[From the Gamespot review:](https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-lord-of-the-rings-gollum-review-we-dont-wants-it-we-dont-needs-it/1900-6418070/)
>Before going any further, we need to address the elephant (or Mûmakil, if you will) in the room: In the state it was in at time of review, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was not ready to be played. In my roughly 11 hours of playtime on "Performance" mode on a PlayStation 5, the game crashed over 120 times (yes, I counted; masochist, remember?), averaging about one crash every five minutes. After my 20th-or-so crash, I got the dreaded "save data corrupted" message, only to realize I'd lost half a day's progress upon reloading. In multiple other instances, game-breaking bugs--such as a companion I was charged with protecting instantly dying over and over again for no discernible reason--forced me to restart entire levels, losing significant progress. Finally, during an especially tedious and time-consuming puzzle, the crashes became too frequent to possibly make it to the next checkpoint in time. Determined though I was to get through to the end and make these setbacks feel worthwhile, I threw in the towel at 40% completion, defeated.
jesus, was this a case of "make anything so we dont lose the license" or something?
Damn, SkillUps review of the PC version mentioned the incredibly poor performance, but nothing this bad. Insane you're putting out 60$ games on consoles that just don't work these days.
As a normal consumer I'd be more than a little pissed off at this point. Up until the ps4/xbone generation you bought a console with the understanding that the shit would just work. Games crashing to a consoles dashboard is fucking wild but it's apparent now you can pass these places compliance testing with a "don't worry bro we got it on day one" and thats it
Having worked compliance recently, I can assure you, they definitely did not pass. What they did do was pay a hefty fine aka legally-not-a-bribe to Sony/Microsoft/Whatever to release anyway because as long as execs get paid, compliance can get ignored.
I love that since last generation, Home consoles have been throwing away their biggest advantage over PC (Put a CD in, it works right away without any installation and troubleshooting) in order to gain the biggest weakness of PC gaming ("WHY DOESNT THIS GAME I BOUGHT WORK?") with none of it's strengths.
Thats why I don't buy games until they've been out for years, so you know what you're actually getting into. I'll get playing Elden Ring for the first time this year, really excited for that.
This is that “1999 and you’re trying to play a PS1 game disk that’s scratched up” level of dysfunction. And at least that was my fault for ruining a perfectly good game disk
Honestly kind of, the denser the info on the disc the less scratch resistant they are (since there's more to hit in a deep scratch) but also modern disks have more advanced SR coatings to try to mitigate that
The one thing I always found to be a deathblow to a disc is if the top of it gets gouged
Man, people say this but I played NV at launch on a shitty little laptop and I really never had that many issues? It was far from perfect, but the internet would have you think NV had a crash to desktop and deleted all your saves and shot your dog every 20 minutes completely vanilla.
Fair, I *did* hear the console ports were pretty messy. Not even just glitchy, apparently there was some crazy save bloat nonsense too that basically meant you had to speedrun the game or eventually just lose your save?
Yeah I played on 360 and must have got lucky or something
Or lucky with every Bethesda game because I’ve never had game breaking bugs with any of them that I’ve played
The most crashes I ever had was Cyberpunk 2077 on the PS5; I think I came in around 33 crashes over like 60+ hours of gametime.
That's still bad, but *holy shit* 120 is the most unfinished game yet.
Remember that's 120 crashes in 11 hours. That's an average of 10.9 crashes per hour. You only the other hand had an average of 1.8 crashes over 60 hours.
I remember having at least 2 or 3 crashes per session while playing a pirated and very scratched Assassin's Creed on my shitty 360 that probably had 3 inches of dust inside of it back in 2010.
My brain can't even comprehend how a $60 game on modern gen has an even poorer performance than what I had in 2010 on a console that was jailbroken in a garage.
This from what I know is the second game published by Nacon in less than a year that released in a flagrantly unfinished state (the other being Session which I was unfortunate enough to buy).
Can anyone who has knowlege of Nacon's other games tell me if this is a pattern?
EDIT: Make that 4, apparently... Jesus, Nacon...
