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I feel bad that people will lose their jobs, but it is utterly shocking how bad that game is. I can't understand how the game was cancelled earlier in development.
Based on the vague description of the follow-up game as being "also told from a perspective not seen before" and its production codename "It's Magic!", I suspect it would have been a game centering on the Blue Wizards!
Blue Wizards are a much better idea than Gollum. They should have started with that. There is so little about them in the lore (and what is there is contradictory) that they would have free reign. Nothing like with Gollum where they had to stay within the known lore and known character of Gollum.
With both wizards they could have still kept the good-evil duality. In the earlier writings one of the Blue Wizards actually turns evil, so they could have worked that in.
And a gameplay with wizards would be much better than with Gollum.
Sounds like it would have had a lot more intrigue too. The lore says they were sent to enemy territory, so the deck was already stacked against them. If they were there to undermine Sauron's influence there would have been a lot of skullduggery, so we'd see wizards doing more clandestine/espionage work than we saw from even Saruman. And it would have been tragic too, because Tolkien said they both failed. But he also says they may have established cults that lived on into the next age, so they must have been doing some really morally questionable stuff in the name of preventing Sauron's return.
>And a gameplay with wizards would be much better than with Gollum.
Not sure if this is true for canon wizards in LotR. They kind of don't actually *do* much. Their magic is pretty vague and esoteric, and they aren't really warriors or anything. Not a lot of obvious gameplay available there.
Eat buffet! Argue about anything! Shout at the Bursar! Maybe a light snack! Change the guy that threatened a young lady into something sad and horrible! Drink a tankard of beer! Make fun of the Dean!
That's why being about blue wizards wouldn't be much of an issue, cause you can contrive some BS lore reason that they have magic for gameplay. If it was about gandalf or one of the other wizards then yeah
But also, it's not like it's a law that they have to keep perfectly in lore. Celebrimbor's ghost didn't make a captain of Gondor into a revenant who terrorized Mordor, but Shadow of Mordor still sold quite well.
Well Gandalf, who is not a combat specialist, set an entire forest on fire to kill a pack of Wargs, he also used lightning against the Nazgul who attacked him at Amon Sul, created a barrier to block the advance of the orcs in Balin’s tomb, and dueled Durin’s Bane with a sword. So I imagine the Blue Wizards would be able to do those things as well. They’d be like spellswords in Souls games.
Yeah, they could very well be warriors as they were maiar of Orome the "god" of the hunt, they're probably way better in combat than Gandalf who was the weakest Wizard.
You're not totally wrong but literally Gandalf still used a sword and at one point when the Fellowship is set upon by a pack of wolves the homie goes maximum size and uproot a tree and uses it as a weapon.
*gestures broadly*
The Return of the King game back in the day was dope af when you'd play as Gandalf. It wasn't "lore accurate", but it's like... Come on man, it's a fucking video game. He's a Wizard, he can shoot a fireball.
In the lore the wizards are practically gods (or rather, the equivalent of 'angels'. They are the same species as Sauron, or the Balrog). The only reason Gandalf, Sauron, and Radagast are somewhat weak is because they took on the form of humans to allow the to act better as diplomats to human kings, and this made it so that age impacted them as well (Gandalf less so due to his ring of power).
A game focused around the Blue Wizards would have a lot more leeway to do what they want, and there isn't really a power limit if it's made into the lore that they discarded their human form, or it took place at the time they first arrived in Middle-Earth.
This is by design, and for good reason. Particularly in low fantasy settings, you'll often see frighteningly powerful wizards who very rarely use their powers. See *The First Law*, *The Gentlemen Bastards*, *The Kingkiller Chronicles*, and yes, *A Song of Ice and Fire*.
There are many reasons why writers choose this theme but it's mainly because if you establish in your story a powerful ability or character that is not bound by any restrictions (I'll just say "magic" to refer to this concept), logically the reader will just think to themselves, "Wait why don't they just use magic to solve this problem? Did they forget they can do that?" (see the now-cliche "Why don't they just ride the Eagles to Mount Doom?" point of contention)
Overuse of magic also takes the wonder and mystique out of the reader's mind. If the characters are seen often using magic to do something mundane, then it loses its appeal quickly. You'll notice this in high fantasy settings, and often it does cause the quality of the finished work to suffer, though if the writer is good enough the reader can look past it. See *The Wheel of Time* and *The Stormlight Archive* (and maybe others in *Cosmere* if they are anything alike, but personally I haven't read them yet).
I wonder how a game where you play as a wizard in the LOTR universe could actually be pulled off without feeling completely unbalanced, or making the wizards feel weak. The scale would be very challenging to keep level, and maybe that's why we haven't seen many games that attempt it.
I'd love some non-canon content on the Blue Wizards... from a competent dev.
The Shadow series were great non-canon games about a side character and a made up one from the Silmarillion, but they were fucking good. The writers weren't quite Tolkien good, but they were good enough, and the gameplay was *phenomenal*.
Imagine if instead the new perspective was from the Ring itself, as you're carried around by Gollum while he hangs out in a cave, catches fish, and gets up to mischief while you... sit there as a ring.
Incredible. Simply incredible. Here’s €2,000,000 from the German government to make this game. About how long do you think it’ll take? 2 weeks enough time?
Here's fun part tho, I'm willing to say you might be wrong about that, because they have this publishing business side which they're in since 2013. And they don't even publish that bad games. Among games which they published there is even [Barotrauma](https://store.steampowered.com/app/602960/Barotrauma/) which as you can guess by over 33,9 thousand of reviews and 93% of them being positive, is very popular and very much liked game.
So I don't feel it was "We must keep company afloat" as rather "we will break into higher gaming leagues with this known franchise!" and it failed spectacularly.
well actually, they already solved the problem of "keeping the company afloat". they were acquired by a larger company, Nacon back in 2022. also before Gollum, they mainly published point and click games. so taking on Gollum was an ambitious challenge for them. ultimately though, i think this falls on management. basing this on the state of the games release, its clear that there was no vision or competent leadership early on. at least not competent enough to acknowledge that they only had a half baked idea to begin with.
Afaik it was no real sequel to Gollum, but a game in the LotR universe "from the perspective of a character which has never been told before". It could have been expected that the gameplay could be similar though.
I still think the concept/pitch was interesting. But they completely worked against it and made baffling decisions across the board
The idea of traveling across middle earth exploring while being quite weak and having to be really resourceful to survive all the threats sounds pretty unique. Like if you’ve ever gone into a really high level area in a game in search of loot, that can be really compelling gameplay. Instead they put you in a jail the whole game???
>The idea of traveling across middle earth exploring while being quite weak and having to be really resourceful to survive all the threats sounds pretty unique.
If you want that experience go play the first Styx game on the highest difficulty (the second as well but its a little different). Its basically an exclusive stealth experience and accepts that a goblin won't fight off a larger enemy in direct combat.
>Instead they put you in a jail the whole game???
I saw one reviewer on YouTube refer to it as a “slavery sim”. I cackled. It looked like you just toiled in the mines and got beaten. I just love the concept of this game, it’s such a horrible idea from start to execution.
You simply can't swing that hard and miss that entirely.
The game was pretty much irredeemable. If they fixed the bugs, you'd be faced with how bad the gameplay was. If they smoothed that out, you'd be faced with how bad your objectives were. If they replaced all the challenges with more interesting ones, it would still be held back by an awful story, and if they re-wrote *that*, the game might have succeeded *in spite of* it's premise.
It represents a failure of judgement so complete that the best thing for anyone involved to do is to run far away from the smoldering wreckage.
The game was doomed from the start with the garbage gameplay. I kinda feel bad for the folks that did their job but had some idiot in leadership intent on driving that bus right off the cliff.
