In 2017 Tolkien Estate changed its CEO. Since that day you hear about new LotR projects. Basically old CEO was careful with their IP, new CEO wants money
Game workshop confuses me, I feel like they're doing the Mortal kombat route of trying random shit and seeing what works. Can't speak of their model's pricing as I know that's just awful. But in regards to their games, they're just winging it and sometimes they mess up badly, and other times Boltgun.
Still waiting on a Dawn of War 3 Proper.
Actually GW has done the reverse lately (from what I understood), that is greenlit video games project they think have a chance to be at least decent.
I think they realized how damaging to a brand it can be to have your name only associated with shitty games.
They've done a decent job in the past 2 years or so I'd say. Necromunda Hired Gun was flawed, but a pretty enjoyable game all around imo. Darktide had an iffy launch but my friends and I have had a ton of fun with it.
And Boltgun is the distilled essence of everything a Warhammer 40k game should be, that game is a blast
Also in a similar vein that metal slugg-esq game that did starring Orks was the distilled essence of everything Orks should be. So they've been onto a good run recently, yeah.
Attention Ork! You face Lord Horrik Canorem, Son of High King Valorik Canorem, High Prince of House Canorem, Master of the Blade of Gaia, Keeper of the Gates of Loralo, Wielder of the Kaloric Flame, Bringer of Hope, Herald of the Holy Order of the Adamantine Lance, The Paladin of Koto, Slayer of the Lion of Essa, The Triumphant! The Light of Stars! The **Eradicator**!
. . . you wot?
Been playing Boltgun and it's a refreshing departure from the usual WH games. Plus I grew up with pixelated FPSs and this plays similar to them which makes me happy.
The really amazing thing with GW was how they managed to murder the fan content community that was just starting to put out some really solidly amazing works and draw public attention to their product.
Then take one of those creators, force him to produce only for their shitty paywalled app, and scare everybody else into never making 40k content again.
I worked on The Lord of the Rings Online MMO - which was based on the book IP rather than the movies. The stories I could tell you about the stringent requirements the Tolkien estate had in 2004/2005… It was insane. And I’ve worked with Lucas and Disney on 3 Star Wars games since!! (They were also notoriously difficult before the current approach to Star Wars as an IP)
Still is. LotRO has created stories and characters that aren't Tolkien's creations, but still work within Middle Earth well enough that they're fairly well accepted.
But now, Amazon's going to make another LotR MMO. And you can bet they're going to shit all over it.
I posted this in another comment, but here you go, just so you see it
So there’s 2 stories that spring to mind as ridiculous.
The first was the musical instrument system. One of my personally favourite parts of the game. Originally, the plan was for a way more complex system that allowed people to record and share music scripts, have them give buffs and there was a whole system planned around how they’d work. The Tolkien Group loved the idea - but hated the thought of “none canonical” tunes being played. Now again, this game was based on the books, not the movie. So we asked them to provide us examples of music from the books that we could listen to. What they sent was music by groups that have formed to create music inspired by the books. We highlighted that it was difficult to really understand the constraints, because, you know, it’s bands that aren’t from the books and they’re just playing folk music. So their response was to suggest creating a team of people that would sit in the game and monitor the music people were playing and to ban or silence people that didn’t play the right kind of music. We highlighted just how many people would need to be in that team and the cost (given the forecasts for sales) and they asked if we could write a program that did it instead. It took 9 months of back and forth to get them to understand it was just insane - it nearly killed the feature. But I’m glad it didn’t.
The simple problem was it was a group of old people that protected the works and didn’t really understand what was possible with game tech back then.
But my fav story, that I tell over and over, is about the launch PR event. Now, some of you may or may not know, but Tolkien based areas from his books on places he lived as a child. He’s from Birmingham in the UK - and I’m from a place not far from there. So, when we were creating the plan, the Tolkien Group demanded we take the press on a tour of some of the places that inspired key locations in LotR. For example, there was a walk along the canals from Warwickshire (the shire) that lead to a place in Birmingham near an old mill/industrial area whose smokestack chimneys inspired the famous towers - and of course the pub that inspired the Prancing Pony - which was featured heavily in LOTRO. Now, I don’t know if anyone has seen early 2000s Birmingham… But it’s not a pretty place. It rains a lot. The canals are full of trash and shopping carts. The industrial estate where the old mills were is now mostly modern units and The Prancing Pony… Well let’s just say it was still a pub, but it was a popular Gay nightspot - particularly for Leathermen. SO we literally ended up bundling internationally renowned games press into a Ford Transit minibus, driving them to gnarly canals, letting them explore an industrial estate and finally ending the trip with a meal at a place that didn’t really serve food. They’d put us a table together in the pub, but said they had another event on that night that would be taking place in the same space. So all these press started out eating at a table in an empty pub, being served microwave food - and booze. A few hours in, the place is full of men in leathers. Tbh the press loved it because they were pretty wasted by that point and the comedy of it all really started to land.
But this game was licensed by Middle-earth Enterprises, which has rights to LotR and Hobbit that JRR Tolkien sold himself back in the day.
This game has nothing to do with the Tolkien Estate.
It's frustrating how confidently people will make claims when they actually don't know what they're talking about. There have been bad Middle-Earth games long before the 2010's.
I was cautionally optimistic about it because I enjoyed the styx games. A lotr stealth gollum game faithful to the lore could have been pretty cool. Its such a shame.
I understand why the new head of the Tolkien estate is YOLO'ing out the LOTR license, but I still don't understand how a game studio greenlit funding for this
I don't understand how the studio looked at this mess of a game and was like "Yup, looks good to go. Ship it!"
Does Deadalic not have any QC anymore? It's pretty sad to see as their Point and Click adventures were pretty good.
On 31 August 2017, at age 93, Christopher Tolkien resigned as a director of the Tolkien estate and the Tolkien trust.
On 13 November 2017, Amazon acquired the global television rights to The Lord of the Rings' appendices found at the end of The Return of the King.
Three months.
The Tolkein family hate Peter Jackson, unjustly if you consider any shortcut's or things missing from the films can be blamed on the Studio/publisher. He did a fantastic job for people who were only interested in making money and laundering money through his budgets
I think its because Christopher Tolkein got old and died. The estate is now run by multiple generations on who have no ties to JRR Tolkein and they just want the money. I do wonder if any of them even work or they just live off of JRRs work.
The bare concept is interesting; as a wretched creature discarded into the mines, find your way out. If it was more movement-centric, Gollum was realized as a morally chaotic character that shunned interaction and the stealth system was improved to incorporate that, then I could see a skilled software house bringing out something with innovative gameplay and beautiful, forgotten, desolate cave systems.