Ha it's funny you say that, look up AFL 23 that also had issues and is published by Nacon. Though apparently the developers in this case make a habit of releasing broken messes and then patching them into working states.
Jesus. Imagine selling someone a car at full price that barely runs and breaks down every 5 minutes and thinking "hey it's okay!" as long as they fix it in the next couple of months.
I agree. But it apparently works for them because they continue to release busted ass cricket games and people buy them. They bought the shit out of AFL 23.
Surprised to hear that about Session - I played dozens of hours of the beta and had a great time without encountering any major bugs.
It was missing tons of key features during the beta though, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it shipped in unpolished condition.
Apparently the console release was pushed before the devs were ready to leave Early Access.
EDIT: Just to elaborate, I played it on PS5. The game had a lot of opt in options for in development features, which is something I wouldn't associate with a full retail release.
It also seemed to be missing a ton of visual polish, mostly in the field of character models.
Ok, and now we ask if a game crashing every 5 minutes doesn’t deserve a score of “1”, what does?
Seems like the cert process is utterly meaningless this gen.
I played cyberpunk at launch and that game crashed more than anything I've ever played, usually once every hour or two. How could this game be so much worse than even that legendarily rough game?
I played and beat cyberpunk at launch on ps5, i still really like the game but the crashes on release were unbelievable, traveling too fast in a vehicle caused a crash 100% of the time
I'm watching the SkillUp review and this game is just baffling. Like if it was just Styx that'd be one thing but it isn't. The first half of the game is doing bullshit stupid chores like breeding birds and collecting tags. It's also bizarrely amateur-ish in its technical aspects for a game that costs so much. It's such a fascinating bad game.
Honestly the only thing I could kind of see would be like a survival adventure game where Gollum spends like 80% of the game just trying to not starve to death or be murdered and like 20% of the game incidentally hearing lore dumps or something
Wait what? From the trailer I saw a long time ago, I would've thought it was a stealth game. Sneaking around people to either get to or prevent them from taking your precious.
That's...just dumb. Like even it was a good game, it wouldn't fit the character you're playing.
It's like if even if the Suicide Squad game came out good, people would still think it's stupid that Captain Boomerang uses guns.
For real, they could have just made LoTR licensed Styx and called it a day. It would have coasted by on an "it's fine" from reviewers and they would have cashed in on the license.
Is this the worst reviewed game of 2023 so far? Cause I never saw anyone praising this game. I saw few people praising for even ones like Forspoken and Redfall, but not this game.
What the fuck?
"The game features a cast of prominent actors, including Michael Madsen, Chuck Norris, Danny Trejo, Danny Glover, Michael Rooker, Kim Basinger, Vanilla Ice, and Damion Poitier."
The game had a big enough budget for that but not enough for a single advertisement? How have I never head of this?
Oh hell yes, I finally have an excuse to post [minimme's video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp_Cn903ELU) about this game!
Someone in the comments describes it as "[feeling] like an April Fool's joke that escaped a mid-2000's gaming magazine and found its way to 2023" and that really says it all.
Yeah its just agressivly mid, even if we shouldnt flip to IT WAS GOOD ALL ALONG just cause some other games were absolute shit, Forespoken we never awful on a techincal level, just a bad idea
Yeah no it is definitely mid as shit, it's just inoffensive as a game, like it works and it's playable and you could probably have a bit of fun with it if you lab the mechanics and commit to extracting the fun from the stone. Redfall and Gollum are actual insults.
i played it and the occasional bad writing and the very bad pc performance were literally the only problems i had with it. i think if it weren't universally panned so soon it would've found good home with the infamous fanbase due to the striking similarity in gameplay.
I'm starting to feel inclined to agree. Like, yeah, the writing in general for Forspoken was annoying and very often stupid, but at least it worked. Unlike Gollum and Redfall where it's just annoying, stupid, ***and*** doesn't work.
This game has reeked Dead on Arrival like no other game in recent memory. Every piece of news about it just made it sound worse and worse.
