No, not like that... gross...
Earlier this year a crime was committed. Not a crime to the public governing laws we live under, but to the very core of good taste as it stands. A cardinal sin to the sanctity of the greater wills- a great enough sacrilege to make the Two Fingers shudder and shake the demi-gods to their very core. A bad Lord of the Rings game was released. Wait, don't leave... You don't understand, we should have been long past this stage in the game creation landscape. A bad game is one thing we will never escape but the one in question, Gollum, was a special kind of terrible. It wasn't just bad, it wasn't even just mediocre- it spawned in from the bargain bin of a whole other decade! Ugly, boring, conceptually bewildered, mechanically amateur- I could have put together a more compelling game with my own pathetic grasp of Unity- let alone the twenty five or so 'professionals' who worked on Gollum.
Although I suppose the real question is: what did anyone expect? Honestly. A game about the loathsome dung beetle of The Lord of the Rings himself? The only creature so repugnant as to be a returning foil in both The Hobbit and the Rings? A covetous, selfish, loathsome little worm looked down upon by even the gentle hobbit-folk who drag him around. Why exactly would he make a good vehicle to explore the magical world of Middle Earth? I understand the voyeuristic angle of peeking through the muddied lens of a character who inexplicably managed to 'see it all' so to speak, but this game failed to even play to that small concept. Gollum spends most of his own video game locked in a nauseatingly dull and dreary prison doing fetch quests. It's a miserable existence lived in all of its tedium.
Again, it's the kind of game that rides hope purely on the name of the brand attached to the box, but we are far past the age where people go into shops and pick up anything that looks familiar on the front cover. Games are getting way too expensive to warrant that sort of frivolous spending. Word of mouth spread quickly with Gollum, informing a trepidatious public that this game was not some unsung quiet masterpiece but a disaster of colossal proportions, which may have won the title some pity 'disaster tourism' purchases if the product wasn't so laughably expensive. £50 for the game! £60 for all the DLC which includes concept art, Sindarin VO (certain lines spoken in the authentic Elf tongue. You have to pay for background chatter.), the goddamn lore compendium and the soundtrack! The game would be a joke at £15, this price is a blatant opt-in robbery scheme.
Reviews are terrible across the board, with the only positives coming from actual career trolls who use the gift of reviewership to be ultra-contrarian with the most cookie-cutter takes imaginable. No one can honestly stomach a single nice word about this game and to be absolutely fair, I fully get it- what is there nice to say about a game like this? What is there to say at all except for... yikes! And of course, the knock-on effect meant that sales dried up super quickly. According to Gamesensor, nearly 300,000 people had this game wishlisted on Steam during the build up to launch- and after? The game sold about 10,000 in it's crucial opening few days; and given the reputation it's quickly gained as the worst title of the year, that was likely the biggest boost this game's sales are ever going to see. That would equal less than half a million dollars in revenue; I wonder if that's enough to cover buying the licence?
It's certainly not enough to keep the studio afloat. Because lo-and-behold, despite moving their efforts directly onto another Lord of the Ring game immediately following the release of Gollum, (to the horror of all the world) it seems mercy has swooped in to save us all. Daedalic entertainment has folded their development arm and ceased all creation efforts for the foreseeable future. Now the company is quite a bit bigger than their development team so this isn't the same as the entire company going under, but it is a pretty solid step back from the trajectory the company was heading in. And it means that now we can identify Gollum as being directly responsible for the death of Daedalic's development efforts for how terrible of a game that he starred in.
Now of course the human side of everyone will make us feel sad hearing this news, and trust me I know how painful it can be to have security ripped away from you. I've lived my entire life without security of any kind and it's a horrible situation to get used to. These developers wanted to make something new and the more creative minds we have working on games the better it is for the artform. Even the early missteps might be stepping stones on the road to something truly great, let's not forget that Hideo Kojima's first game as director got cancelled before it ever saw the light of day and see what heights he has gone on to reach. Any studio can contain the next auteur with the power to catapult the industry forward.
On the otherhand, Gollum really was that bad. Soulless, uninspired, uncreative, unambitious, meandering, ugly, badly written, badly designed and worst of all- severly anti consumer. The very existence of this game in the state it's in is like a black mark slathered across the hand of everyone who worked on it- as it's an admission that this is the state you think it is just fine to release games in. Not only that, but for the price of a full AAA title, and a marketing campaign slapped alongside for extra boost points- you just really can't rightly justify investing time into a studio that can't put out even the base of a good product. It's a damning indictment of literally everyone who okayed this for release, and those that worked alongside them to promote it. (Still noticing Gollum polluting banner ads on the Xbox Store, Microsoft: where's your integrity?)
At the end of the day I honestly think the blame for this comes down on the executives. They took on a project their team couldn't handle, the project obviously ran into some form of development issues and yet at no time did someone with a discerning producers eye look over the affair and realise that the game wasn't going to make it launch in any viable state. Instead shoulders were shrugged and they thought they could ride out the reputational damage, probably because it's happened so often in recent years. Bethesda and CDPR have both been high-profile perpetrator's of similar plots, but this stretches beyond them into something of a habit- companies who want to try and recoup what little they can, slapping the dregs of a bad release above the reputational save of a cancellation. Daedelic threw out their child thinking it could fly only to watch it crash and take them along with it. That's some nominative determinism for you right there
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