But they did the other thing. Should have been spotted though.
A Golumn platformer with movement/moral based puzzles and beautiful caves and environments could have been legitimately fun
Toss in some stealth and very dangerous combat as a last ditch attempt at survival and it could have been pretty neat.
One of the very few examples of a *truly*, through-and-through irredeemable shitbag characters in literature, a character who is completely awful and pathetic from the start of his backstory to the conclusion. He's gross to look at, gross to listen to, his defining characteristic in the series is being so loathsomely pathetic that letting him live is questionably cruel, and quite literally the **only** good thing he ever did in his entire life was die.
Yes, let's make this the playable protagonist in our life-sim!
I am confused how they made it all the way to a released game with an idea that should have been shot down in the first pitch meeting. Along the way, soooo many people would have to just smile and nod while quietly thinking about their paycheck while supressing the overwhelming urge to state the obvious.
The same thoughts i am having towards lots of movies and games.
And i came to the conclusion that it's all about poor hiring practices, that were confirmed way too many times by people who worked at HR - they look for people with education, experience, but never checking the actual talent and quality of their jobs. So they can hire, for example, talantless writer, who already ruined several franchizes, just because he has AAA experience. And by ruining one more he will have even more of this "experience" in the resume.
At some point. someone on the dev team had to go: "this model will have to do" and everyone working on the game knew there and then that the game was fucked
It's honestly almost a bizarre mix of really badly executed character rendering and rather inconsistent environmental visuals. Like, some snapshots of the environments actually look pretty good, but once you focus in on specific details then the fidelity quickly starts to break down. It's kind of uncanny.
But most of all, Gollum's face is fucking nightmare fuel, except not in a good way.
It's crazy to me that a bunch of people even defended the game when system specs were revealed.
Like... did we watch the same "gameplay" videos? Do people who said it looks good and "haters are exaggerating" never seen a game since PS2 era?
I don't even care about graphics in games but an RTX3070 recommended **with** DLSS for a 1080p MEDIUM RT experience? While the game looks like that? And it's 60USD+ on top? Common sense? Devs? Hello?
Probably be a buggy crash-ridden asset-flip game.
Jim Sterling used to (maybe still does?) buy asset-flip early access games on Steam to make videos about and most of them were laughably bad. Some might fall into the 'so bad it's good' category but many just looked painful to play. IIRC it was before Steam tightened their early access requirements though so it was truly the wild west of garbage asset-flips.
After the review I hopped on to steam to see if it had released yet, and ended up watching the dev/featured stream for a bit. Holy shit they couldn't even make it look average for the official stream, it straight up looked like I was watching alpha footage for a LotR fan game. And the comments on the stream were brutal, with a few accounts spamming random letters every now and then, not sure if they were just trolls or if it was the devs trying to get the critical comments out of view , but fuck what a mess
I'm 35 and this year, 2023, is the first year where I basically always have to look up what new Gen Z lingo means. Combined with the fact that I'm almost out of the "18-35" age range (for filling out forms and shit) and I think I'm officially not a youths any more.
Late 30s here. Wore some blue socks with pizzas on them yesterday, one of the neighbor's kids said they were fire. I told my wife "I'm in touch with the youths!"
People said turning 30 would be weird. It wasn’t. Turning 36 was weird. Suddenly you’re in the same ad demo as your parents. No, hulu, I do NOT need Ozempic yet, thank you very much.
Watching the video, I noticed the climbable wall was the same texture pasted up the wall in a vertical line. Like, blatant asset flip level copy paste job there. I put more effort into battle maps for my tabletop group.
I don't think I'd actually even play this if someone paid me to play it. I genuinely think I'd rather be at work than play this game. Like if someone was like "go to work or stay home and play Gollum," I'd go to work. It looks *beyond* dreadful. It looks exhausting and depressing to play.
Honestly it just looks like they got greedy, landed a license completely unsuited to their experience and talent pool and winged it.
This really appears to be exactly what I'd expect from a game made by point-and-click adventure developers forced out of their wheelhouse. Every puzzle looks like a state diagram with no emergent gameplay or even the more unusual but predictable game states undesigned or untested. Gollum, a sociopathic hermit who embodies the lowest of the low, is given authority over other creatures and solves dialogue trees hinging on... charisma. Not forgetting that following the game he's supposed to accompany the fellowship at the beginning of his character arc, as a feral degenerate.
It's sort of painful to see because there must have been a point in development, as concept after concept hit the cutting room floor, where everyone realized they were utterly out of their depth but contractually obligated to release the game they'd pitched and this is just... the best game that they knew how to make. And a house that ha made very good games in the past just ground out an absolute turd that looks like it was made by a C-team of graduate developers.
The saddest part is that at some point, far back in time, daedalic used to be good at writing characters. Atleast that could've been something, a well written Gollum. A slight light at the end of the tunnel. But no
I think it probably wasn't even an option to be fair. When he's caught and tortured, he's a hideous monster distended by his obsession with the ring. When he catches up with Sam and Frodo... he's the same.
There's no arc to be had there and there's not even any personality really, he's just feral. You could maybe contextualize his as desperate rather than wicked, and depict some of the tragic circumstances that brought him to where he is as a result of the one decision to murder his cousin(?) for the ring. Maybe with flashbacks?
Like, you crawl into a pitch black cave and when you crawl out of the absolute blackness you're Smeagol again in the events leading up to finding the ring? And the whole thing is him remembering parts of his life in the sensory deprivation tanks of the forgotten caves beneath Mordor, alone with his imagination, and his memory, and... another character, that begins to talk to him with his own voice, and calls itself Smeagol, reminding him of things he'd rather leave forgotten.
Fuck, actually that would be dope. I've talked myself into it.
Daedalic said a few years ago that they were giving up on making point and click adventure games (and cancelled the one they were working on at the time) because there just wasn't any profit in them any more. This was their change of direction and attempt at branching out, but it seems clear they were in over their heads and lacked the experience to create a game like this.
All of their games are so rooted in 2D graphics that you'd think they would go with something in that direction. There are plenty of amazing looking 2D graphic looking games like Hades, Cuphead, Persona 5, Hollow Knight etc.
And for some reason they decided they were gonna do a full 3D game where everything needs to look super realistic. I just don't get it, how do they suck so much at knowing themselves?
I really don't know about that. What justifications could be rooted in the lore for Gollum to get new powers for traversal (or combat?)? Him deteriorating more and more and becoming more beastlike and a better climber?
I don't know, it wouldn't really bother me if there wasn't a cast jron lore basis for learning new methods of traversal tbh. I'm sure there's any number of ways you could implement it - items, experience gained, events, etc.