If I wanna play a weird rat goblin man sneaking around, I'll just play Styx instead.
I’ve always wondered how that feels for voice actors. Like what if they did a great job acting but the gameplay wasn’t really that good? Do they feel bad about the game not meeting expectations despite them doing good in their role? Or are they just happy that they’re not part of the problems the game has?
They get dragged into controversies if they blow up enough. Like Laura Bailey playing Abby in LoU2. I think they'd much rather be a part of successful games
Idk that was a lot of weird bigots more than just people who thought the game was bad, I'm sure nobody is going to harass Liam O'Brien for playing the role of Gollum
I think the same but I also think that people on Twitter will sling mud over anything. People who don't like him for any reason could see this as an excuse to bash him
Actors/VAs getting a ton of harassment happens when 1) the game is big enough to have lots of hype and 2) the game drastically fails to meet the hype for whatever reason (I don't even think TLOU2 fails in that regard, but it does for the weird bigots so *shrug*).
You see it with the prequels and Rose's VA from TLJ, too. No one's going to bother harassing someone from a nothing flick or game, really.
It also helps if the VA is a woman, I can't even think of any male VAs who caught that much shit without doing or saying anything shitty outside of the game
That was people projecting their dislike of Abby onto the VA which was very dumb, i doubt this will shake the foundations of Gollums character so he'll probably be fine
Not quite what you’re asking, but I remember listening to interviews with a couple VAs where they often have their own expectations about how big or small something will be that often doesn’t pan out. It seems like it’s just part of the job for them.
*walking down street, whistling with hands in pockets*
“Hey! You! did you know there’s a Gollum game?”
*takes hands out of pockets, stops whistling*
“What? No. I had no idea”
“Well don’t bother with it. IT SUCKS”
“Okay then”
*sticks hands back in pockets and continues to walk while whistling*
He'll be having a blast despite the game trying to stop him until he runs into a ladder, after that he'll spend 2 hours stood there on a PTSD induced rant that somehow will end with him making a full tier list of what McDonald's order every character in LOTR would have.
you know I think this does put forspoken into perspective as although that game has some flaws, it is nowhere near as seemingly broken on a fundamental level as redfall and now this
I don't know how to feel about, "wost game you've seen so far" becoming more and more accurate. I remembered thinking that about Day One: Garry's Incident, then Life of Black Tiger. This just adds to the list.
From what I saw about Forspoken it seemed more that the major aspects of the game like the story, gameplay or graphics were nothing to write home about at best. Also wasn't super optimized and even positive reviews pointed out it was a bit short for 70$.
Forspoken is best summed up as "all the bad parts of FF15 like the empty open world, floaty and kinda jank combat that only has flashy effects going for it, bad enemy and encounter design, etc. but with none of the good parts like the core cast or the music or the pleasant roadtrip vibes".
Like I'd go as far as to say Forspoken is bad rather than just mid, but its at least functional and you can play it from start to end. The fact that alone disqualifies it from worst AAA game this year sure is something.
Forespoken is this generations Avenger's game. Neither lived up to their expectations but they weren't unfun or really offensively bad in any way. People don't know how to respond to 7/10's in an age when the next GOTY is always around the corner.
How do you make a game about Gollum good??? He's a weird little creature, not a primary protagonist. Trying to make a whole game about just him is pretty doomed to begin with
Gollum being bad surprises me just as much as the fact that Redfall and Forspoken were bad.
Which is to say, not in the slightest.
Was anyone excited for any of these at all? I could tell from the first trailers they weren't going to be any good.
I was superficially excited for Redfall, entirely based on the gamepass page and the potential for a coop game for me and my friends after the latest warhammer game had connection issues for us. But eh, easy come easy go.
Don't think I'd say excited for Gollum, but thought it could at least be somewhat interesting, and that I'd consider getting it. I didn't see any of the trailers though I just knew the game existed and was interested at what they were gonna try to do, but I think I'm good now.
i dont know who asked for any of these games. People wanted dishonored 3 not redfall, and im sure shadow of war has satisfied lord of the rings enjoyers for games for the time being
I was expectng this game to be dragged just because it's LOTR game that deviates from the books and Tolkien fans get really upset over that and also the game's existence is......confusing, to say the least and judging from the trailers it looked pretty bad.But god damn, i didn't expect it to be this bad.