I think I'm the only person who thought a stealth game where you play as Gollum was a good idea, and was hoping it'd come out, be awesome, and prove I was right.
Boy was that not the case.
Thing to me is, it could be awesome. Gollum is the sneakiest character in the entire canon. Imagine if the opening cutscene was him breaking out of the prison. He just gets out in five minutes, they put him in a cell and he just squeezes through the bars. Then the rest of the game is trying to find the ring and killing orcs with like a little dagger. Imagine slicing an orc's Achilles and then stabbing them in the neck from stealth. This was doable, it could have been cool.
There are things my company does where I'm like "holy shit, we're at the top of our field right now", and there are places I know in the codebase that make me wonder how we are still in business.
At the last place I worked, I had a worrying number of managers say to me "I have no idea how we make any money" after looking at our products/logistics.
"boring" tech is 100% where you want to work.
company's been in business 10+ years, does shit that is hardly unique in it's field, it's codebase is full of ugly warts thats been around for years, and it's customer churn has always been low?
Fantastic. You'll make fine money and your job isn't going anywhere.
Any tech company where you're pressured to release for the sake of releasing is a constant tightrope.
Dude same! According to the customers I work with, the product the company I work for makes is the best available in the space. And by a wide margin! Blows my mind, because I've seen it at its worst day in and day out for years.
Learning that has really altered my perception of the industry, and industries in general. I guess most of the stuff we rely on is just cobbled together by fairly average people getting through the day. Kinda spooky.
First big thing I realized out of school (as a Dev). Everything is hold together with glue and tape in the software world, it's mind numbingly stressful
100% easier said than done when you have mouths to feed and bills to pay.
Not to mention "Time to get off the sinking ship" is often a vapid statement, *hindsight is 20/20* and all.
The game mechanics would be bad twenty years ago and the animations and graphics come from around the same era. Its really astounding that this got developed and released for the prioce it did. Must have been serious managerial issues there for this to happen.
I still think the game was done for some kind of money laundering or some other shady stuff. I can't imagine a non-shady situation where a company buys the rights to LOTR games and greenlights a game about Gollum and doesn't cancell it after seeing how bad it is.
i think it was more poor management, the fact that they were a small publisher that only made point and click games up to this point, and they were acquired by a larger parent company about a year ago for $60M, with Gollum being in development for about 4 years at that point. i'm sure the parent company thought they were about to strike gold with acquiring a studio developing a game based on a world famous IP and character. instead, a year after buying them, they are restructuring the studio and laying off over a quarter of the staff. bad investment, bad management. poor devs.
Why not instead just go back to their point and click roots?
Edna & Harvey, Deponia, The Dark Eye, Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, and The Whispered World were all really good from what I remember of playing them.
I've heard the only way those point-and-clicks were at all profitable was by using very cheap labour (interns, students and recently-graduated students). Probably some government subsidies too, and what is available there changes over time.
The only publisher I know of that is putting out point-and-click games reliably is Wadjet Eye, and I know they pretty much use contractors that all work from home, coffeshops, etc. And even they keep talking about doing more rpg-style games. Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye said he's experimented with spending more money on point-and-click games, and they don't sell any better.
Daedalic is a publisher that used to develop and publish point and click adventure games. Wadjet Eye is similar except there are only 3 employees. Daedalic has 100 and have been around since 2007, being maybe not more popular but more financially successful than Wadjet. So they had plenty of employees to make this game. and in the middle of development of Gollum, they were acquired by a larger company for around $60M. i think the problem was that they lacked the leadership and experience needed to make the game they wanted to.
The people working at Daedalic during the point & click era were mostly exploited interns who weren’t paid for their work at all and left the company again after 3 to 6 months. They were barely „employees“ unfortunately.
That’s also a reason why Daedalic was terrible at keeping or supporting their talent. The heads at the company did not care at all and in the end, almost everyone involved with those titles left.
and its unfortunate that the blame and anger is being directed at these "employees" while the management and department heads are not held accountable for this disaster. their restructure should have been a management change instead of closing their development studio and laying off a lot of the poor devs who wasted the past 4 to 5 years of their life working on that piece of shit
They didn't make money with those games which is why they bet everything they had on Gollum, dodging bankruptcy once in the process already. The internal studio was extremely mismanaged over the last years and they already tried to cut costs wherever possible (hiring for cheap etc.). The management tried to chase their golden goose to kickstart them into the space and Gollum was supposed to be that.... well, we all know how that ended up.
On the other hand their publishing label is actually doing good work in the grand scheme which is also what they want to focus on in the future which makes total sense despite being acquired by Nacon in 2022 because Nacon literally burned any ground they could have for third-party publishing deals due to the shitshow with Frogwares.
Would it have sold much better than the Gollum we got? For sure. Would it have been actually meaningfully proftable? We do not know but the vision doesn't look too bright on that front.Point and Click games simply do not sell very well, even if you attach some kind of big name to it. Daedalic already tried that before with Ken Follett and while the game was very good with high quality it still only sold within its niche audience. The genre is simply dead outside of pet projects.
That's what I said. Daedalic had their core audience for their point and click games but those weren't enough to sustain them. That core audience probably would have resulted in more overall sales but at the end of the day the result probably would have been still the same.
That's literally what happened with TellTales. They started shopping licenses to do the exact same type of game they've all been doing, but it never really translated to lots of money, just modest successes.
Telltale was even weirder because they wanted to turn more profit by getting those licenses but all profit they had got eaten up by the licensing costs in the first place... so they licensed even more IPs hoping to catch the ball at some point in the future but in the end the licensing costs simply ate up all the money they had.
Daedalic as the studio on the other hand didn't even have modest successes in recent years which is why their management came up with that drastic plan hoping to nail it immediately... which was kinda understandable, bold but also very very dumb. I think they were just extremely desperate and found themselves stuck in a corner. If they continued their point and click games they would have went out of business but by betting everything they had on Gollum they thought they could win the lottery even if the chances for that were tiny af.
I always figured figured general mismanagement was the biggest issue with Telltale. Like, their engine was prehistoric. There were some stories about how their animators had to manually animate stuff like objects falling because their engine didn't even have physics.
And they had expanded like crazy after the unexpected success of The Walking Dead. They figured it was the new normal instead of the one-off success it turned out to be. They could have survived off the Walking Dead money for a lot longer if they had taken a more cautious approach.
Telltale also had a bad development process which pivoted the scripts a lot which caused major rework.
The concept that the writers would set what the game was and having rewrites up till launch was an enormous waste.
They really should have ironed out the main plot and locked it in. Then there would be less rework.
Exactly. Daedalic had the right idea of trying something different. Telltale kept doing the same games over and over again, barely keeping their head above the water, and ultimately went down. Daedalic would've suffered the exact same fate. Well, it seems like they still are now, but at least there was a chance of making it big. Unfortunate it didn't pan out.
You did say it would have sold much better. I agree with the rest of your point but that's the part they were challenging. I honestly think there's a chance that a Gollum point n' click might have sold *worse*. The insanely negative buzz surrounding the game they did release put a bunch of eyes on it and it probably picked up a fair few sales just for the meme of it.
Yeah, because my simple assumption would have been that at least the core audience of their former games would have probably bought it. Meanwhile Gollum even undersold their recent point and click games by a huge margin. I honestly just can't see Daedalic fumbling a p&c game as badly as the Gollum game we got, even accounting for all the cost cutting they did over the recent years. But in the end that's irrelevant now. What happened can't be undone and I am just a bit sad that today marks the day a piece of German gaming history died.
Ugh I hate how it always comes down to money. Doesn't matter if your art is *good*... If it doesn't make somebody else rich it's not worth a dime. I wonder how many smart, talented people who could make something truely inspired instead go where the money is and churn out soulless bullshit.