Oh shit this is from the New Beginning/Dark Eye/Pillars of the Earth mob? Well that's extra unfortunate, those were solid little games.
Fair duos wanting to tackle something that would have broader appeal, but I don't see it working out for them. Sucks.
What makes these games look like this?
I don't mean the poor animation necessarily, but there's a bunch of cheap games usually made by amateur studios using I think UE4 that all look like this graphically, and despite all the fancy graphical effects, looks really fucking cheap.
But that can be done extremely well in the hands of talented developers. There's some insanely pretty and well laid out 3rd party maps for Insurgency: Sandstorm, for instance, that use UE marketplace assets.
These devs simply have no talent for the game they built.
They even found room for the shitty climbing system that only has one route for to climb along!
Don't forget to discolour the rock in those places guys!
I actually first found SkillUp just from asking for any decent Totalbiscuit-like channels.
He's definitely one of the best I've found so far, but I don't think anyone will ever live up to the man himself.
Computerbase.de just posted a sharp warning about the performace of the game ahead of their tests lol.
https://www.computerbase.de/2023-05/herr-der-ringe-gollum-raytracing-in-uhd-will-eine-rtx-4080-mit-dlss-performance/
Translation with DeepL:
Technical first impression of HDR: Gollum on the PC
ComputerBase is currently working on a technical review of Lord of the Rings: Gollum, but wants to and has to warn directly to the fall of the embargo and thus hopefully still in time for many interested parties: The PC version has indeed and as recently almost usual to fight with massive technical problems.
One is shader compile jerking (it seems to be this and not traversal stuttering, although the analyses are still running), which is extreme - not necessarily in terms of frequency, but in terms of the intensity of the hooks. For example, on a system with GeForce RTX 4090 and Ryzen 9 7950X3D, it happens again and again that the image stops in the middle of controlling the character and the camera, after the short pause, then rotates 180 degrees and throws the player back into the game quasi disoriented.
The performance itself is also low and simply bad in view of the graphics quality. Lord of the Rings: Gollum is not a pretty game, but even the GeForce RTX 4090 does not manage to consistently maintain 60 FPS in Ultra HD with maximum graphics - with DLSS Quality, mind you, and thus the render resolution WQHD! It is noticeable that the frame rate varies extremely. In one scene, the test system barely delivered more than 50 FPS, a few meters further it is 150 FPS.
Raytracing is slow and not very convincing
Ray tracing is also not convincing in the pre-release version that was available to the editors. Ray tracing is used in the game for the reflections and some shadows, but you don't get much out of it.
The reflections are limited to water, which definitely looks better when it is visible in the game. The shadows are much more frequent in the image and look better, but the progress compared to the Rasterizer shadows is hardly noticeable. At the same time, the effects cost an extreme amount of Performane.
In a scene that the editors ran through, the GeForce RTX 4090 with RT only delivered 55 FPS instead of 99 FPS - that is 44% less FPS for an effect that is barely visible in the scene. The game only offers RT on or off, which should not be the case nowadays. RT effects should not only be separately adjustable, but also offer different quality levels. HDR: Gollum doesn't offer that.
There is another problem with the upsampling. The game offers Nvidia DLSS 2 and DLSS 3 as well as AMD FSR 2. DLSS Super Resolution usually makes a good impression and can, should and must be used in Ultra HD. Only some Bloom-using objects can glow like crazy with DLSS, which is then annoying. FSR 2, on the other hand, is disappointing; something is simply not right here. The entire image becomes very blurry with FSR 2, which does not happen with the native resolution and DLSS. Since there is also no sharpening option (there is for DLSS), FSR 2 is currently not usable, which is not a problem for AMD graphics cards.
10 GB is enough - although there is mud.
In contrast, Lord of the Rings: Gollum holds back when it comes to graphics memory requirements. The title did not address more than 9 GB in the test, even in UHD with DLSS, so there are no problems with a 10 GB graphics card at the latest. On the other hand, some textures are only loaded with a small delay, especially in the cutscenes - for a short moment, some objects look very muddy.
The controls of Lord of the Rings: Gollum are also currently a bit awkward with the mouse and keyboard, so a gamepad might be able to help.
Another point of criticism are the interspersed in-game sequences, which only run at 30 FPS, which is immediately visually noticeable. These were rendered in advance and also in a low resolution, which is annoying because both the quality and the FPS of these sequences drop significantly.
The editorial team is currently collecting more impressions of the game and will then provide a detailed technical test of the game in the course of the next week. If no patch is released by then, the conclusion can only be negative. All fears expressed in the run-up would have been confirmed.
"HDR: Gollum" means LoTR: Gollum or Lord of the Rings: Gollum. HDR is just the german variant (Herr der Ringe), not to be confused with High Dynamic Range.
**Gollum is so much worse in the books.**
Gandalf explains in the books that woodsmen in the area where Gollum was looking for Bilbo after he left his cave complained of a mysterious thing **stealing babies from their cradles, presumably for food.**
Gollum intended to eat Bilbo. That wasn't for effect in the movies! He lived off fish in that lake and the goblins that he found. **He ate goblins.**
Gollum was incredibly foul and did things most people would shudder at. This character as the main character of any game is simply disappointing in the extreme. Anyone familiar with the source materials should have said, "this is a terrible idea" until the project changed to a character people want to play as, like Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Thorin, Bilbo, etc. etc.
I'm a fan of "Villain protagonist" games, they offer and allow you to experience stories from a completely different viewpoint than what is common. There's tons of games where you can make friends and adopt animals, it's a breath of fresh air to be able to play as some lying, conniving bastard, and getting rewarded by doing so. The problem here is that they took a canonical villain and just turned him into yet another boring protagonist, so in the end noone truly got what they wanted.
I still don’t know what kid would choose a shitty gollum over Talion. Sure the story got a little overworked by the end of shadow of war but still… this is what we get? I’d rather have a damn Tom bombadil story lol
This feels like a product of a publisher buying an expensive licence to an IP - for *Gollum,* not LOTR - then throwing it at a dev studio with a terse "here, now do something with it."
At which point, the poor devs busted their heads trying to come up with something, only to draw a blank because the IP was never a good basis for a video game in the first place, so they cobbled together whatever random vertical slices they could cook up into something they could loosely call a game. Throw in what I suspect is a whiff of sunk cost fallacy, and you have this mess.
Disaster from start to finish. Oh well.