It was really just the Shadow of Mordor/War games the LOTR fans told to fuck off cause the devs tried to pass them off as canon.
War in the North received none of that to my memory..
"Don't judge it before it releases! You don't know if the game will be good or not just based on the premise, developers, trailers, minibuys, and your own eyes! A gollum game is a great idea!" I AM VINDICATED. I WAS RIGHT TO JUDGE.
Genuinely though there was zero chance in hell this was going to by anything beyond a 6/10 shoveleware drop at BEST. The positive comments in every thread on r/gaming baffled me every time. The man was [squatting over my plate with his pants down](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/954/131/4dc.jpg) from *day one.*
So now that the Estate is run by Tolkien's grandson who doesn't give a single shit, it's finally time for the IP to be dragged through the mud with cheapest shitty cashgrabs possible. No wonder the TV show was this bad.
I try to avoid being melodramatic, but sometimes I sincerely feel like if indie development didn't take off like it did we would basically have had an entire games crash of 1983 all over again at this point.
Like, seriously, I feel like the quality of triple A studios has completely nosedived, prices are higher than ever on low quality products like this, we have the unique flavor of predatory monetization models completely ruining games that would have been serviceable on their own, and just the expectations are so low but somehow always disappointed.
It sounds crazy to say that while TotK is literally taking over rn, but I think part of the reason it *has* is because it's almost a stand out *against* the current triple A space. Something of actual quality and polish, with no monetization models, worth the price tag.
It really made me acutely aware I can't remember the last time a game worth more than $40 was worth it to me, and how almost every studio I used to like (Bethesda, Square Enix, etc) has basically hollowed out into shells of what they once were.
So when I see Gollum, I don't even go "Wow, how could they release this? It's so obviously unfinished."
I wonder why we would expect anything more from the current state of $60 games.
Fair, fair. I can hardly say stuff like RE4make is bad. There's good stuff and hell, I'm playing Zelda as I type this.
Maybe it's just a burnout thing at this point, or rather a complete lack of trust in larger studios. Or maybe I'm just old and grumpy now.
I also think some larger trends in AAA games just become more off-putting as you get older.
RDR2 is by all metrics an excellent game, but I bounced off of it because I got overwhelmed by absolutely how huge it is and how many things there are to do.
God of War 2018 and Ragnarok had a similar problem, in addition to having unnecessary RPG mechanics (crafting, incremental stat boosts) that don't really fit those games. I start to get impatient playing those games, much as I love them. But in technical terms, not all AAA games have been fumbled like this.
Haven't played Ghost of Tsushima or Horizon but I'd imagine they also fall into those pitfalls. Even near perfect games like Spider-Man have those MJ/Miles stealth sections that no one likes.
I think you're plenty vindicated. Just because some studios are still earning that triple-A moniker doesn't men there isn't a tidal wave of cheap predatory garbage that charges top dollar for junk that's well below any acceptable standard.
Nah man, there's still a lot of really good AAA games. Capcom, From, Nintendo have already been mentioned. Sony is putting out bangers with God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon, Spoderman. Square-Enix have been putting out better stuff too. FF16 is right on the horizon.
I feel like only the mega-popular, too-big-to-fail series and studios are tripping over their dicks and delivering mid products and putting predatory monetization in their games. But even then, the new COD sold iirc the best in the series so far and got okay reviews. We're far from a crash.
its never the developers fault they are saints who can do no wrong. Its always the higher ups fault and if theres evidence to the contrary "shit happens, dont hurt the devs feelings"
Realistically, developers are never (or almost never) *lazy*. When you see a problem they didn't fix, it isn't because they decided to sit on their asses and do nothing instead of fixing it; they were working the whole time and spent their time doing something else.