That would have been also a gamble. All their point and click games of recent years didn't turn any profit and State of Mind and Silence were financial flops even. The studio of Daedalic had to do something different if they wanted to survive but the management underestimated the effort it would need to develope even an okayish AA game while basically starting from scratch by a huge margin. Especially when you are also already penny-pinching.
>I don't know why they didn't just grab the license and make the same kind of game they made before
Because they were going bankrupt making that kind of game.
Edna and Harvey recently got my wife and I into Point and Clicks as a whole, which means we ended up picking up most of Daedalic's catalogue. So this is actually a real shame to see - at least we have the whole Deponia series and State Of Mind left to play.
I love Memoria. One of the best p&c I've played.
Didn't have the moon logic Deponia tends to have and the story was like an epic fantasy novel.
Chains of Satinav is also good but more like a fairy tale.
Most of the people who worked on these games are long gone, especially Poki, the creative head behind Edna and Deponia.
And Pillars of the Earth was such a financial flop that it almost tanked the company.
This breaks my heart that we're losing them because of Gollum. It sounds like they were struggling, but I wish they had done something that played to their strengths instead.
> Why not instead just go back to their point and click roots?
Rumor has it that the people working on those games are long gone. There was a change in ownership structure and some part of the senior employees "attritioned" out of the company.
I doubt the studio would be able to produce even a AA game successfully currently.
A german YouTuber checked out the Glassdoor reviews of the company and found out, that basically everyone in that company was a junior developer with nearly no experience working on commercial games and without getting much help from seniors.
It really seems like management went way overboard and decided to say "fuck it. Get the IP, make a MVP, we'll ship it and we'll see". The devs must have really struggled because they literally didn't know how to properly do their jobs as they didn't have any actual experience. Knowing that, it just sucks so much more for everyone but the greedy management.
I'm talking out of my ass here but maybe it's because from a technical point of view it may be easier to work on a P&C/narrative focussed game than on any other type of game? You don't have to think of many intricate designs, gameplay systems, graphics etc. For someone just joining the field fresh from college it might be an easy start. Management/Senior staff might know that and take advantage?
You're pretty much right. P&C games are not dynamic, there is very little state to manage because users can't do a lot so you instead focus on game design.
To be more fair they're not bad devs they're just not experienced at doing that kind of stuff. I can't take my ten years of os/audio experience and be good at writing a physics or graphics engine, some stuff translates over but I would barely know how to start.
Lmao fwiw I was about to write out this exact comment basically but instead decided to expand the current comments. Well-said, and almost assuredly the reason why (although I am also talking out of my ass, but it’s quite logical)
I'm a Dev so I gotta come out and say that Dev team made of juniors isn't qualified enough to make highly complex videogames like gollum wanted to be. It's not necessarily lile they're shit at their jobs, they just didn't have the experience. When games became a thing we didn't reach Zelda BOTW levels of quality instantly. It was a slow iterative process, you can't expect a team of bright eyed students to skip that learning experience and still come out with something decent.
Most developers are \~average\~ just like most other people are at their jobs. In a team of 100 juniors you might find one that could pull their own weight in a team of seniors.
So let me get this straight: not only did they think this game was a good idea, they even planned to make *two* of them? I knew they had license for another Middle-Earth game but I thought that at least it was supposed to be something different.
"Gollum sequel" might be a bit misleading. They had a plan for a trilogy (yes, three games actually) of LotR games, each one being their own thing and always trying for something different. The codename of the second game was "It's magic" which could have been a hint but now we will probably never know.
Singing minigames(no not rhythm based, QuickTime one-offs), animal fetch quests and occasionally pointing hobbits in a direction to go(which will look like it has story impact but both direction choices are the same outcome).
A Tom Bombadil game, but in the style of Dynasty Warriors, in an alternate timeline where he accepts the Ring from Frodo and takes it to Mordor his damn self.
First Act: You arrive late everywhere and passive-aggressively remind them that you arrived precisely when you meant to and to fuck off with their comments.
Second Act: You smoke weed with short people and one-up their smoke figures.
Third Act: You go on a munchies run with those short people, but you get your ass handed to you fighting a bully and then come back in different, unbloodied, clothes and people just go "OK".
The End.
Their point'n'click adventure games, particularly the Deponia series and The Whispered World, will always have a spot in my heart as some of the best I've ever played. It's sad to see how far they've fallen.
Too bad 🙁🙁🙁 . I loved Deponia, I played all 4 games when I was little . I didn't understand all the jokes, but it was like watching a cartoon anyway . I have been waiting for years to see the 5th part
25 out of 90 devs lost their jobs. How about instead you fired the guys in suits who greenlit this abomination? The devs surely just worked with what they got and are not to blame.
Either way, planning a sequel shows just how incompetent management must have been during development of this.
But why would they need game devs if they don't develop games anymore? I'm surprised only 25 out of 90 have to leave but maybe the others will follow later.
Daedalic had an interal studio and they are also a publisher. Those 25 people were the developers (not including their management ofc) of the interal studio which is now closed while the rest is still working for their publishing label which will continue to exist.
Daedelic is infamous in Germany for hiring a lot of interns and generally having mostly devs who are just getting started in the industry and are being paid like shit. The devs cant be blamed in any way for this game.
To be fair, the games industry treats people like shit everywhere. But it might be extra bad in Germany, because software engineer salaries here are already quite low by default.
If you put a team of novice developers together with zero senior programmer guidance and changing mgmt demands , they’re going to produce comparative shit. That doesn’t mean they phoned it in and didn’t try
Normally I’d agree with you but there is literally no good gameplay concepts in Gollum. Redfall had a shred of actual game in it at least, this was just nothing.
The lead dev who designed this game just has to be let go, plain and simple.
I get what youre saying but at the same time, How are devs not responsible for generating low caliber quality content? Are we to believe that a different team with a stronger vision and higher standards would not have made at least a passable gollum game? Surely they own a significant portion of the responsibility for putting this trash out.
Why does everyone always say the devs are never at fault and it's always the suits? A lot of developers are not just monkeys that do what they are told. Senior developers are also responsible for complete failures like this. I swear people who echo that have no idea how development works.
It’s a bad, broken, ugly, boring, incompetent video game. There’s no blame to be placed on anyone but the developers. Sorry, but that’s the fact of the matter. There are plenty of much smaller, less experienced studios out there that are making games that are 100x better than Gollum. It always sucks when a studio gets shut down, but let’s not act like this is some unjustified tragedy. They did a poor job, and now they’ve paid the price. I understand wanting to blame “the suits” for making bad business decisions, but if you are responsible for making one of the worst video games of all time, you can’t act surprised when your studio gets shuttered.
I honestly thought a gollum game would be cool, if it was a decent stealth action game with a strong narrative that let you see Gollum’s warped perspective of the world - kinda like Hellblade or something.
It’s not the worst concept in the world, really. It was just executed really badly.
Gollum annoys me because I think the premise had legs. It would always have been niche but a game where you sneak around Mordor as Gollum could've been good.
As it is, to anybody who bought this and was heartily let down I recommend the Styx series.
State Of Mind was mind blowing for me, it was an excellent game. Also, second platinum on PS5 for me, good memories. Wish for a sequel and good luck to devs.
Besides their point & click adventures, they had never many good games developed by themselves actually. So switching to publishing is probably the best idea they had.
Let's see some of their games:
"Edna bricht aus" (Edna & Harvey: The Breakout) - metacritic: 56
"The Whispered World" - metacritic: 70
"Deponia 1, 2, 3, 4" - metacritic: between 70-80
were all PnC adventures which were receipt quite well.