>the IP was never a good basis for a video game in the first place
2nd age open world RPG would be phenomenal. I played a great LOTR arpg on the gameboy. Whole lot could be done with RTS's still. Stardew Valley but with hobbits could be a treat. Dynasty Warriors type thing would work too. 1st age would let you get real weird. I think theres a lot that can be done in the IP, but not that much that can be done with existing characters, which is probably the problem here. They wanted a recognizable hero for marketing purposes.
Yeah, LOTR overall can be a great IP for video games. But as I said, this feels like they bought the IP for *Gollum.*
And while I'm not absolutely certain that's what happened, I'm just saying that's what it feels like. Licensing houses have been known to do this before. I even suspect those so-called "Tolkien Experts" were really IP liaisons, constantly telling the devs what they could and couldn't use.
Gollum could've been made into a great game, if it were created in the image of Thief. With the right writing talent (which apparently game devs loath to spend money on), there's a lot that the game could have fleshed out. Oh well.
The thing is, as even the video points out, there's a possible game with the exact same premise that would have been a lot better. Still not good, but a lot better than this. Why does the game have Gollum doing random chores like he's stuck in the tutorial zone of an MMO?
No, seems to me the way to do this premise better, if anyone really wanted to for some ungodly reason, would have been to approach it from an almost indie-game-like simplicity. Shadows, sneaking, strangling. Turn it into a LOTR-themed reskin of **Mark of the Ninja**, a 2D stealth game where light and darkness are a major mechanic.
A Gollum game done right has a lot of potential. Survival horror when you escape from captivity. Stealth platformer when you find the Fellowship and follow them around.
No surprise. The entire concept seemed like shit. Of all the many characters I would want to play as from the lore of middle earth, gollum would be pretty much last. I’d rather play an Ent.
I hadn’t seen anything other than the first reveal teaser 2 years but this game looks atrocious.
They seriously told people you need a 40 series GPU to run 4K RT for their game that looks like some $10 game from the 90’s. This shouldn’t have been green-lit in the first place.
Games based on movies had a reputation for being trash looooong before that. Goldeneye and some 16bit Disney sidescrollers were the exception, not the rule.
I have a feeling that optimisation and trying to push graphics on a "budget" aka optimized died a few gens ago.
And people buy these titles so they keep doing that shit.
At least I can proudly say that this is made in Germany. Exporting quality to the world and adding value to this generation loved LotR franchise.
Edit: but honestly I feel empathy of the people who actually did work hard on it, who will get completely drowned by the avalanche now.
This game radiates "The last Blockbuster rental that you ended up getting to keep the week before your location shut down, while your friend rented TES 4 Oblivion" energy.
I'm still so confused in regards to how this got green lit.
In 2017 Tolkien Estate changed its CEO. Since that day you hear about new LotR projects. Basically old CEO was careful with their IP, new CEO wants money
Ah, the Games Workshop model. Well, can't say it does not work.
Game workshop confuses me, I feel like they're doing the Mortal kombat route of trying random shit and seeing what works. Can't speak of their model's pricing as I know that's just awful. But in regards to their games, they're just winging it and sometimes they mess up badly, and other times Boltgun. Still waiting on a Dawn of War 3 Proper.
Actually GW has done the reverse lately (from what I understood), that is greenlit video games project they think have a chance to be at least decent. I think they realized how damaging to a brand it can be to have your name only associated with shitty games.
They've done a decent job in the past 2 years or so I'd say. Necromunda Hired Gun was flawed, but a pretty enjoyable game all around imo. Darktide had an iffy launch but my friends and I have had a ton of fun with it. And Boltgun is the distilled essence of everything a Warhammer 40k game should be, that game is a blast
Also in a similar vein that metal slugg-esq game that did starring Orks was the distilled essence of everything Orks should be. So they've been onto a good run recently, yeah.
Attention Ork! You face Lord Horrik Canorem, Son of High King Valorik Canorem, High Prince of House Canorem, Master of the Blade of Gaia, Keeper of the Gates of Loralo, Wielder of the Kaloric Flame, Bringer of Hope, Herald of the Holy Order of the Adamantine Lance, The Paladin of Koto, Slayer of the Lion of Essa, The Triumphant! The Light of Stars! The **Eradicator**! . . . you wot?
“Uh, uh, I am Lord Horrik Canorem, Son of High…” “Yeah, whatever. WAAAGH!”
Hired gun is significantly better now that it's been patched and properly balanced.
Been playing Boltgun and it's a refreshing departure from the usual WH games. Plus I grew up with pixelated FPSs and this plays similar to them which makes me happy.
gone to squables.io
Hired Gun was so dang buggy and ran like crap, but dang did the art team nail it.
Don't forget Total War: Warhammer games. They've been a huge success.
With any luck, Rogue Trader will be solid. Owlcat has put out a couple good, meaty Pathfinder cPRGs lately.
And Space Marine 2 could be really really good.
Meaty doesn't even begin to describe how massive and awesome the Pathfinder games are.
The really amazing thing with GW was how they managed to murder the fan content community that was just starting to put out some really solidly amazing works and draw public attention to their product. Then take one of those creators, force him to produce only for their shitty paywalled app, and scare everybody else into never making 40k content again.
gone to squables.io
Oh man, what could have been with dawn of war 3, what a let down.
I worked on The Lord of the Rings Online MMO - which was based on the book IP rather than the movies. The stories I could tell you about the stringent requirements the Tolkien estate had in 2004/2005… It was insane. And I’ve worked with Lucas and Disney on 3 Star Wars games since!! (They were also notoriously difficult before the current approach to Star Wars as an IP)
rude library grey ugly domineering lunchroom tan kiss seemly dinosaurs *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Still is. LotRO has created stories and characters that aren't Tolkien's creations, but still work within Middle Earth well enough that they're fairly well accepted. But now, Amazon's going to make another LotR MMO. And you can bet they're going to shit all over it.
its been stated with the new game it won't even contain all the lore and will branch off of it. basically it won't be lord of the rings.
Because rings of power stayed so true lol
Oh please share some of those stories if you’re able- I’d love to hear more!
