Gollum's Going

And he's gone

Gollum has a body count

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

Gollum...

 Sneaky little Daedelic, wicked, tricksy, false!

Now, we live in a very peculiar era of the evolution of the game's industry right now. Games are far beyond that experimental stage of 'throw everything at a wall and see what sticks', which itself saw the birth of many great franchises that stuck around to this day as well as many utter duds that seemed to die in the conceptualisation stage but still, somehow, made it to print. I mean that's just how production worked back in the day- you can up with a stupid idea that you didn't really believe in and never really came together in development but you might as well stick with it- the consumer base didn't really know what good games were back then so they'd probably still eat it up! Developers got a little wacky, games got a little wacky, and it was a more free time of publishing and development where any old game could slip out of the woodworks to blow us all away. (Or disappoint the world spectacularly.)

You just need to take a glance at the line-up of the recent Playstation 'State of Play' to see how that is no longer really the case anymore. Insomniac's Spider Man 2, Metal Gear Solid 3 (remake), Marathon (Reboot), Alan Wake 2, Final Fantasy XVI, Ghost Runner 2, The Talos Principle 2, Assassin's Creed Mirage, Street Fighter 6, Dragon's Dogma 2; they're all continuations to proven properties because that's all the modern world cares about anymore. Sure there were a few new games and franchises revealed during the event, but they were more the substanceless filler propping up the empty space between actual announcements. How many of those non-sequels did people actually end up talking about? Only Phantom Blade Zero because that game looked sick- another one from that spate of promising-looking eastern martial arts games that has come out of nowhere to impress with a trailer and no tangible release date. (Black Myth is 2024, huh? I'll believe it when I see it...)

Experimentation is something of a dead art, underlined by the domination of companies like Ubisoft who currently exist less as a 'development studio' and more like a Frankenstien's lab of conceptual thieves who hop around the industry taking the most 'successful' features of other games and trying to stitch it onto their repeated stale franchises. (I've just gotten around to playing 'Assassin's Creed: Odyssey'; it feels like they're trying to make 5 games at the same time and all of them are only half done.) It makes sense honestly, there's just too much money currently going into the industry to be creative and take risks, too much spent and too much potential to earn. Even indie games tend to trend in similar directions, going through waves of mimicking the same low-budget art styles or the same general genre trends. As such it has become increasingly rare we come across a game like 'Gollum'. Because let's be honest, who in their right mind thought there could be a good game based on 'Gollum'?

In the most vapid and intangible manner possible, I did honestly consider it for a time. I mean the idea seemed inherently repulsive, playing as the loathsome twisted wreck of innocence that Gollum represents, torn by animalistic desire and base instinct- but I guess some dumb part of my brain filled a game like this away with the other 'art piece' style games. Like 'Shadow of the Colossus' or 'The Last Guardian', quiet games that span across grand yet personal adventures which reverberate around the heart and mind of the player in that manner which slips under their membrane and settles in the soul. Moving, powerful experiences that come around once a generation- unless you work for 'Thatgamecompany' or 'Giant Squid', in which case you scramble to try and capture that sensation every game release. (To, in my case, severely diminishing returns.) Um... yeah, so it turns out Gollum is not an understated, subversive masterpiece... actually, it is a little subversive, but certainly no masterpiece.

Gollum is special. A return to that once dead era of rampant, unchecked, experimentation that tainted and twisted all the gaming world back in those halcyon days of creativity. A game formed from a half-baked idea likely shouted out in the middle of a team brainstorming session that no one really liked the sound of but everyone struggled to think up any sound alternatives. Gollum takes the question everyone was asking, how on earth do you make a game about the weakest and lowliest creature in all of 'The Lord of the Rings' and tell a game about him- and answers quite honestly: "We have no idea." It doesn't know if it wants to be a stealth game, an adventure platformer, a puzzle game or even a slice of life chore simulator- and it spectacularly fails at every single one of those things. Oh, and that's on top of being one of the most poorly optimised titles of the past 5 years, in a an era of gaming defined by poor optimisation. Ain't that just a kick in the head? 