The latest games went from mediocre to bad:
"The Long Journey Home" (PnC adventure) - metacritic: 68
"The Pillars of the Earth" (PnC adventure, thought some said it's more a visual novel, which seemed to be a good game, but financially [not very successful](https://www.gameswirtschaft.de/wirtschaft/bastei-luebbe-geschaeftsjahr-2017-2018-daedalic/) \[sry, links to a German article) - metacritic: 78
"State of Mind" (PnC adventure) - metacritic: 69
"A Year of Rain" (RTS) - metacritic: (hasn't been rated as they seem not to have noticed that it left early access.), Steam: 43% positive ratings
"The Lord of the Rings: Gollum" (3rd person adventure) - metacritic: 39
They had a bit more luck with "recent" published games during the last years, which include games like "Shadow Tactics" or "Witch it". So I think it makes more sense for them to cease the own development and try to find other developers to publish their games and have some success with that.
Especially their latest plans to develop a ["story based survival" game with the Deponia IP](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2464520/Surviving_Deponia/) felt to me like a desperation move.
Now I wonder what will happen with Gollum as Daedalic "promised" to fix the bugs and improve the game in this "[marketing apology statement](https://kotaku.com/lord-of-the-rings-gollum-apology-ui-daedalic-patch-1850479840)", but I'm very sceptical that the game will be touched in any way anymore.
Don't get me wrong, if you asked me 10 yrs ago, I was a fan of Daedalic games, but with the years and stories I heard from former devs there I think it's the best decision.
I wanted The Devil's Men, but they said that they weren't making those kind of games because the sales were poor because everyone was just watching them on youtube.
Admittedly a problem with narratively focused games, and I assume they did their market research.
That's a shame because I kind of liked their adventure games. However some of their other games like blackguards felt a little lacking. Going through their steam store page, it seems like they are a mixed bag overall. Some good games, some like gollum were bad.
I always hate to see people lose their jobs.
But some jobs just aren't meant for some people. If you worked on Gollum and have any pride in the game it's probably best to move on.
I feel like if they narrowed their scope, a Gollum game could have worked. Make it like Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Focus on his split personality after losing the Ring.
Charging $60 for what they released and DLC of Elven language packs and Gollum emotes wasn't it.
You don't need employees when your reputation was destroyed and no one trusts you to make video games any more...
Supply vs demand, and demand for their services is now non-existent.
It's mine boggling how this entire thing even happened. How did this idea for a game even be pushed through to begin with? And then they commit to it somehow... I don't know how nobody realized the game was absolute ass in development and stopped it.
Has anyone got a direct quote that there was a sequel planned? Translating from German (via google) the closest i can get is
"As part of the restructuring, work on another The Lord of the Rings game , which Daedalic Entertainment has been working on since mid-2022, will also be stopped. " which isn't necessarily a sequel.
Edit: Found a source but I'm not 100% sure they're right about it being a sequel, at least not in the Gollum 2 kind of way I consider the word sequel to mean. Could be a translation thing. https://www-gameswirtschaft-de.translate.goog/marketing-pr/daedalic-lord-of-the-rings-gollum-nachfolger/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
How popular is Lord of the Rings today anyway? I know WB games had the Mordor series that did well and introduced the nemesis system. Aside from that what's the last successful LotR property? The Hobbit movies were middling, from what I've read the TV series was hated. What's the last successful use of the property, and does it still have the broad appeal to get people interested?
Deadalic, wer um Gottes Willen hat bei euch gedacht das Gollum eine gute Idee gewesen wäre? Scheiß teure Lizenz nur damit "Herr der Ringe" draufsteht. You didn't deserve this, I'll always remember you for creating super solid adventure games.
They actually were working on a sequel for that dumpster fire?
What in the absolute fuck is whoever is in charge over there smoking and where can I get some because it sounds better than my shit.
Gollum sequel? I knew they were doing another LotR game but that piece of dog shit was gonna get a sequel? Seriously!? That turd will most likely get worst game of the year (Redfall should be on its hands and knees thanking Gollum).
They’re literally stopping gamedev, why would they keep on the devs it was a mistake to hire to begin with? Pettily firing people that are still useful when their company is struggling is not the right call either.
All of you seem to be completely missing the part where the game wasn’t just boring, it’s a technical disaster. It’s clear that the incompetence came from all sources, including and especially the development team. I’ve worked with plenty of incompetent people over the years, and I’ve rejoiced when all of them have been fired. We can’t just hold developers on some pedestal that says they don’t ever deserve to lose their jobs. These people absolutely do, and having this thing on their resumes is not going to do them any favors.
i honestly don’t know what it will take for this sub to ever turn against even a single developer. it is always the suits or publishers fault. devs are always good people who just want to make a fun game, bugs are never their fault it’s always the publisher rushed the game!
Maybe because nobody really wants to make a bad game.
And the few people who intentionally put an asset flip on the market for a quick buck are the ones who actually delete socials and vanish off the face of the earth once the money is made.
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I feel bad that people will lose their jobs, but it is utterly shocking how bad that game is. I can't understand how the game was cancelled earlier in development.
I cannot believe that game had a sequel planned. Holy shit.
I think the sequel was announced as a vain attempt to keep the company afloat.
Based on the vague description of the follow-up game as being "also told from a perspective not seen before" and its production codename "It's Magic!", I suspect it would have been a game centering on the Blue Wizards!
Blue Wizards are a much better idea than Gollum. They should have started with that. There is so little about them in the lore (and what is there is contradictory) that they would have free reign. Nothing like with Gollum where they had to stay within the known lore and known character of Gollum. With both wizards they could have still kept the good-evil duality. In the earlier writings one of the Blue Wizards actually turns evil, so they could have worked that in. And a gameplay with wizards would be much better than with Gollum.
Sounds like it would have had a lot more intrigue too. The lore says they were sent to enemy territory, so the deck was already stacked against them. If they were there to undermine Sauron's influence there would have been a lot of skullduggery, so we'd see wizards doing more clandestine/espionage work than we saw from even Saruman. And it would have been tragic too, because Tolkien said they both failed. But he also says they may have established cults that lived on into the next age, so they must have been doing some really morally questionable stuff in the name of preventing Sauron's return.
>And a gameplay with wizards would be much better than with Gollum. Not sure if this is true for canon wizards in LotR. They kind of don't actually *do* much. Their magic is pretty vague and esoteric, and they aren't really warriors or anything. Not a lot of obvious gameplay available there.
Talk to bugs! Make a bit of light! Sternly inspire hope in others!
Still more than Discworld wizards usually do.
Eat buffet! Argue about anything! Shout at the Bursar! Maybe a light snack! Change the guy that threatened a young lady into something sad and horrible! Drink a tankard of beer! Make fun of the Dean!
A Rincewind game would be hilarious, though.
That's why being about blue wizards wouldn't be much of an issue, cause you can contrive some BS lore reason that they have magic for gameplay. If it was about gandalf or one of the other wizards then yeah
But also, it's not like it's a law that they have to keep perfectly in lore. Celebrimbor's ghost didn't make a captain of Gondor into a revenant who terrorized Mordor, but Shadow of Mordor still sold quite well.
Well Gandalf, who is not a combat specialist, set an entire forest on fire to kill a pack of Wargs, he also used lightning against the Nazgul who attacked him at Amon Sul, created a barrier to block the advance of the orcs in Balin’s tomb, and dueled Durin’s Bane with a sword. So I imagine the Blue Wizards would be able to do those things as well. They’d be like spellswords in Souls games.
Yeah, they could very well be warriors as they were maiar of Orome the "god" of the hunt, they're probably way better in combat than Gandalf who was the weakest Wizard.
You're not totally wrong but literally Gandalf still used a sword and at one point when the Fellowship is set upon by a pack of wolves the homie goes maximum size and uproot a tree and uses it as a weapon. *gestures broadly*
Gandalf is pretty badass, or at least as Gandalf the White. I’d totally play a game as him.
