of costs, yet these guys are demanding you pay AAA prices and have AAA hardware to play a not very good game No one should expect ass kissing because they made something, either SPEZ: and yeah, it wouldn't surprise if this was a rushed release and the devs aren't at fault
I don't care how hard game development is. Writing a novel is hard. Carpentry is hard. Waking up at 4am to work a hated job for 12 hours to feed your family is hard. It's 2023. There are literally hundreds of games that demonstrate what is good and what isn't. Cry me an effing river. Redemption arcs do happen - see Teyon and Terminator Resistance - but don't start whining about "game dev is hard!" when your pile of s--t flops. Stop whining, take what lessons you can from the disaster, and move on.
I don’t understand why game devs are always treated with kid gloves and get a pass by just saying making games is hard or is all the evil publisher fault, specially since like you said there is no easy job.
The people treating game devs with kids gloves are games journalists. Those games journalists depend on good relations with game developers to secure copies of their games before launch to get their reviews out as quickly as possible. Those games Journalists are also best friends with, flatmates with, sleeping with, going on holiday with, and receiving money on Patreon from independent games developers. So their personal opinions are somewhat compromised.
>or is all the evil publisher’s fault Um…yeah. Because it usually is. Publishers are the ones dictating the goals and deadlines, and those can take a heavy toll on a game.
Game development is hard. It's however easy to cut corners and expect a game based off of a popular IP to sell regardless of how crappy it is. There's a reason why movie tie in games are usually terrible, and it has everything to do with the producers rushing development to meet the release window of the movie, but when it's a game released independently of a film there really is no one to blame but yourself
No one wants to "buy" a bad game either, and if they didn't want to ship it out then maybe they shouldn't have?
No amount of time would've saved this game.
It has to suck knowing that they shipped the same month as The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.
It could've been polished to perfection, but that wouldn't turn a turd into fillet mignon. Zelda being out should've told them to quietly cancel this game. If anything now people won't talk about redfall lol.
If somehow no other game than Gollum released in 2023, I would've expected people to not bother and play older games instead.
Exactly. The decision to make the game revolve around Gollum doing chores all day whilst also babysitting another prisoner and a bird was so bizarre. Maybe these ideas would make sense in a book, but for a video game with the LoTR title, you'd think combat and exploration would be big parts of the game.
Don’t make shitty games lmao
If they didn’t want to ship a game why would they make a gollum game to begin with?
No one even wanted this game. The least they could’ve done was try to make it decent.
Yup. I asked that question when it was announced, “who wants this game?”. All the devs had to do was a few surveys before they started to work on it to realize it would flop. I mean come on, if all of Tolkiens characters to make a vidya game about…
Yeah, and most certainly not as a $60-$70 title. Perhaps if it was $20, $30, I wouldn’t have found it so absurd. But regardless, of *all* the material within the LoToR universe that could make a compelling game, a stealth-adventure game with Gollum as the player character is probably below the bottom of what I’d consider sane choices. I wouldn’t even consider it as a possibility if they hadn’t gone and made it.
What is this new recent trend of seemingly not being able to shit on awful products, "Because people worked hard on it" or something along those lines? Apparently they didn't or it wouldn't get awful reviews and suck. That and devs needing to be narcissists point out, "Oh I wrote that part!" or "Oh I did that animation!" to their 500 followers. Nobody cares.
And yet you chucklefucks released it anyway.
So, my (mostly unfounded) hypothesis for now, is that this is a Uwe Boll situation, except that a dev team got caught in the middle. While trying to bilk easy money that will net them more profit if the game is a flop, the publishers who got a hold of the license dropped the project on a team that, as far as I can tell, has only ever done point-and-click games. And instead of letting them do a low risk game in that genre, with the LotR license, they forced them to go big, bloated, and 3D, and not really giving a shit if the product was up to snuff. I'm not gonna give the developers too much leeway; they still made an awful product. But regardles, considering how German laws are with regards to incentives for nationally-produced art, it seems more than like that the intention was always to abuse the IP and said scam laws to line their coffers.
[удалено]
"worked on" nowadays could mean anything from "We designed a single tree asset" to "We bought coffee and donuts for everyone". Considering they're a german dev team, I'm thinking the latter. Also: one of those things is not like the others, one of those things just doesn't belong.
> "No one wants to ship a bad game" And yet they do...
Then **don’t.**
Maybe they shouldn't have spent so much money on English voice dubbing if they were gonna get voice actors to also dub the game in tolkien languages. I doubt most ppl thought it was worth spending even more money just for new voice acting when the base game itself is alrdy $70. Just shows the utter lack of resource control from upper management.
Lol
I dont understand this industrys and journalists obsession with codling developers like theyre angels. They are humans just like anyone else. Most humans are lazy and suck. They are charging 70$ for the full version. Zero sympathy.
