Gollum's Going

And he's gone

It is no great secret that this year has been one of amazing disparity in the world of gaming. On one hand we've received some of the best decade defining games dropped upon our laps in the form of titles like Baldur's Gate 3 and Tears of the Kingdom- and the otherhand Forspoken came out this year. (Yes, sometimes that feels like a world away to me too.) But the depths sink far deeper than that, because we also found ourselves delivered upon the sorts of games that challenge the very limits of torture, in that 'charming' little adaptation of one of the greatest myths of all time: Gollum. To this day I cannot vocalise the totally irrational expectation I harboured towards the Gollum game being something of a quiet masterpiece before it's launch. I envisioned a 'Last Guardian' style adventure weaved in non-standard narrative techniques across a gorgeous world deep in ephemeral beauty spotted with dabs of a poignant and longing sadness. And that was so wrong!

I can't remember ever getting a worse misread on a product in my life, because Gollum turned out to be such a shockingly terrible game that it wasn't only just an insult to it's awful price point, but an insult to the craft and philosophy of games in general. I'm not even exaggerating! There are key structure and gameplay decisions, totally regardless of polish and coding, that defy the very basic building blocks of game design in spectacularly garish ways- it's hard not to see Gollum as some sort of failed Avant Garde restructuring of the very art of design in some attempt to cast a satirical light on the form as a whole. But that's just my guess, as it happens the game was terrible. It sold terrible. It's legacy is terrible. And now the studio behind it has been wrapped around the knuckles and demoted back down to publisher for it, which sucks but... can you blame anyone for making a decision like that?

Recently there have been some efforts made to detangle the web of mysteries around what went wrong with the Gollum conundrum by the brave individuals at a German Publication called 'Game Two' who have dived into the sewers were no one else dared tread. What did they discover? Pretty much exactly what you can feel with the controller in your hand. Most notably, Gollum was originally pitched as some highly ambitious AAA juggernaut developed for the budget of your average horror movie. 15 million euros is a shockingly tiny amount for a big studio project and absolutely nowhere near enough for a AAA game that expects to have kind any of staying power in the modern market. Numbers like that suggests a producer with absolutely no idea about the medium they're working with. So then, what about the game that the developers had in their heads and hearts?

Well for one they wanted some sort of free-climbing mechanic just like the one in Breath of the Wild or Genshin Impact, which implies a wholly different approach to level design away from the tightly underground level based product were ultimately lumped with. Heck, this might even have been semi-open world at some point during the planning stages before it became horrifically clear that was never going to happen. They were also shooting for a much more cinematic 'Gollum arguement' system which would have had dynamic camera angles and more complex dialogue webs, but kind of still sounds gimmicky to me. (It's hard to sell people on new ideas, I guess.) And it was designed to be a heavy narrative epic which swept around dozens of interconnected stories with Gollum being the glue bringing them all-together- which dissolved into the ugly stew of bad 'eavesdropping' objectives which is the delivered product.

Of course the most inflammatory statement comes regarding the infamous apology pic that the team posted which features the now legendary typo- "Lord of the Ring: Gollum" In reference to their own game which they put out, somehow misspelled. At the time this was like a signal flare of insanity. How could the team manage to screw up the name of their own product, didn't anyone fact check it, how could so little care go into something so basic? Well according to what we hear that might be because the statement wasn't made by Daedalus but rather by their publisher Nacon in the guise of Daedalus! Further accusations claim that the post was made by AI, although I do wonder how the alleged source could confidently make that claim given they apparently were a Daedalus worker, but I guess you never know. Dumber things have happened, just look at the platform formerly known as Twitter!

The claims then start to become a little more disturbing as we slip into the actual conditions of worklife behind the walls of Daedalus. All the usual suspects of working in the games industry are present, stressful working conditions, atmospheres of fear, more effort going into making it through the day than creating the project. All of it topped off by the Publisher who owned them publicly doubting their continued existence, claiming they had "no future'. Honestly this is all making my inherent underdog instincts kick in and I'm in danger of switching to their side; arguing in the defence of a developer that was dealt every bad hand possible and practically set-up to fail. At the very least it tracks with the colossal size of the game's failure.

And yet I have trouble swallowing it. Oh, the budget concerns I totally believe, and the bad working conditions too! (Despite Daedalus' vehement denials on the matter.) There isn't a single inch of this game that betrays unfulfilled potential. Not in it's design, it's ambition, it's systems- even the signature Gollum arguement concept doesn't sound all that interesting on paper; it's just an AI argument system. Usually even the most burnished and scuppered games have glints of diamond within all that muck and filth that you can see, in the best light, what the team may have dreamed of. Gollum feels amateurish at a design level, with mindless fetch tasks or meaningless eavesdropping missions. If you were to freeze this exact game just before active production and gave it a billion dollars and all the time to do everything they had written down, the final product still wouldn't have been good. So what can we believe here?

What I choose to believe is that Daedalus is a company that never got the chance to demonstrate their fullest potential as creators, and that is a tragedy worth mourning. I've always viewed more functioning game studios as a good thing for the industry, but they have to start their rise from a place of solid practises and good management. From the sounds of it, Daedalus had none of those foundations and so even if by some freak miracle Gollum was a success, it's likely their next budding project would have been subjected to all the same problems if not worse ones. And if there's one thing this industry absolutely can do without, it's more sources of blatant toxicity. Still, I'll pour one out to the Gollum we could have gotten, as well as horribly deformed and mutilated one that we did. Respect for the dead, you know?