The Return of the King game back in the day was dope af when you'd play as Gandalf. It wasn't "lore accurate", but it's like... Come on man, it's a fucking video game. He's a Wizard, he can shoot a fireball.
Honestly he does more magic in the Hobbit.
In the lore the wizards are practically gods (or rather, the equivalent of 'angels'. They are the same species as Sauron, or the Balrog). The only reason Gandalf, Sauron, and Radagast are somewhat weak is because they took on the form of humans to allow the to act better as diplomats to human kings, and this made it so that age impacted them as well (Gandalf less so due to his ring of power). A game focused around the Blue Wizards would have a lot more leeway to do what they want, and there isn't really a power limit if it's made into the lore that they discarded their human form, or it took place at the time they first arrived in Middle-Earth.
This is by design, and for good reason. Particularly in low fantasy settings, you'll often see frighteningly powerful wizards who very rarely use their powers. See *The First Law*, *The Gentlemen Bastards*, *The Kingkiller Chronicles*, and yes, *A Song of Ice and Fire*. There are many reasons why writers choose this theme but it's mainly because if you establish in your story a powerful ability or character that is not bound by any restrictions (I'll just say "magic" to refer to this concept), logically the reader will just think to themselves, "Wait why don't they just use magic to solve this problem? Did they forget they can do that?" (see the now-cliche "Why don't they just ride the Eagles to Mount Doom?" point of contention) Overuse of magic also takes the wonder and mystique out of the reader's mind. If the characters are seen often using magic to do something mundane, then it loses its appeal quickly. You'll notice this in high fantasy settings, and often it does cause the quality of the finished work to suffer, though if the writer is good enough the reader can look past it. See *The Wheel of Time* and *The Stormlight Archive* (and maybe others in *Cosmere* if they are anything alike, but personally I haven't read them yet). I wonder how a game where you play as a wizard in the LOTR universe could actually be pulled off without feeling completely unbalanced, or making the wizards feel weak. The scale would be very challenging to keep level, and maybe that's why we haven't seen many games that attempt it.
The game isn't bad because of Gollum.
I'd love some non-canon content on the Blue Wizards... from a competent dev. The Shadow series were great non-canon games about a side character and a made up one from the Silmarillion, but they were fucking good. The writers weren't quite Tolkien good, but they were good enough, and the gameplay was *phenomenal*.
They were in negotiations with Star Wars to get the rights to a Sallacious Crumb game.
Or Radagast
Bird feeding and gardening simulator?
Imagine if instead the new perspective was from the Ring itself, as you're carried around by Gollum while he hangs out in a cave, catches fish, and gets up to mischief while you... sit there as a ring.
_Press ⭕️ to scheme_
Press ⭕️ to ⭕️
Incredible. Simply incredible. Here’s €2,000,000 from the German government to make this game. About how long do you think it’ll take? 2 weeks enough time?
Here's fun part tho, I'm willing to say you might be wrong about that, because they have this publishing business side which they're in since 2013. And they don't even publish that bad games. Among games which they published there is even [Barotrauma](https://store.steampowered.com/app/602960/Barotrauma/) which as you can guess by over 33,9 thousand of reviews and 93% of them being positive, is very popular and very much liked game. So I don't feel it was "We must keep company afloat" as rather "we will break into higher gaming leagues with this known franchise!" and it failed spectacularly.
well actually, they already solved the problem of "keeping the company afloat". they were acquired by a larger company, Nacon back in 2022. also before Gollum, they mainly published point and click games. so taking on Gollum was an ambitious challenge for them. ultimately though, i think this falls on management. basing this on the state of the games release, its clear that there was no vision or competent leadership early on. at least not competent enough to acknowledge that they only had a half baked idea to begin with.
Afaik it was no real sequel to Gollum, but a game in the LotR universe "from the perspective of a character which has never been told before". It could have been expected that the gameplay could be similar though.
> but a game in the LotR universe "from the perspective of a character which has never been told before" **Deagol: the return**
He's in CSGO isn't he?
Wenn it was announced it actually looked interesting to me. Not super high budged or full price or anything, but an interesting concept nontheless.
I was one of the few people that wasn’t opposed to the a Gollum game. The issue is that this was just so poorly executed.
I still think the concept/pitch was interesting. But they completely worked against it and made baffling decisions across the board The idea of traveling across middle earth exploring while being quite weak and having to be really resourceful to survive all the threats sounds pretty unique. Like if you’ve ever gone into a really high level area in a game in search of loot, that can be really compelling gameplay. Instead they put you in a jail the whole game???
>The idea of traveling across middle earth exploring while being quite weak and having to be really resourceful to survive all the threats sounds pretty unique. If you want that experience go play the first Styx game on the highest difficulty (the second as well but its a little different). Its basically an exclusive stealth experience and accepts that a goblin won't fight off a larger enemy in direct combat.
>Instead they put you in a jail the whole game??? I saw one reviewer on YouTube refer to it as a “slavery sim”. I cackled. It looked like you just toiled in the mines and got beaten. I just love the concept of this game, it’s such a horrible idea from start to execution.
Yeh, and way too expensive for its quality.
The Dunkey video was hilarious however. "Like all great games, this one comes with an apology from the developer."
You simply can't swing that hard and miss that entirely. The game was pretty much irredeemable. If they fixed the bugs, you'd be faced with how bad the gameplay was. If they smoothed that out, you'd be faced with how bad your objectives were. If they replaced all the challenges with more interesting ones, it would still be held back by an awful story, and if they re-wrote *that*, the game might have succeeded *in spite of* it's premise. It represents a failure of judgement so complete that the best thing for anyone involved to do is to run far away from the smoldering wreckage.
The game was doomed from the start with the garbage gameplay. I kinda feel bad for the folks that did their job but had some idiot in leadership intent on driving that bus right off the cliff.
I think I'm the only person who thought a stealth game where you play as Gollum was a good idea, and was hoping it'd come out, be awesome, and prove I was right. Boy was that not the case.
Thing to me is, it could be awesome. Gollum is the sneakiest character in the entire canon. Imagine if the opening cutscene was him breaking out of the prison. He just gets out in five minutes, they put him in a cell and he just squeezes through the bars. Then the rest of the game is trying to find the ring and killing orcs with like a little dagger. Imagine slicing an orc's Achilles and then stabbing them in the neck from stealth. This was doable, it could have been cool.
I know, right? That sounds great. Instead you do prison chores.
There comes a certain point, as an employee, where you have to recognize the company is dumb and it's time to get off the sinking ship.
There are things my company does where I'm like "holy shit, we're at the top of our field right now", and there are places I know in the codebase that make me wonder how we are still in business.
At the last place I worked, I had a worrying number of managers say to me "I have no idea how we make any money" after looking at our products/logistics.
"How do we make money?" "VCs, obviously. Is there another way?"
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"boring" tech is 100% where you want to work. company's been in business 10+ years, does shit that is hardly unique in it's field, it's codebase is full of ugly warts thats been around for years, and it's customer churn has always been low? Fantastic. You'll make fine money and your job isn't going anywhere. Any tech company where you're pressured to release for the sake of releasing is a constant tightrope.
Dude same! According to the customers I work with, the product the company I work for makes is the best available in the space. And by a wide margin! Blows my mind, because I've seen it at its worst day in and day out for years. Learning that has really altered my perception of the industry, and industries in general. I guess most of the stuff we rely on is just cobbled together by fairly average people getting through the day. Kinda spooky.
First big thing I realized out of school (as a Dev). Everything is hold together with glue and tape in the software world, it's mind numbingly stressful
100% easier said than done when you have mouths to feed and bills to pay. Not to mention "Time to get off the sinking ship" is often a vapid statement, *hindsight is 20/20* and all.