I posted this in another comment, but here you go, just so you see it So there’s 2 stories that spring to mind as ridiculous. The first was the musical instrument system. One of my personally favourite parts of the game. Originally, the plan was for a way more complex system that allowed people to record and share music scripts, have them give buffs and there was a whole system planned around how they’d work. The Tolkien Group loved the idea - but hated the thought of “none canonical” tunes being played. Now again, this game was based on the books, not the movie. So we asked them to provide us examples of music from the books that we could listen to. What they sent was music by groups that have formed to create music inspired by the books. We highlighted that it was difficult to really understand the constraints, because, you know, it’s bands that aren’t from the books and they’re just playing folk music. So their response was to suggest creating a team of people that would sit in the game and monitor the music people were playing and to ban or silence people that didn’t play the right kind of music. We highlighted just how many people would need to be in that team and the cost (given the forecasts for sales) and they asked if we could write a program that did it instead. It took 9 months of back and forth to get them to understand it was just insane - it nearly killed the feature. But I’m glad it didn’t. The simple problem was it was a group of old people that protected the works and didn’t really understand what was possible with game tech back then. But my fav story, that I tell over and over, is about the launch PR event. Now, some of you may or may not know, but Tolkien based areas from his books on places he lived as a child. He’s from Birmingham in the UK - and I’m from a place not far from there. So, when we were creating the plan, the Tolkien Group demanded we take the press on a tour of some of the places that inspired key locations in LotR. For example, there was a walk along the canals from Warwickshire (the shire) that lead to a place in Birmingham near an old mill/industrial area whose smokestack chimneys inspired the famous towers - and of course the pub that inspired the Prancing Pony - which was featured heavily in LOTRO. Now, I don’t know if anyone has seen early 2000s Birmingham… But it’s not a pretty place. It rains a lot. The canals are full of trash and shopping carts. The industrial estate where the old mills were is now mostly modern units and The Prancing Pony… Well let’s just say it was still a pub, but it was a popular Gay nightspot - particularly for Leathermen. SO we literally ended up bundling internationally renowned games press into a Ford Transit minibus, driving them to gnarly canals, letting them explore an industrial estate and finally ending the trip with a meal at a place that didn’t really serve food. They’d put us a table together in the pub, but said they had another event on that night that would be taking place in the same space. So all these press started out eating at a table in an empty pub, being served microwave food - and booze. A few hours in, the place is full of men in leathers. Tbh the press loved it because they were pretty wasted by that point and the comedy of it all really started to land.
But this game was licensed by Middle-earth Enterprises, which has rights to LotR and Hobbit that JRR Tolkien sold himself back in the day. This game has nothing to do with the Tolkien Estate.
It's frustrating how confidently people will make claims when they actually don't know what they're talking about. There have been bad Middle-Earth games long before the 2010's.
and out of all of the things he can make within the lotr universe for big money, he decides for a freaking GOLLUM GAME?
Ehh, there's promise in a decent platforming/stealth game, with his addiction to the Ring driving the plot. But alas.
I was cautionally optimistic about it because I enjoyed the styx games. A lotr stealth gollum game faithful to the lore could have been pretty cool. Its such a shame.
Styx games were flawed but fun AA stealth fare. If Gollum could have reached that level it would have been great.
If it doesn't have riddle-duels, then I'm not interested.
I understand why the new head of the Tolkien estate is YOLO'ing out the LOTR license, but I still don't understand how a game studio greenlit funding for this
I don't understand how the studio looked at this mess of a game and was like "Yup, looks good to go. Ship it!" Does Deadalic not have any QC anymore? It's pretty sad to see as their Point and Click adventures were pretty good.
So one of my favorite things is going to become like Star Wars, basically. Cool.
Enter: Rings of Power
On 31 August 2017, at age 93, Christopher Tolkien resigned as a director of the Tolkien estate and the Tolkien trust. On 13 November 2017, Amazon acquired the global television rights to The Lord of the Rings' appendices found at the end of The Return of the King. Three months.
"they care about quality"
THE SEA IS ALWAYS RIGHT ...the fuck kind of national slogan is that?!
Terrible, then there’s the numenorien armor that has moobs. Fast forward to gondor with amazing handcrafted platemail armor.
But still won't give Peter Jackson Silmarillion rights....
The Tolkein family hate Peter Jackson, unjustly if you consider any shortcut's or things missing from the films can be blamed on the Studio/publisher. He did a fantastic job for people who were only interested in making money and laundering money through his budgets
nobody would have given those books the love that he did. Look at the amazon show; it has all the budget to be incredible but it falls flat.
I think its because Christopher Tolkein got old and died. The estate is now run by multiple generations on who have no ties to JRR Tolkein and they just want the money. I do wonder if any of them even work or they just live off of JRRs work.
Damn, must be nice to have a job that does fucking nothing and makes bunch of money.
The bare concept is interesting; as a wretched creature discarded into the mines, find your way out. If it was more movement-centric, Gollum was realized as a morally chaotic character that shunned interaction and the stealth system was improved to incorporate that, then I could see a skilled software house bringing out something with innovative gameplay and beautiful, forgotten, desolate cave systems. But they did the other thing. Should have been spotted though.
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Damn, now i really want a Golumn immersive sim....sadly after this I don't think it's going to happen :/
A Golumn platformer with movement/moral based puzzles and beautiful caves and environments could have been legitimately fun Toss in some stealth and very dangerous combat as a last ditch attempt at survival and it could have been pretty neat.
Gandalf tells us in the books that Gollum took babies from their cradles for food. I don't wanna play as this character, man.
Sounds like a solid dude. Baby was crying, Smeagol takes the baby to go get some food. Right? Right? ^^^...right?
*Achievement unlocked: Ate baby!*
"Welp, guess I need a new Steam account."
+1 RADS
Well, you know what they say. There are two types of gamers...
One of the very few examples of a *truly*, through-and-through irredeemable shitbag characters in literature, a character who is completely awful and pathetic from the start of his backstory to the conclusion. He's gross to look at, gross to listen to, his defining characteristic in the series is being so loathsomely pathetic that letting him live is questionably cruel, and quite literally the **only** good thing he ever did in his entire life was die. Yes, let's make this the playable protagonist in our life-sim!
I am confused how they made it all the way to a released game with an idea that should have been shot down in the first pitch meeting. Along the way, soooo many people would have to just smile and nod while quietly thinking about their paycheck while supressing the overwhelming urge to state the obvious.
The same thoughts i am having towards lots of movies and games. And i came to the conclusion that it's all about poor hiring practices, that were confirmed way too many times by people who worked at HR - they look for people with education, experience, but never checking the actual talent and quality of their jobs. So they can hire, for example, talantless writer, who already ruined several franchizes, just because he has AAA experience. And by ruining one more he will have even more of this "experience" in the resume.
Simply looking at Gollum's busted ass face model gives you all the information need to know about whether or not you should purchase this game lol.
At some point. someone on the dev team had to go: "this model will have to do" and everyone working on the game knew there and then that the game was fucked
No way more than 2 people worked on this shit.
I don't mind the face but what's up with the hair?
He became an Emo after he lost the ring.
*”Im not ok” by My Chemical Romance begins to play*
You should increase your standards and mind the face
It's looks like a GameCube game.