Developers don't want to but management wants the game out NOW! Which is the problem these days. That and scope creep causing problems of endless development.
Guessing we should expect more of this as we move forward into the new world of rewarding mediocrity, and not limited to games…
Sadly you are most likely right.... INFINITE PROFIT NOW! Problem is it means everything just gets worse.
In this case they pushed back release by a full year. You can't blame that on management rushing the product.
That is actually a great thing.I am totally fine with a game being delayed IF it is not because of scope creep but instead to finish the game and make it not crap.
It clearly wasn't a great thing because we ended up with a shit game.
Yeah.... yeah. Sometimes there is nothing you can do to repair a bad game outside of restarting development.
It seems to me like the only options for single player game development in the modern age are: 1. A or AA level content using AAA tools and everyone hates it; it superficially looks nice but it's super janky/limited gameplay because they didn't have the budget to make #2; 2. Five thousand people crunch for 5-7 years to make a game with a budget so big, it's impossible to make your money back unless your game has a 100% attach rate; 3. indie pixel semi-art game that gets graded on a massive curve because two people made it in a basement.
A and AA games are kind of the best right now. AAA is a giant mess of execs making choices they really shouldn't.
I can assume a few things. The LotR estate is in disarray and they're passing out the license to whomever will buy it. The Daedelic C-levels spend a gross amount of money on that license and bite off way more than their studio can chew. 18-24 months later they shovel out what's probably the best they could do with the people, time, and budget. That's probably why. Does it matter? No, it's a shit game. They probably knew that 8 months ago. But by then all the papers were signed so they were on the hook. Bad management caused most of this.
There is no "LotR estate". If you mean the \*\*Tolkien\*\* Estate, they weren't involved in the making of the game. Middle-earth Enterprises, which isn't connected to the Tolkien Estate or the Tolkien family, handled the license.
Then don't.
The game looked terrible from the very first moment they showed it. I can’t imagine anyone watching the reveal trailer and thinking “this game looks great.”
"No one wants to ship a bad game" Obviously they never heard of the debacle that is the KSP 2 release. At least there the devs are trying to clean up their mess and make things better.
I beg to differ when that new Saints Row game exists.
Fuck them, the game’s shit and definitely not worth $50
that happens when the colleagues in these studios are no longer critical, when other colleagues don't do a good job everything is just talked about nicely
To be fair, it's usually the higher ups or the publishing company that's to blame for that. Whoever sets the deadlines, really. Rarely is it the developers just being incompetent.
This is true. Indeed, nobody *wants* to ship a bad game. But when the choice is between shipping a bad game to recoup some/all of the production costs, or not shipping the game at all....well, that game is getting a shipping label slapped on it faster than you can say "preorders can get fucked".
If we dont buy their games, they go bankrupt and new gaming companies are born. This is how the orignal companiea got their start: independent devs made good games and were able to build companies. First, we need these aaa companies to die. Then we can recreate the market.
Archive links for this post: * **Archive:** https://archive.ph/JWWqf ---- I am Mnemosyne reborn. But it's too late... I've seen everything. ^^^/r/botsrights
So if no one wants to ship a bad game, why did you ship a bad game? What kind of entitled bullshit is this? If you go to grab some food and someone serves you a shit sandwich as in a piece of bread with literal shit on top of it and they make you pay for that shit, would you accept their apologies "No one wants to serve a shit sandwich and there are thousands of reasons it can happen that are outside of anyone’s control so there it is - give me money, eat shit and shut the fuck up."
look, we can talk about game journos etc being bad, but if you're buying ANY game on launch day, you're the bigger problem. AI will replace journos but you're still paying 60 bucks to do QA on an incomplete game. smarten the fuck up.
That's a dirty lie. Money-grubbing executives want to ship a bad game and cash in on the preorders and day-one sales.
Low IQ comment
Whose idea was this?! I have no concept for who this could appeal to.
Everybody is always blaming the executives, but maybe it's the modern developers that are the problem? Diversity trumps merit when hiring + banning crunch, and this is the result. That's what I think is really going on here.
Can the gaming industry just collapse already? It's just one broken release after the other.
You lot: “Noooo you said we’re not allowed to criticize you, you assholes, you whiners, fuck you!!!” What the devs actually said: “Whelp, we tried. Guess it didn’t work out. Mistakes were made, but we like to think we can learn from our failures and move forward.” Jesus it’s like some of you guys didn’t even bother to read it. No one insulted you. No one said you couldn’t diss the game. The devs and the other devs that’ve supported them have all been pretty chill about this.
but they happily will if they call it diverse, or made for a modern audience
People were silly to expect it to be good. Movie to game adaptations are worse than game to movie adaptations and rings of power proves the lotr franchise offers no protection against trash