Daedalic has apologized via twitter yesterday, basically saying they'll fix the bugs. Which is definitely one thing that ails this game, but not the only thing. Besides, they knew the state the game was in before releasing it. The apology is difficult to accept.

As of right now, LotR: Gollum is clobbered senseless by reviews internationally, painfully reminding us of Germany's recent ESC intermezzi. For Daedalic, that was likely indeed the final nail in the coffin. They should have told Bastei Lübbe to fuck off and finished The Devil's Men, thus building a legacy for story oriented games instead of ruining it by trying to imitate 'new' Telltale.

A party based LotR RPG would have been incredible. A "Hobbit" themed point and click game would have been great. Both would have had to avoid the Gollum pitfalls though. And I don't know if Daedalic could have ever delivered a "AAA" game experience at this point. Of course, they could have avoided setting most of the game underground, darkness and firelight. Nothing evokes the wonderful landscapes of Middle Earth as not seeing any of them.

Daedalic has always supported GOG of course, so it's extra painful to see them crash their ship so horribly.

There is actually an official CRPG top-down game in that vein, that also had point and click mechanics. While the SNES iteration of the thing was Gollum levels of wretched, the PC edition was apparently quite a bit better. But like many PC games of the time, it wasn't suited to be a mass-market item. Apparently the first two books in the trilogy had a PC interpretation from this series, but the third doesn't seem to have been created.

Basically, they are a forgotten version of Ultima VII.

JRR Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, vol.1 - MOBYGAMES


James talks bout JRR Tolkein's Lord of the Rings for PC

Yes... that's what hurts. Not many developers / Publishers consistently release here day one.

(I still think their Blackguards series was GREAT... and severely underrated.)

Nacon seems to the kiss of death.

That makes it far worse. This project should have been canceled or shelved, or put back in another 2 years. The only reason not to is contractual obligations, but at which point it shouldn't even be on sale with how it looks.

It needs to do a full refund to everyone and take off sale. There's no way they didn't know this wasn't ready to go out.


There's smaller studios that did far harder projects in far more constraining system requirements. Makes me wonder if they burned out all the good programmers with crunch and you don't have problem solvers anymore, just the leftover chaff...

No. Just no. If we could dispense with your conspiracy theories for once, that would be great.

What with us being the 'socialist' country that we are apparently, the employer's opportunity for crunch is rather limited. But if you look at the rolling credits of the game, what you will see is a lot of concept art, plus most importantly: the same people in different roles, and an absurd amount of black space to make the credits just about long enough for the outro music theme.

They tried to do AAA on a shoestring budget and were then forced to push the game out way too early when Nacon terminated the development cycle. I applaud the people involved for even trying.

Daedalic is desperately trying to play in the big leagues now, but they don't get the big league budgets. And never will.

Never say "never". :) Who knows, maybe in the future they will grow and create something really worthy.

I'd really really love to believe that.

They definitely had their chance, but sadly, they never finished The Devil's Men.

Ever since Pillars of the Earth they've tried to jump on the back of another great license, Telltale style. They can not do those licenses justice, particularly not with a Telltale approach.

But now they have to justify a 53 million investment by their new overlords! And that will force ever more desperate moves by Daedalic. New licenses that they can't do justice. More early releases.

I kind of dread their next announcement(s).

Guess, i will go for a refund. At first I thought, lets .... but after giving it some thought... It does seem to be a wiser choice. I mean, I only bought cyberpunk 2077 to have the world's most expensive game in the pocket... Never would I dream that it would turn out like the way it did.
Forspoken I decided on picking up after they released their first major patch and DLC. I've been playing the game for a couple of hours now, and i can only conclude that what lies on the table is good enough to justify the (discounted) price I paid. (especially with the eye candy/and don't laugh the amount of work spend to make some scenes emotionally believable)

Maybe if the price hits a tenner.... I can continue this middle earth journey

Not sure about this one guys.

to be correct, that would be Star Citizen (currently at $501M), Cyberpunk 2077 is the second most expensive game (at $331M).

of course i went surfing :-p

i've seen numbers detailing red death redemption zwei went over the 500M too

and what about this article .. unnamed publisher went over 1B with taking advertising into account

https://www.gamesradar.com/the-total-cost-of-the-biggest-games-now-reportedly-tops-dollar1-billion/

Just play Styx instead.

It's a damn shame. I really hoped this would be good. I am not a hardcore LOTR fan, but I enjoyed LOTRO and hoped for a game without too much action that fits into the universe. I even considered preordering for some stupid emotes.

Haven't really read all the comments, but what are the main issues? I do like LoTR so I was looking forward to buying this.

This game crashes more frequently than a fleet of Titanics in an arctic naval battle, anything short of perfect specs will compel all hair to flicker and flip like an Olympian wearing strobe lights, platforming controls are finnicky and nightmarishly unreliable, and the story is a prison-break where the title character is wildly out-of-character.

Gollum is tasked with "breeding" a bird, which means performing a few menial tasks exactly right so that the egg doesn't vanish and you start over. When the bird hatches, it becomes a loyal pet to Gollum who normally wouldn't think twice as he stuffs a live hatchling down his gullet. The mechanics to command the bird are then re-purposed with a human, even though there's not a single tall humanoid in all of Middle Earth that would let Gollum tell them what to do.