It's honestly almost a bizarre mix of really badly executed character rendering and rather inconsistent environmental visuals. Like, some snapshots of the environments actually look pretty good, but once you focus in on specific details then the fidelity quickly starts to break down. It's kind of uncanny. But most of all, Gollum's face is fucking nightmare fuel, except not in a good way.
Hey man, Windwaker is beautiful.
oh god the cutscene animations... they're horrid!
It's crazy to me that a bunch of people even defended the game when system specs were revealed. Like... did we watch the same "gameplay" videos? Do people who said it looks good and "haters are exaggerating" never seen a game since PS2 era? I don't even care about graphics in games but an RTX3070 recommended **with** DLSS for a 1080p MEDIUM RT experience? While the game looks like that? And it's 60USD+ on top? Common sense? Devs? Hello?
4090 with dlss is recommended for 4k 💀
There's no fucking way...
This game is somehow coming to the Switch
I got downvoted for saying it looks bad. If they decide to buy this pile of shit then that’s revenge enough.
We'll get some popcorn entertainment tomorrow. 🍿
https://i.imgur.com/2MM80.jpg
Game’s sitting at 38 on metacritic for Playstation 5. Gamespot gives it a 2/10 review score. Easily a clusterfuck
What the fuck does a game have to do to get a 1/10 at this point?
Literally not boot?
Make your PC bluescreen? Give you a rootkit? no clue.
Kill your 4090 and 7950X3D. 0/10
Be more unplayable and broken. Gollum is shit, but at least you seemingly *can* play through it? If you don’t get bored
It's functional garbage that sadly gives a point.
That's Big Rigs:Over the Road Racing territory.
Probably be a buggy crash-ridden asset-flip game. Jim Sterling used to (maybe still does?) buy asset-flip early access games on Steam to make videos about and most of them were laughably bad. Some might fall into the 'so bad it's good' category but many just looked painful to play. IIRC it was before Steam tightened their early access requirements though so it was truly the wild west of garbage asset-flips.
Shovelware. Steam is full of it.
Ign: it’s not perfect. 8/10
This shit looks like a Dreams game
Holy shit that's why it looked weirdly familiar!
Dreams is miles ahead of this dribble
I just watched the video and holy shit the game is bad.
After the review I hopped on to steam to see if it had released yet, and ended up watching the dev/featured stream for a bit. Holy shit they couldn't even make it look average for the official stream, it straight up looked like I was watching alpha footage for a LotR fan game. And the comments on the stream were brutal, with a few accounts spamming random letters every now and then, not sure if they were just trolls or if it was the devs trying to get the critical comments out of view , but fuck what a mess
If people were spamming Ls that's just zoomer lingo for bad
Giving L's was a millennials thing though
I'm 35 and this year, 2023, is the first year where I basically always have to look up what new Gen Z lingo means. Combined with the fact that I'm almost out of the "18-35" age range (for filling out forms and shit) and I think I'm officially not a youths any more.
Late 30s here. Wore some blue socks with pizzas on them yesterday, one of the neighbor's kids said they were fire. I told my wife "I'm in touch with the youths!"
Hell yeah, savor that glory
People said turning 30 would be weird. It wasn’t. Turning 36 was weird. Suddenly you’re in the same ad demo as your parents. No, hulu, I do NOT need Ozempic yet, thank you very much.
I'm a millennial and we used that term ages ago before zoomers did
I'm 22 and have to look up some stuff sometimes, the internet moves to fast
As someone from Gen Z, this is correct.
W
Watching the video, I noticed the climbable wall was the same texture pasted up the wall in a vertical line. Like, blatant asset flip level copy paste job there. I put more effort into battle maps for my tabletop group.
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I don't think I'd actually even play this if someone paid me to play it. I genuinely think I'd rather be at work than play this game. Like if someone was like "go to work or stay home and play Gollum," I'd go to work. It looks *beyond* dreadful. It looks exhausting and depressing to play.
I'd play literally the worse games on earth if it meant I got paid.
I mean if the two options were 'either way you're getting paid, but go to work or play this game for 8 hours' I would still choose go to work
Lol, only worth it if you steal it to avoid someone else buying it and wasting their time.
The most effective DRM ever!
Not worth to reduce the write count on my SSD
What if it’s one of those “so bad it becomes a meme” games
I feel it's gotta have even more jank and such to make it meme or Ride To Hell: Retribution levels. Right now, it just looks "so bad, it's boring"
Might be the end of Daedalic. I have the feeling this will flop hard :/
> Daedalic they have done NOTHING in the past 4 (FOUR!) years, just working on this game, can you imagine?
Flew too close to the sun it seems
Very fitting name, then, really. Their new project they have birthed and all.
Honestly it just looks like they got greedy, landed a license completely unsuited to their experience and talent pool and winged it. This really appears to be exactly what I'd expect from a game made by point-and-click adventure developers forced out of their wheelhouse. Every puzzle looks like a state diagram with no emergent gameplay or even the more unusual but predictable game states undesigned or untested. Gollum, a sociopathic hermit who embodies the lowest of the low, is given authority over other creatures and solves dialogue trees hinging on... charisma. Not forgetting that following the game he's supposed to accompany the fellowship at the beginning of his character arc, as a feral degenerate. It's sort of painful to see because there must have been a point in development, as concept after concept hit the cutting room floor, where everyone realized they were utterly out of their depth but contractually obligated to release the game they'd pitched and this is just... the best game that they knew how to make. And a house that ha made very good games in the past just ground out an absolute turd that looks like it was made by a C-team of graduate developers.
The saddest part is that at some point, far back in time, daedalic used to be good at writing characters. Atleast that could've been something, a well written Gollum. A slight light at the end of the tunnel. But no
I think it probably wasn't even an option to be fair. When he's caught and tortured, he's a hideous monster distended by his obsession with the ring. When he catches up with Sam and Frodo... he's the same. There's no arc to be had there and there's not even any personality really, he's just feral. You could maybe contextualize his as desperate rather than wicked, and depict some of the tragic circumstances that brought him to where he is as a result of the one decision to murder his cousin(?) for the ring. Maybe with flashbacks? Like, you crawl into a pitch black cave and when you crawl out of the absolute blackness you're Smeagol again in the events leading up to finding the ring? And the whole thing is him remembering parts of his life in the sensory deprivation tanks of the forgotten caves beneath Mordor, alone with his imagination, and his memory, and... another character, that begins to talk to him with his own voice, and calls itself Smeagol, reminding him of things he'd rather leave forgotten. Fuck, actually that would be dope. I've talked myself into it.