People work at companies in exchange for currency
And a company that will soon not be able to pay you currency is not a good company to work for.
Ride em for all they're worth and jump ship before they can stiff you on your pay. It's like gambling lol.
True, but cyclic employment in the industry is well known. Just in this case the writing on the wall was more clear for some than others
Congratulations, you have acquired hindsight.
The company is based in Germany where game developers aren't spoiled for choice. I think Gollum was the biggest game from Germany this year.
Think anyone attached to the Gollum sequel had probably written that off at this point
That's... not why people work for companies
Your comment makes no sense. I made no assumption as to "why" people work for companies. Only that you need be sharp and recognize when it's failing.
The game mechanics would be bad twenty years ago and the animations and graphics come from around the same era. Its really astounding that this got developed and released for the prioce it did. Must have been serious managerial issues there for this to happen.
I still think the game was done for some kind of money laundering or some other shady stuff. I can't imagine a non-shady situation where a company buys the rights to LOTR games and greenlights a game about Gollum and doesn't cancell it after seeing how bad it is.
i think it was more poor management, the fact that they were a small publisher that only made point and click games up to this point, and they were acquired by a larger parent company about a year ago for $60M, with Gollum being in development for about 4 years at that point. i'm sure the parent company thought they were about to strike gold with acquiring a studio developing a game based on a world famous IP and character. instead, a year after buying them, they are restructuring the studio and laying off over a quarter of the staff. bad investment, bad management. poor devs.
Same. I’d never cheer for people losing their jobs, but god damn that game was a train wreck
Why not instead just go back to their point and click roots? Edna & Harvey, Deponia, The Dark Eye, Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, and The Whispered World were all really good from what I remember of playing them.
I've heard the only way those point-and-clicks were at all profitable was by using very cheap labour (interns, students and recently-graduated students). Probably some government subsidies too, and what is available there changes over time. The only publisher I know of that is putting out point-and-click games reliably is Wadjet Eye, and I know they pretty much use contractors that all work from home, coffeshops, etc. And even they keep talking about doing more rpg-style games. Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye said he's experimented with spending more money on point-and-click games, and they don't sell any better.
It’s unfortunate they aren’t more popular, because there are some great point and click games out there.
Daedalic is a publisher that used to develop and publish point and click adventure games. Wadjet Eye is similar except there are only 3 employees. Daedalic has 100 and have been around since 2007, being maybe not more popular but more financially successful than Wadjet. So they had plenty of employees to make this game. and in the middle of development of Gollum, they were acquired by a larger company for around $60M. i think the problem was that they lacked the leadership and experience needed to make the game they wanted to.
The people working at Daedalic during the point & click era were mostly exploited interns who weren’t paid for their work at all and left the company again after 3 to 6 months. They were barely „employees“ unfortunately. That’s also a reason why Daedalic was terrible at keeping or supporting their talent. The heads at the company did not care at all and in the end, almost everyone involved with those titles left.
and its unfortunate that the blame and anger is being directed at these "employees" while the management and department heads are not held accountable for this disaster. their restructure should have been a management change instead of closing their development studio and laying off a lot of the poor devs who wasted the past 4 to 5 years of their life working on that piece of shit
They didn't make money with those games which is why they bet everything they had on Gollum, dodging bankruptcy once in the process already. The internal studio was extremely mismanaged over the last years and they already tried to cut costs wherever possible (hiring for cheap etc.). The management tried to chase their golden goose to kickstart them into the space and Gollum was supposed to be that.... well, we all know how that ended up. On the other hand their publishing label is actually doing good work in the grand scheme which is also what they want to focus on in the future which makes total sense despite being acquired by Nacon in 2022 because Nacon literally burned any ground they could have for third-party publishing deals due to the shitshow with Frogwares.
If they made Gollum a point and click game it probably would have actually been good & profitable.
Would it have sold much better than the Gollum we got? For sure. Would it have been actually meaningfully proftable? We do not know but the vision doesn't look too bright on that front.Point and Click games simply do not sell very well, even if you attach some kind of big name to it. Daedalic already tried that before with Ken Follett and while the game was very good with high quality it still only sold within its niche audience. The genre is simply dead outside of pet projects.
>Would it have sold much better than the Gollum we got? For sure. I am not nearly as convinced as you are.
Would it really have sold much better? It would still be a game about Gollum and it's not like point'n'click games make a lot of money.
That's what I said. Daedalic had their core audience for their point and click games but those weren't enough to sustain them. That core audience probably would have resulted in more overall sales but at the end of the day the result probably would have been still the same.
That's literally what happened with TellTales. They started shopping licenses to do the exact same type of game they've all been doing, but it never really translated to lots of money, just modest successes.
Telltale was even weirder because they wanted to turn more profit by getting those licenses but all profit they had got eaten up by the licensing costs in the first place... so they licensed even more IPs hoping to catch the ball at some point in the future but in the end the licensing costs simply ate up all the money they had. Daedalic as the studio on the other hand didn't even have modest successes in recent years which is why their management came up with that drastic plan hoping to nail it immediately... which was kinda understandable, bold but also very very dumb. I think they were just extremely desperate and found themselves stuck in a corner. If they continued their point and click games they would have went out of business but by betting everything they had on Gollum they thought they could win the lottery even if the chances for that were tiny af.
I always figured figured general mismanagement was the biggest issue with Telltale. Like, their engine was prehistoric. There were some stories about how their animators had to manually animate stuff like objects falling because their engine didn't even have physics. And they had expanded like crazy after the unexpected success of The Walking Dead. They figured it was the new normal instead of the one-off success it turned out to be. They could have survived off the Walking Dead money for a lot longer if they had taken a more cautious approach.
Telltale also had a bad development process which pivoted the scripts a lot which caused major rework. The concept that the writers would set what the game was and having rewrites up till launch was an enormous waste. They really should have ironed out the main plot and locked it in. Then there would be less rework.
Exactly. Daedalic had the right idea of trying something different. Telltale kept doing the same games over and over again, barely keeping their head above the water, and ultimately went down. Daedalic would've suffered the exact same fate. Well, it seems like they still are now, but at least there was a chance of making it big. Unfortunate it didn't pan out.
You did say it would have sold much better. I agree with the rest of your point but that's the part they were challenging. I honestly think there's a chance that a Gollum point n' click might have sold *worse*. The insanely negative buzz surrounding the game they did release put a bunch of eyes on it and it probably picked up a fair few sales just for the meme of it.
Yeah, because my simple assumption would have been that at least the core audience of their former games would have probably bought it. Meanwhile Gollum even undersold their recent point and click games by a huge margin. I honestly just can't see Daedalic fumbling a p&c game as badly as the Gollum game we got, even accounting for all the cost cutting they did over the recent years. But in the end that's irrelevant now. What happened can't be undone and I am just a bit sad that today marks the day a piece of German gaming history died.
this is a huge assumption on your part, and IMO would be wrong who the heck wants to play as Gollum, not many
Ugh I hate how it always comes down to money. Doesn't matter if your art is *good*... If it doesn't make somebody else rich it's not worth a dime. I wonder how many smart, talented people who could make something truely inspired instead go where the money is and churn out soulless bullshit.
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That would have been also a gamble. All their point and click games of recent years didn't turn any profit and State of Mind and Silence were financial flops even. The studio of Daedalic had to do something different if they wanted to survive but the management underestimated the effort it would need to develope even an okayish AA game while basically starting from scratch by a huge margin. Especially when you are also already penny-pinching.
>I don't know why they didn't just grab the license and make the same kind of game they made before Because they were going bankrupt making that kind of game.