Daedalic Entertainment have succeeded in dropping the ball in a way that many didn't think was even possible in the modern age of game design, with checks and balances and overbearing publishers watching your every move. Taking the name of a multi-billion dollar franchise and fumbling it like first time developers might, which Daedalic absolutely aren't, I must add! They've made plenty of games before, enough to know the basics of design principles, but after this release one might wonder if the entire team didn't get replaced by lobotomites overnight, because this product would be an embarrassment for any studio to drop. Joining the ranks of 'Redfall' and 'Forspoken', it really does feel like certain teams out there are in a race to get to the absolute bottom of the dregs of the industry, scouring the depths of just how bad multimillion dollar games become. And today it seems Daedalic may be winning that race... (for now.)

And if you can't tell, the whole thing just flabbergasts me. I mean we can all go back to the 'increadibly spicy' take that it was the mean old executives forcing this game out the door too early which led to it's downfall and... well, yes the game was so pitifully optimised that was absolutely the case as well- but let's not pretend this game has some latent wisp of genuine potential deep in it's heart. It's vapid, it's ridiculously boring, it's eye-wateringly unambitious and it seems to utterly misunderstand it's source material. (Why would Gollum foster a pet bird? Gollum eats birds!) The only way the 'Executives bad' excuse works here is if the executives literally forced the studio to make this game against their wishes (Which is a possibility given the property) and bumrushed the studio in order to lead the development themselves, with absolutely no idea what they're doing, what the modern standards of gaming are or even what fun is. Honestly, I know the whole "nobody wants to make a bad game" line which this team has employed in their apology tour, but sometimes products like this honestly make me wonder.

So Lord of the Rings under the Amazon banner has now issued out another grim offering which makes fans of the timeless fantasy blueprint-story queasy. We've seen that modern Lord of the Rings can't handle brand new stories told within it's world, can't handle TV shows, and can't handle games. And yet we're supposed to hold on and get all excited for 'Lord of the Rings: Online' reboot which is headed our way? What about the next LoTR game that Daedalic is allegedly also scheduled to make? If there's any billionaire angel investor that has a heart for this franchise, I'm sure the entire fantasy loving world would appreciate if they could swoop in and save this beloved piece of yore from Amazon's clearly incompetent paws... wait, unless your name happens to be Elon Musk- dear god, don't let him be the next to disgrace Middle Earth...

Gollum is now fashionably late

 A real maverick, that one.

I am fascinated by the idea of the new upcoming Gollum game, just as I am with this coming slate of Lord of the Rings that appears to be quietly trying to have it's cake and eat it at the same time. To be clear, I'm actually not a huge LoTR head who can rattle off dates and deep lore and characters from the top of my brain jar like some sort of flesh-bound Silmarillion; I'm just some clueless rube who happens to think the story of those books are damn near peerless, the Peter Jackson movies are exceptionally incredible adaptations and that Amazon doesn't quite know how much they're chewing when it comes to their reboot of the franchise. And to be clear, they are very much leaning towards rebooting the whole Lord of the Rings franchise, as much as they're desperately trying to hide that fact by taking the cowards route up to the big events. They're trying to paint their own ancillary stories that nervously skirt around the important book-covered storylines and place a few recognisable names here and there, allowing them to flirt with the world without placing themselves in direct competition with Jackson's work, all to try and get people used to the idea of their remakes before the remakes are made.

I do think it's pretty spineless to approach the whole development process of this remake series as 'LoTR: The Rings of Power' has. Kind of like if Tetsuya Nomura had been too scared to touch the classics he revered in his youth and so made a management sim Final Fantasy game where you played as the investment brokers trying to come together as a conglomerate called 'Shinra' hoping to exploit the bubbling power concerns of the, still mid-construction, city of Midgar. They want the audience to think "Yeah, I guess I can close my eyes and pretend this is an addendum to Peter Jackson's work" before they then come around and try to redo the story of those movies as was their original attention before the fan's scoff-back made them all reconsider. And to be honest, I can kind of see where they're coming from. The Lord of the Rings movies expertly cut through the material to draw not only the most salient, but also the most photogenic and engaging, moments of the book to truncate the immense Lord of the Rings narrative without compromising the heart of the story; that's one tough act to follow.