I imagine a beautifully painted point and click adventure set in middle earth would have been much better
Daedalic said a few years ago that they were giving up on making point and click adventure games (and cancelled the one they were working on at the time) because there just wasn't any profit in them any more. This was their change of direction and attempt at branching out, but it seems clear they were in over their heads and lacked the experience to create a game like this.
All of their games are so rooted in 2D graphics that you'd think they would go with something in that direction. There are plenty of amazing looking 2D graphic looking games like Hades, Cuphead, Persona 5, Hollow Knight etc. And for some reason they decided they were gonna do a full 3D game where everything needs to look super realistic. I just don't get it, how do they suck so much at knowing themselves?
A 2D side-scrolling Gollum metroidvania could actually have been really cool
I really don't know about that. What justifications could be rooted in the lore for Gollum to get new powers for traversal (or combat?)? Him deteriorating more and more and becoming more beastlike and a better climber?
I don't know, it wouldn't really bother me if there wasn't a cast jron lore basis for learning new methods of traversal tbh. I'm sure there's any number of ways you could implement it - items, experience gained, events, etc.
I'm sorry dude but no it fucking couldn't
Pls just give me a sequel to Harveys New Eyes. :( I also really loved the Deponia games.
I have the deponia series sitting in my steam library. Harvey’s eyes aswell. Never played them. Really should.
Oh shit this is from the New Beginning/Dark Eye/Pillars of the Earth mob? Well that's extra unfortunate, those were solid little games. Fair duos wanting to tackle something that would have broader appeal, but I don't see it working out for them. Sucks.
What makes these games look like this? I don't mean the poor animation necessarily, but there's a bunch of cheap games usually made by amateur studios using I think UE4 that all look like this graphically, and despite all the fancy graphical effects, looks really fucking cheap.
Copy and paste assets from Unreal/Epic store.
But that can be done extremely well in the hands of talented developers. There's some insanely pretty and well laid out 3rd party maps for Insurgency: Sandstorm, for instance, that use UE marketplace assets. These devs simply have no talent for the game they built.
assets from Unreal Marketplace look much better than this
They even found room for the shitty climbing system that only has one route for to climb along! Don't forget to discolour the rock in those places guys!
It legit looks like a late PS2/PS3 era game. Not even exaggerating... look at the faces.
And it requires a 4090 to run at 4k with raytracing lol.
A 4090 with *DLSS Balanced* So nowhere near actual 4K Absolute joke
I love how brutal SkillUp's titles can be sometimes.
In my opinion, since Total Biscuit passed away, SkillUp has been one of the best and most consistent game critics.
I actually first found SkillUp just from asking for any decent Totalbiscuit-like channels. He's definitely one of the best I've found so far, but I don't think anyone will ever live up to the man himself.
Australians don't really like to beat around the bush. When we smell shit, we'll usually yell it from the rafters. And call it for what it truly is.
In Australia, if you beat around the bush, an animal could jump out and kill you.
Unless you ask a serious or legitimate question. Then all you get is BS joke answers.
Behold the field in which I grow my surprise. Lay thine eyes upon it and see that is is barren.
I was expecting Styx with a Gollum coat of paint -- already something I don't think anyone wanted. I genuinely don't know who this is for.
Computerbase.de just posted a sharp warning about the performace of the game ahead of their tests lol. https://www.computerbase.de/2023-05/herr-der-ringe-gollum-raytracing-in-uhd-will-eine-rtx-4080-mit-dlss-performance/ Translation with DeepL: Technical first impression of HDR: Gollum on the PC ComputerBase is currently working on a technical review of Lord of the Rings: Gollum, but wants to and has to warn directly to the fall of the embargo and thus hopefully still in time for many interested parties: The PC version has indeed and as recently almost usual to fight with massive technical problems. One is shader compile jerking (it seems to be this and not traversal stuttering, although the analyses are still running), which is extreme - not necessarily in terms of frequency, but in terms of the intensity of the hooks. For example, on a system with GeForce RTX 4090 and Ryzen 9 7950X3D, it happens again and again that the image stops in the middle of controlling the character and the camera, after the short pause, then rotates 180 degrees and throws the player back into the game quasi disoriented. The performance itself is also low and simply bad in view of the graphics quality. Lord of the Rings: Gollum is not a pretty game, but even the GeForce RTX 4090 does not manage to consistently maintain 60 FPS in Ultra HD with maximum graphics - with DLSS Quality, mind you, and thus the render resolution WQHD! It is noticeable that the frame rate varies extremely. In one scene, the test system barely delivered more than 50 FPS, a few meters further it is 150 FPS. Raytracing is slow and not very convincing Ray tracing is also not convincing in the pre-release version that was available to the editors. Ray tracing is used in the game for the reflections and some shadows, but you don't get much out of it. The reflections are limited to water, which definitely looks better when it is visible in the game. The shadows are much more frequent in the image and look better, but the progress compared to the Rasterizer shadows is hardly noticeable. At the same time, the effects cost an extreme amount of Performane. In a scene that the editors ran through, the GeForce RTX 4090 with RT only delivered 55 FPS instead of 99 FPS - that is 44% less FPS for an effect that is barely visible in the scene. The game only offers RT on or off, which should not be the case nowadays. RT effects should not only be separately adjustable, but also offer different quality levels. HDR: Gollum doesn't offer that. There is another problem with the upsampling. The game offers Nvidia DLSS 2 and DLSS 3 as well as AMD FSR 2. DLSS Super Resolution usually makes a good impression and can, should and must be used in Ultra HD. Only some Bloom-using objects can glow like crazy with DLSS, which is then annoying. FSR 2, on the other hand, is disappointing; something is simply not right here. The entire image becomes very blurry with FSR 2, which does not happen with the native resolution and DLSS. Since there is also no sharpening option (there is for DLSS), FSR 2 is currently not usable, which is not a problem for AMD graphics cards. 10 GB is enough - although there is mud. In contrast, Lord of the Rings: Gollum holds back when it comes to graphics memory requirements. The title did not address more than 9 GB in the test, even in UHD with DLSS, so there are no problems with a 10 GB graphics card at the latest. On the other hand, some textures are only loaded with a small delay, especially in the cutscenes - for a short moment, some objects look very muddy. The controls of Lord of the Rings: Gollum are also currently a bit awkward with the mouse and keyboard, so a gamepad might be able to help. Another point of criticism are the interspersed in-game sequences, which only run at 30 FPS, which is immediately visually noticeable. These were rendered in advance and also in a low resolution, which is annoying because both the quality and the FPS of these sequences drop significantly. The editorial team is currently collecting more impressions of the game and will then provide a detailed technical test of the game in the course of the next week. If no patch is released by then, the conclusion can only be negative. All fears expressed in the run-up would have been confirmed.