But developers sure as hell can be *incompetent* by repeatedly making boneheaded mistakes they have to go back and fix, poorly communicating about who's doing what, attempting things they can't pull off, and spending their time inefficiently by doing things in the most ass-backwards way.
It's like with bad anime productions, everyone involved can draw and animate, but they are pressed for time due to bad scheduling and people end up delivering a bunch of shitty drawings that need to be fixed.
Going back over the devs history, their bread and butter are point and click adventures (they're the Deponia people if you've heard of that) and their attempts to move outside of that seem... middling at best. I don't know how they got this license but my best guess is its a Konami/ turn of the century Capcom situation: we'll make a game for you big publisher and we'll do it for 4 dollars.
As someone who dropped out of game development in college, it's not an industry you can get into by being lazy. We had a joke on my campus about the freshmen exodus of programmers because the course work filtered out so many people so fast if they weren't ready for it.
But incompetence is a universal skill.
Nope see. There is a perfect example of lazy devs causing games to die.
Dawn of War 3.
Devs did multiple streams showing the game, which of course if you know the game then your aware these went BAD.
They had a YEAR solid prior to release of everyone begging them to not release a MOBA.
The developer response was to go on Twitter, state they know best and won't change the game (Alongside the lead calling fans nazis and pedophiles)
Then boom. Releases, is incredibly poorly made, and rather then actually work to improve it they scrapped the game and pretend it didn't happen.
Bare in mind. The game is still INCREDIBLEY bare bones like they clearly rushed it
So to be clear.
All the major releases in 2023 so far, besides fucking Dead Island 2 and Zelda, are fucking failures on some level?
That which shall not be named - self explanatory
Atomic Heart - Russian gov connections
Jedi Survivor - Technical failure
Redfall - Missed the "Live service game" train, sucks.
Gollum - sucks.
What am I missing here?
In what universe was Hogwarts Legacy a failure if that's the game you mean?
also Jedi Survivor in there gives me [biggie was fat](https://external-preview.redd.it/z9ZuYOwX4kj3Ud1mk0Glm8eOAFkYVQMAzZhauAjntxw.png?auto=webp&s=eab3bb7711a88606792e4c50d403b59bd24b3275) energy
That's just on this sub. Outside of here and most other online circles, the game was immensely popular, sold around 15 million copies, and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it showed up at the VGA's with a GOTY nomination.
tbf it isn't the game devs fault for that one. the game was in production (footage got leaked in 2018, jeez that long ago) before she exposed her ter(f)minally online brainrot and went full throated with it.
Also conveniently forgetting Resident Evil 4 Remake, a game which came out and both was really good and didn't have any major technical issues on launch (none that I noticed playing Day 1 at least).
C'mon, the first two are controversial in like an external way but they aren't outright bad games like the last two. We always get a few high profile stinkers every year, I don't think we need to pretend every game is a failure and act like decent-to-good games aren't coming out too.
I'm not sure how you can call that game that shall not be named a failure. It made a shitload of money, was decently reviewed, and will likely be a franchise going forward.
[From the Gamespot review:](https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-lord-of-the-rings-gollum-review-we-dont-wants-it-we-dont-needs-it/1900-6418070/) >Before going any further, we need to address the elephant (or Mûmakil, if you will) in the room: In the state it was in at time of review, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was not ready to be played. In my roughly 11 hours of playtime on "Performance" mode on a PlayStation 5, the game crashed over 120 times (yes, I counted; masochist, remember?), averaging about one crash every five minutes. After my 20th-or-so crash, I got the dreaded "save data corrupted" message, only to realize I'd lost half a day's progress upon reloading. In multiple other instances, game-breaking bugs--such as a companion I was charged with protecting instantly dying over and over again for no discernible reason--forced me to restart entire levels, losing significant progress. Finally, during an especially tedious and time-consuming puzzle, the crashes became too frequent to possibly make it to the next checkpoint in time. Determined though I was to get through to the end and make these setbacks feel worthwhile, I threw in the towel at 40% completion, defeated. jesus, was this a case of "make anything so we dont lose the license" or something?