And this Gollum game has been another tool in that misinformation campaign, and one I've recognised as being particularly egregious in how it's attempted to brook it's independence from the Jackson films. Right from the get go the team have affirmed that Gollum is its own project that bows only to the books as its master, and though I don't know if they've ever played up their relationship to the Amazon TV show, they had planned to release the game alongside the debut of that show so it's pretty clear the two are linked. Yet this messaging conflicts pretty heavily with the visuals we're seeing out of this game from a base level, because lo-and-behold; that is just Andy Serkis' version of Gollum that they're making a game out of. Claiming to be a totally new take on the character, yet actually just nabbing the visual design and even a bit of Andy Serkis' performance. (Yes, reading the same sort of line means there'll be a bit of cross-over no matter who's giving the performance. As such I can overlook those similarities somewhat.)

You might read that and think; "But that's just Gollum, isn't it? They're just bringing Gollum to life, he's obviously going to look like that." but as with many of the visualisations of Lord of The Ring before the Jackson movies will show you; that is nowhere near the case. Gollum is actually described with a lot of room for interpretation in the books, he's slimy and skinny and has huge black eyes. He's ethnically from Hobbiton, but as with perhaps the biggest theme of the story, his corruptive influence, lustful greed has twisted and warped his appearance to be hardly recognisable even by his own kin. If you were to honestly try and make a Gollum without trying to leverage the pre-built movie fanbase to try and play both sides, as it were, there would be any number of potential final looks that your character might have. Just look at the Ralph Bakshi Gollum.

But of course, trying something new is scary when the last guys did such a good job, and it's much easier to just climb on their back and try to build from there. No shade, that's literally something I would do, I just think it would less underhanded if you didn't try to play up the 'considerable' effort that went into designing their unique Gollum who looks identical to the Peter Jackson one with just a few more rogue strands of hair. Be that as it may, I'm pretty sure we're all excited to get a glimpse at whatever nonsense everyone's favourite magpie was up to whilst the forces of evil were shoring up to try and wipe clean the land of man. I'm expecting a sort of 'Thief' style storyline where the narrative is happening around you whilst you're on a selfish trip to get money and interacting with the grander world in a perfunctory fashion almost despite your own wishes. Unfortunately, it's not going to be that simple.

You see, whilst the gods of brand synergy decree that games and movies must come out within a hair's breadth of one-another, sometimes accidents happen. Strike while the franchise is hot only works if the hilariously dissimilar arts of TV show creation and game production line up perfectly and that... well, that's just not likely to happen all too often. What should come as a surprise to no one is the realisation  that Gollum is going to need a few more months in the oven and thus is going to miss the, already determinedly controversial, launch of 'The Rings of Power'. I'm sure that made some executive out there just weeps to know that, although I'm going to take it as a positive because it means the developers aren't chopping off the game's knees in order to score a few cheap recognition bucks, or to literally try and profit off someone else's marketing.

In many ways this is actually perfect for them whatever way the show goes. If it's a great reboot for the series than that's going to push traffic towards their game in the months after enjoying the full show, and if it turns out to be another god awful adaptation like the many we've seen recently, then the visual similarities to the Jackson movies will attract fans nostalgic to the days before the franchise was murdered. Poke as I will at Daedelic Entertainment, they really have masterfully manoeuvred their way into a seemingly infallible position. Then again... Marvel's Avengers did teach us that even with a sure thing that couldn't possible be corrupted, bad corporate decisions can corrupt the incorruptible. Still, unless Gollum starts randomly introducing buyable skins and lootboxes I can't see how they'd mess it up. And if they did, I'd honestly be impressed to see how many skins they could manage to print of Gollum's posing pouch. (I guess they could sell a Tiger print and Zebra stripe variant; but where do you go from there? Lacey silk?)

Now to be fair, after laying down all that shade; I think that in the right hands a very focused narrative following a single character across a lore-rich universe at the edge of a lit tinder box has the potential to be an amazing experience piece in the same vein as 'Brothers: A tale of Two Sons' or The Last Guardian. I don't know whether this team are the right hands, but maybe they will be. I just think there's a air of dishonesty surrounding this which, in fairness, probably did not start at all in their offices but rather from their Amazon brand partners. I just pray at the end of the day that none of this gets in the way of the third 'Shadow of' game which we were all promised, given how that game is now balancing between the Peter Jackson visual style and this stealthy reboot. (Shadow of Middle Earth? I'm spitballing here.)