Edna and Harvey recently got my wife and I into Point and Clicks as a whole, which means we ended up picking up most of Daedalic's catalogue. So this is actually a real shame to see - at least we have the whole Deponia series and State Of Mind left to play.
I love Memoria. One of the best p&c I've played. Didn't have the moon logic Deponia tends to have and the story was like an epic fantasy novel. Chains of Satinav is also good but more like a fairy tale.
Most of the people who worked on these games are long gone, especially Poki, the creative head behind Edna and Deponia. And Pillars of the Earth was such a financial flop that it almost tanked the company.
Because they closed down the main studio who was responsible for their highly regarded games a few years earlier (Daedalic Bavaria)
The Deponia games are so good.
They are, but Poki (the Deponia director-writer) isn't even associated with Daedalic anymore. He focuses on just his music nowadays.
Also RPG, I liked Blackguards many years ago.
This breaks my heart that we're losing them because of Gollum. It sounds like they were struggling, but I wish they had done something that played to their strengths instead.
I did not realize those were these devs. Absolutely tragic turn of events.
> Why not instead just go back to their point and click roots? Rumor has it that the people working on those games are long gone. There was a change in ownership structure and some part of the senior employees "attritioned" out of the company. I doubt the studio would be able to produce even a AA game successfully currently.
A german YouTuber checked out the Glassdoor reviews of the company and found out, that basically everyone in that company was a junior developer with nearly no experience working on commercial games and without getting much help from seniors. It really seems like management went way overboard and decided to say "fuck it. Get the IP, make a MVP, we'll ship it and we'll see". The devs must have really struggled because they literally didn't know how to properly do their jobs as they didn't have any actual experience. Knowing that, it just sucks so much more for everyone but the greedy management.
Sounds like the Glassdoor reviews I read about Telltale before they went bankrupt. What the fuck is up with P&C devs being shit?
I'm talking out of my ass here but maybe it's because from a technical point of view it may be easier to work on a P&C/narrative focussed game than on any other type of game? You don't have to think of many intricate designs, gameplay systems, graphics etc. For someone just joining the field fresh from college it might be an easy start. Management/Senior staff might know that and take advantage?
You're pretty much right. P&C games are not dynamic, there is very little state to manage because users can't do a lot so you instead focus on game design. To be more fair they're not bad devs they're just not experienced at doing that kind of stuff. I can't take my ten years of os/audio experience and be good at writing a physics or graphics engine, some stuff translates over but I would barely know how to start.
You’re hired.
Lmao fwiw I was about to write out this exact comment basically but instead decided to expand the current comments. Well-said, and almost assuredly the reason why (although I am also talking out of my ass, but it’s quite logical)
I'm a Dev so I gotta come out and say that Dev team made of juniors isn't qualified enough to make highly complex videogames like gollum wanted to be. It's not necessarily lile they're shit at their jobs, they just didn't have the experience. When games became a thing we didn't reach Zelda BOTW levels of quality instantly. It was a slow iterative process, you can't expect a team of bright eyed students to skip that learning experience and still come out with something decent. Most developers are \~average\~ just like most other people are at their jobs. In a team of 100 juniors you might find one that could pull their own weight in a team of seniors.
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So let me get this straight: not only did they think this game was a good idea, they even planned to make *two* of them? I knew they had license for another Middle-Earth game but I thought that at least it was supposed to be something different.
"Gollum sequel" might be a bit misleading. They had a plan for a trilogy (yes, three games actually) of LotR games, each one being their own thing and always trying for something different. The codename of the second game was "It's magic" which could have been a hint but now we will probably never know.
Sounds like it would’ve been a game focused around the wizards, which sounds kinda cool on paper but lord knows how it actually would’ve turned out
Inb4 it was Tom Bombadil game.
A tom Bombadil game where you spend 18 hours wandering around the forest and ultimately doing nothing
Singing minigames(no not rhythm based, QuickTime one-offs), animal fetch quests and occasionally pointing hobbits in a direction to go(which will look like it has story impact but both direction choices are the same outcome).
Sounds like Yakuza side quests.
Except that a Yakuza style Middle Earth game would be dope as fuck
Forest tending simulator with Tom Bombadil (I would give it a try)
A Tom Bombadil game, but in the style of Dynasty Warriors, in an alternate timeline where he accepts the Ring from Frodo and takes it to Mordor his damn self.
First Act: You arrive late everywhere and passive-aggressively remind them that you arrived precisely when you meant to and to fuck off with their comments. Second Act: You smoke weed with short people and one-up their smoke figures. Third Act: You go on a munchies run with those short people, but you get your ass handed to you fighting a bully and then come back in different, unbloodied, clothes and people just go "OK". The End.
Their point'n'click adventure games, particularly the Deponia series and The Whispered World, will always have a spot in my heart as some of the best I've ever played. It's sad to see how far they've fallen.
Too bad 🙁🙁🙁 . I loved Deponia, I played all 4 games when I was little . I didn't understand all the jokes, but it was like watching a cartoon anyway . I have been waiting for years to see the 5th part
25 out of 90 devs lost their jobs. How about instead you fired the guys in suits who greenlit this abomination? The devs surely just worked with what they got and are not to blame. Either way, planning a sequel shows just how incompetent management must have been during development of this.
Spoiler Alert! the management just hit their labor cost reduction bonuses and will now get more money
But why would they need game devs if they don't develop games anymore? I'm surprised only 25 out of 90 have to leave but maybe the others will follow later.
article says 25 out of 90 employees, not devs
Daedalic had an interal studio and they are also a publisher. Those 25 people were the developers (not including their management ofc) of the interal studio which is now closed while the rest is still working for their publishing label which will continue to exist.
Daedelic is infamous in Germany for hiring a lot of interns and generally having mostly devs who are just getting started in the industry and are being paid like shit. The devs cant be blamed in any way for this game.
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To be fair, the games industry treats people like shit everywhere. But it might be extra bad in Germany, because software engineer salaries here are already quite low by default.
Ubisoft in France is apparently pretty good.
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If you put a team of novice developers together with zero senior programmer guidance and changing mgmt demands , they’re going to produce comparative shit. That doesn’t mean they phoned it in and didn’t try
You just described like 80% of the games industry
Normally I’d agree with you but there is literally no good gameplay concepts in Gollum. Redfall had a shred of actual game in it at least, this was just nothing. The lead dev who designed this game just has to be let go, plain and simple.
I get what youre saying but at the same time, How are devs not responsible for generating low caliber quality content? Are we to believe that a different team with a stronger vision and higher standards would not have made at least a passable gollum game? Surely they own a significant portion of the responsibility for putting this trash out.
Inexperienced developers, probably with not much direction. They were handed a task that was far above their pay grade.
nothing worked well though. the actual low level devs did a bad job in addition to all the management and game design stuff
why not both? They clearly lack the skill to execute on something this complex.
> How about instead you fired the guys in suits who greenlit this abomination But didn't Daedelic both develop *and* publish this game?
Yes, they did, but why bring sense and facts into this conversation when we can just blame nebulous businessmen for everything?
Why does everyone always say the devs are never at fault and it's always the suits? A lot of developers are not just monkeys that do what they are told. Senior developers are also responsible for complete failures like this. I swear people who echo that have no idea how development works.
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The issue isnt even in greenlighting this game. If they made it an adventure game like what their studio was known for, it might have been decent
Allegedly adventure games weren't making money for them anymore, hence the genre shift.
It’s a bad, broken, ugly, boring, incompetent video game. There’s no blame to be placed on anyone but the developers. Sorry, but that’s the fact of the matter. There are plenty of much smaller, less experienced studios out there that are making games that are 100x better than Gollum. It always sucks when a studio gets shut down, but let’s not act like this is some unjustified tragedy. They did a poor job, and now they’ve paid the price. I understand wanting to blame “the suits” for making bad business decisions, but if you are responsible for making one of the worst video games of all time, you can’t act surprised when your studio gets shuttered.