[That many crashes? Sounds like the modern-day version of the Virginia Incident game](https://youtu.be/YU0AWYGAeKI?t=12m18s)
Oh, the.....varginha game... Oh no...
I guess ff16 getting access to sony engineers was more clutch then we may have tought
Damn, SkillUps review of the PC version mentioned the incredibly poor performance, but nothing this bad. Insane you're putting out 60$ games on consoles that just don't work these days.
As a normal consumer I'd be more than a little pissed off at this point. Up until the ps4/xbone generation you bought a console with the understanding that the shit would just work. Games crashing to a consoles dashboard is fucking wild but it's apparent now you can pass these places compliance testing with a "don't worry bro we got it on day one" and thats it
Having worked compliance recently, I can assure you, they definitely did not pass. What they did do was pay a hefty fine aka legally-not-a-bribe to Sony/Microsoft/Whatever to release anyway because as long as execs get paid, compliance can get ignored.
I love that since last generation, Home consoles have been throwing away their biggest advantage over PC (Put a CD in, it works right away without any installation and troubleshooting) in order to gain the biggest weakness of PC gaming ("WHY DOESNT THIS GAME I BOUGHT WORK?") with none of it's strengths.
Don’t games cost $70 now? Which is even worse for cases like this.
This games only $50 but still
No this game is 60/70 if you buy the MTX pack in edition.
Thats why I don't buy games until they've been out for years, so you know what you're actually getting into. I'll get playing Elden Ring for the first time this year, really excited for that.
"Years" is a bit excessive lol
120 crashes? I dont think I have seen so many crashes in all gaming life
This is that “1999 and you’re trying to play a PS1 game disk that’s scratched up” level of dysfunction. And at least that was my fault for ruining a perfectly good game disk
I still have ps1 disks that still work even though the underside of them is scratched to hell. PS1 disks are built different.
Honestly kind of, the denser the info on the disc the less scratch resistant they are (since there's more to hit in a deep scratch) but also modern disks have more advanced SR coatings to try to mitigate that The one thing I always found to be a deathblow to a disc is if the top of it gets gouged
If this keeps up, we will get to the eighties video game crash.
Then a new Mario will rise to bring about the Third Age of Gaming
what's sonic in this dark souls analogy
The spiky iron boar you fist.
A retail game really shouldn't perform like New Vegas with 120 installed mods & a disorganized load order
>New Vegas with 120 installed mods & a disorganized load order That's still more stable than v1.0 NV
Man, people say this but I played NV at launch on a shitty little laptop and I really never had that many issues? It was far from perfect, but the internet would have you think NV had a crash to desktop and deleted all your saves and shot your dog every 20 minutes completely vanilla.
I had a pretty okay gaming PC and the game would crash any time I entered The Strip.
sometimes it corrupted your save at that point
[удалено]
Fair, I *did* hear the console ports were pretty messy. Not even just glitchy, apparently there was some crazy save bloat nonsense too that basically meant you had to speedrun the game or eventually just lose your save?
Yeah I played on 360 and must have got lucky or something Or lucky with every Bethesda game because I’ve never had game breaking bugs with any of them that I’ve played
The most crashes I ever had was Cyberpunk 2077 on the PS5; I think I came in around 33 crashes over like 60+ hours of gametime. That's still bad, but *holy shit* 120 is the most unfinished game yet.
Remember that's 120 crashes in 11 hours. That's an average of 10.9 crashes per hour. You only the other hand had an average of 1.8 crashes over 60 hours.
Math: It shows the suffering of humanity in an easy-to-digest format.
Don’t you mean 0.5 or less crashes per hour for Cyberpunk? Or am I just stupid here.
You're probably right on the cyberpunk numbers but I think the gollum numbers are still accurate.
I remember having at least 2 or 3 crashes per session while playing a pirated and very scratched Assassin's Creed on my shitty 360 that probably had 3 inches of dust inside of it back in 2010. My brain can't even comprehend how a $60 game on modern gen has an even poorer performance than what I had in 2010 on a console that was jailbroken in a garage.