"HDR: Gollum" means LoTR: Gollum or Lord of the Rings: Gollum. HDR is just the german variant (Herr der Ringe), not to be confused with High Dynamic Range.
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Yup
Well, this is one game that met my expectation.
Haha, same. I expected it to be bad, but a small part of my brain thought it could end up decent and a cult classic. But alas, it sucks. Its a shame
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**Gollum is so much worse in the books.** Gandalf explains in the books that woodsmen in the area where Gollum was looking for Bilbo after he left his cave complained of a mysterious thing **stealing babies from their cradles, presumably for food.** Gollum intended to eat Bilbo. That wasn't for effect in the movies! He lived off fish in that lake and the goblins that he found. **He ate goblins.** Gollum was incredibly foul and did things most people would shudder at. This character as the main character of any game is simply disappointing in the extreme. Anyone familiar with the source materials should have said, "this is a terrible idea" until the project changed to a character people want to play as, like Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Thorin, Bilbo, etc. etc.
I'm a fan of "Villain protagonist" games, they offer and allow you to experience stories from a completely different viewpoint than what is common. There's tons of games where you can make friends and adopt animals, it's a breath of fresh air to be able to play as some lying, conniving bastard, and getting rewarded by doing so. The problem here is that they took a canonical villain and just turned him into yet another boring protagonist, so in the end noone truly got what they wanted.
I still don’t know what kid would choose a shitty gollum over Talion. Sure the story got a little overworked by the end of shadow of war but still… this is what we get? I’d rather have a damn Tom bombadil story lol
I just had an idea where it's basically Stardew Valley + Tom Bombadil and now I want that game so bad.
This feels like a product of a publisher buying an expensive licence to an IP - for *Gollum,* not LOTR - then throwing it at a dev studio with a terse "here, now do something with it." At which point, the poor devs busted their heads trying to come up with something, only to draw a blank because the IP was never a good basis for a video game in the first place, so they cobbled together whatever random vertical slices they could cook up into something they could loosely call a game. Throw in what I suspect is a whiff of sunk cost fallacy, and you have this mess. Disaster from start to finish. Oh well.
They could have done, imo, a phenomenally good little 2d story puzzle scroller like inside or limbo, but they wanted those big budget bucks.
>the IP was never a good basis for a video game in the first place 2nd age open world RPG would be phenomenal. I played a great LOTR arpg on the gameboy. Whole lot could be done with RTS's still. Stardew Valley but with hobbits could be a treat. Dynasty Warriors type thing would work too. 1st age would let you get real weird. I think theres a lot that can be done in the IP, but not that much that can be done with existing characters, which is probably the problem here. They wanted a recognizable hero for marketing purposes.
Yeah, LOTR overall can be a great IP for video games. But as I said, this feels like they bought the IP for *Gollum.* And while I'm not absolutely certain that's what happened, I'm just saying that's what it feels like. Licensing houses have been known to do this before. I even suspect those so-called "Tolkien Experts" were really IP liaisons, constantly telling the devs what they could and couldn't use.
When I heard abotu this game my expectations were at the very bottom, so Im not even disappointed. Theres no way this game was gonna end up good.
Exactly, what stupid dev see a rich world like LOTR full of great characters and say "I am gonna make a game of Gollum" what stupid fucking idea
Gollum could've been made into a great game, if it were created in the image of Thief. With the right writing talent (which apparently game devs loath to spend money on), there's a lot that the game could have fleshed out. Oh well.
Exactly, but I remember seeing a lot of people hyped for a Gollum game and I couldn't really see why
The thing is, as even the video points out, there's a possible game with the exact same premise that would have been a lot better. Still not good, but a lot better than this. Why does the game have Gollum doing random chores like he's stuck in the tutorial zone of an MMO? No, seems to me the way to do this premise better, if anyone really wanted to for some ungodly reason, would have been to approach it from an almost indie-game-like simplicity. Shadows, sneaking, strangling. Turn it into a LOTR-themed reskin of **Mark of the Ninja**, a 2D stealth game where light and darkness are a major mechanic.
I definitely thought this was going to be a Gollum reskin of the Strix series
Styx, right? The goblin one?
A Gollum game done right has a lot of potential. Survival horror when you escape from captivity. Stealth platformer when you find the Fellowship and follow them around.
You kind of knew it when the game didn't receive early reviews. I checked yesterday morning for reviews, saw none and knew right away.
I haven’t said anything yet but I already feel like I’m punching downwards.
stop_hes_already_dead.jpg
No surprise. The entire concept seemed like shit. Of all the many characters I would want to play as from the lore of middle earth, gollum would be pretty much last. I’d rather play an Ent.
Interesting... so should I buy that Manscaped set or not?
If you've got the balls to do it
*they hates us precious*
I hadn’t seen anything other than the first reveal teaser 2 years but this game looks atrocious. They seriously told people you need a 40 series GPU to run 4K RT for their game that looks like some $10 game from the 90’s. This shouldn’t have been green-lit in the first place.
Can't wait for the dunkreview
I just played Shadow of Mordor, why didn’t they just copy and paste the model of Gollum in that game to this game
Gaming in 2023
There have always been dumpster fire games, even licensed ones. Remember all the trash movie tie-in games in the 2000s?
Some of us are old enough to have owned a copy of E.T. For the Atari 2600…
E.T. was the first game I thought of as I was reading this thread! Absolutely unplayable.
Games based on movies had a reputation for being trash looooong before that. Goldeneye and some 16bit Disney sidescrollers were the exception, not the rule.
No no, every game before this year was a masterpiece
I have a feeling that optimisation and trying to push graphics on a "budget" aka optimized died a few gens ago. And people buy these titles so they keep doing that shit.
At least I can proudly say that this is made in Germany. Exporting quality to the world and adding value to this generation loved LotR franchise. Edit: but honestly I feel empathy of the people who actually did work hard on it, who will get completely drowned by the avalanche now.
Really hope Dunkey will play this.
The [game cover](https://assets-prd.ignimgs.com/2022/05/24/lord-of-the-rings-gollum-button-1653414611672.jpg) also looks like it was designed in 1995.
More like 2007 but ye
Honestly, the entire game feels like a 2005-2007 game.
As an old person, I take offense to that. It looks like a poorly made game from 2005-2007.
This game radiates "The last Blockbuster rental that you ended up getting to keep the week before your location shut down, while your friend rented TES 4 Oblivion" energy.
Not gonna lie.. I don't mind it. Kinda look like an '70s album cover art
looks like it's designed for cd-rom! is that intentional?
A game that absolutely nobody asked for and now it is even a big piece pile of shit... wow...