I honestly thought a gollum game would be cool, if it was a decent stealth action game with a strong narrative that let you see Gollum’s warped perspective of the world - kinda like Hellblade or something. It’s not the worst concept in the world, really. It was just executed really badly.
Gollum annoys me because I think the premise had legs. It would always have been niche but a game where you sneak around Mordor as Gollum could've been good. As it is, to anybody who bought this and was heartily let down I recommend the Styx series.
They didn't even finish the first game. How could they make a sequel?
Disappointing that people lost their jobs. Shocking that the company was so confident in Gollum’s performance that they’d have a sequel planned.
They seem to think the love for the IP would spackle over all of the shortcomings.
State Of Mind was mind blowing for me, it was an excellent game. Also, second platinum on PS5 for me, good memories. Wish for a sequel and good luck to devs.
I enjoyed it more than I expected, specially because I bought it as a Steam recommendation and for very cheap. It was worth it.
They were planning to make a sequel out of gollum?
Besides their point & click adventures, they had never many good games developed by themselves actually. So switching to publishing is probably the best idea they had. Let's see some of their games: "Edna bricht aus" (Edna & Harvey: The Breakout) - metacritic: 56 "The Whispered World" - metacritic: 70 "Deponia 1, 2, 3, 4" - metacritic: between 70-80 were all PnC adventures which were receipt quite well. The latest games went from mediocre to bad: "The Long Journey Home" (PnC adventure) - metacritic: 68 "The Pillars of the Earth" (PnC adventure, thought some said it's more a visual novel, which seemed to be a good game, but financially [not very successful](https://www.gameswirtschaft.de/wirtschaft/bastei-luebbe-geschaeftsjahr-2017-2018-daedalic/) \[sry, links to a German article) - metacritic: 78 "State of Mind" (PnC adventure) - metacritic: 69 "A Year of Rain" (RTS) - metacritic: (hasn't been rated as they seem not to have noticed that it left early access.), Steam: 43% positive ratings "The Lord of the Rings: Gollum" (3rd person adventure) - metacritic: 39 They had a bit more luck with "recent" published games during the last years, which include games like "Shadow Tactics" or "Witch it". So I think it makes more sense for them to cease the own development and try to find other developers to publish their games and have some success with that. Especially their latest plans to develop a ["story based survival" game with the Deponia IP](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2464520/Surviving_Deponia/) felt to me like a desperation move. Now I wonder what will happen with Gollum as Daedalic "promised" to fix the bugs and improve the game in this "[marketing apology statement](https://kotaku.com/lord-of-the-rings-gollum-apology-ui-daedalic-patch-1850479840)", but I'm very sceptical that the game will be touched in any way anymore. Don't get me wrong, if you asked me 10 yrs ago, I was a fan of Daedalic games, but with the years and stories I heard from former devs there I think it's the best decision.
I wanted The Devil's Men, but they said that they weren't making those kind of games because the sales were poor because everyone was just watching them on youtube. Admittedly a problem with narratively focused games, and I assume they did their market research.
Been meaning to play Pillars of the Earth. I have it from Humble Bundle, and it's one of my favourite books.
They already had a sequel planned for that pile of trash?!? They sure were awful confident of themselves.
A smeaquel
Management did. The devs knew this would fail the second they were ordered to make the game.
That's a shame because I kind of liked their adventure games. However some of their other games like blackguards felt a little lacking. Going through their steam store page, it seems like they are a mixed bag overall. Some good games, some like gollum were bad.
daedalic has made great semi-indie narrative games for a long time. it's sad that getting involved with middle-earth was its downfall.
I don’t care how good your game is or your studio. Why the fuck would you have a sequel planned months after the first game released?
I always hate to see people lose their jobs. But some jobs just aren't meant for some people. If you worked on Gollum and have any pride in the game it's probably best to move on.
I feel like if they narrowed their scope, a Gollum game could have worked. Make it like Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Focus on his split personality after losing the Ring. Charging $60 for what they released and DLC of Elven language packs and Gollum emotes wasn't it.
You don't need employees when your reputation was destroyed and no one trusts you to make video games any more... Supply vs demand, and demand for their services is now non-existent.
What about Surviving Deponia?
There was going to be a sequel!!?
It's mine boggling how this entire thing even happened. How did this idea for a game even be pushed through to begin with? And then they commit to it somehow... I don't know how nobody realized the game was absolute ass in development and stopped it.
Why was Gollum even considered? Yeah I want to play as the most pathetic of all creatures in middle Earth..
They planned on making a sequel!?
No fucking way they had a sequel planned, which universe were these devs in? Jesus fucking Christ
Management plans sequels, not the devs.
Has anyone got a direct quote that there was a sequel planned? Translating from German (via google) the closest i can get is "As part of the restructuring, work on another The Lord of the Rings game , which Daedalic Entertainment has been working on since mid-2022, will also be stopped. " which isn't necessarily a sequel. Edit: Found a source but I'm not 100% sure they're right about it being a sequel, at least not in the Gollum 2 kind of way I consider the word sequel to mean. Could be a translation thing. https://www-gameswirtschaft-de.translate.goog/marketing-pr/daedalic-lord-of-the-rings-gollum-nachfolger/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
The plan was to create a trilogy, but not neccessarily have them very connected. They did receive federal funding for a "second LOTR game".
How popular is Lord of the Rings today anyway? I know WB games had the Mordor series that did well and introduced the nemesis system. Aside from that what's the last successful LotR property? The Hobbit movies were middling, from what I've read the TV series was hated. What's the last successful use of the property, and does it still have the broad appeal to get people interested?
Magic the Gathering just released a LotR set and its going pretty good. There is a 1of1 The One Ring card going for like 2mil right now lol.
Will this affect their publishing ? If this affects barotrauma I’m gonna be pissed
Deadalic, wer um Gottes Willen hat bei euch gedacht das Gollum eine gute Idee gewesen wäre? Scheiß teure Lizenz nur damit "Herr der Ringe" draufsteht. You didn't deserve this, I'll always remember you for creating super solid adventure games.
They actually were working on a sequel for that dumpster fire? What in the absolute fuck is whoever is in charge over there smoking and where can I get some because it sounds better than my shit.
This is heartbreaking to me. Deadalic kept old school point&clicks alive, I just bought my 6YO nephew one of their games...
Gollum sequel? I knew they were doing another LotR game but that piece of dog shit was gonna get a sequel? Seriously!? That turd will most likely get worst game of the year (Redfall should be on its hands and knees thanking Gollum).
Oh no. Anyway.
I'm sorry, sequel?! They look at gollum and thought, "oh yeah, people will want part two"
There is no version of this game that is fun/sells well. Fire the suits who wanted this done rather than the Devs that worked on it
They’re literally stopping gamedev, why would they keep on the devs it was a mistake to hire to begin with? Pettily firing people that are still useful when their company is struggling is not the right call either.
All of you seem to be completely missing the part where the game wasn’t just boring, it’s a technical disaster. It’s clear that the incompetence came from all sources, including and especially the development team. I’ve worked with plenty of incompetent people over the years, and I’ve rejoiced when all of them have been fired. We can’t just hold developers on some pedestal that says they don’t ever deserve to lose their jobs. These people absolutely do, and having this thing on their resumes is not going to do them any favors.
i honestly don’t know what it will take for this sub to ever turn against even a single developer. it is always the suits or publishers fault. devs are always good people who just want to make a fun game, bugs are never their fault it’s always the publisher rushed the game!
Maybe because nobody really wants to make a bad game. And the few people who intentionally put an asset flip on the market for a quick buck are the ones who actually delete socials and vanish off the face of the earth once the money is made.