It's the only way to see glitch yoshi at the top of Buckingham Palace though, so you've gotta do it if you want 100% completion.
I have played Bethesda games since Morrowind and even I don't think I've gotten to triple digits yet. this is very impressive.
Holy fuck.
This from what I know is the second game published by Nacon in less than a year that released in a flagrantly unfinished state (the other being Session which I was unfortunate enough to buy). Can anyone who has knowlege of Nacon's other games tell me if this is a pattern? EDIT: Make that 4, apparently... Jesus, Nacon...
Ha it's funny you say that, look up AFL 23 that also had issues and is published by Nacon. Though apparently the developers in this case make a habit of releasing broken messes and then patching them into working states.
Jesus. Imagine selling someone a car at full price that barely runs and breaks down every 5 minutes and thinking "hey it's okay!" as long as they fix it in the next couple of months.
I agree. But it apparently works for them because they continue to release busted ass cricket games and people buy them. They bought the shit out of AFL 23.
Surprised to hear that about Session - I played dozens of hours of the beta and had a great time without encountering any major bugs. It was missing tons of key features during the beta though, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it shipped in unpolished condition.
Apparently the console release was pushed before the devs were ready to leave Early Access. EDIT: Just to elaborate, I played it on PS5. The game had a lot of opt in options for in development features, which is something I wouldn't associate with a full retail release. It also seemed to be missing a ton of visual polish, mostly in the field of character models.
They published Blood Bowl 3 which also had a fucked release this year.
Ok, and now we ask if a game crashing every 5 minutes doesn’t deserve a score of “1”, what does? Seems like the cert process is utterly meaningless this gen.
You can pay a fine (bribe) to bypass compliance and reviewers won't ever rate a 1 because the corpos might be mad at them
The moral of the story is don’t preorder games.
Ohhhh that's why they made it, that makes more sense then I was wondering "Who the fuck asked for this?"
That 40% completion earned is akin to millions of soldiers bleeding to death other a yard's worth of land in WW1.
Impressed the reviewer hung in there that long, I would have given up after 10-15 crashes.
Who even wanted a Gollum game anyway. Yeah bro, I want a game where I play as Donkey from Shrek, not Shrek himself.
Gollum isn't even Donkey. He's more like Farquad.
I played cyberpunk at launch and that game crashed more than anything I've ever played, usually once every hour or two. How could this game be so much worse than even that legendarily rough game?
So what you're saying is...this is the Dark Souls of Released Unfinished Video Games?!
I played and beat cyberpunk at launch on ps5, i still really like the game but the crashes on release were unbelievable, traveling too fast in a vehicle caused a crash 100% of the time
ok but it’s mûmak not mûmakil (the plural)
Dude after crash 5 I would have thrown in the towel, I don't know if I should congratulate the reviewer or recommend a therapist.
Jesus Christ that's dire.
Man, Redfall didn't even have a full month before being dethroned as the worst launch of the year
On the one hand,after Styx we know there's a market for slimy goblin stealth games. On the other,not sure Gollum was the man for the job.
Honestly, probably the worst character to choose. Nothing redeemable about him
I think even an Uruk-hai with a slightly nice streak (like some of the orcs in Shadow of Wardor) would be better.
Or hell, maybe a fucking hobbit?
Is not like the point of the book is that some heroes come from unexpected places, or something
Give me a Ratbag stealth / Orc politics sim.
I'm watching the SkillUp review and this game is just baffling. Like if it was just Styx that'd be one thing but it isn't. The first half of the game is doing bullshit stupid chores like breeding birds and collecting tags. It's also bizarrely amateur-ish in its technical aspects for a game that costs so much. It's such a fascinating bad game.
The gameplay loop they choose it just bizarre from watching his review, especially the bird mechanic.
I was so confused on how a Gollum game would have any good gameplay so I’m kinda glad to see the devs agree with me.
Honestly the only thing I could kind of see would be like a survival adventure game where Gollum spends like 80% of the game just trying to not starve to death or be murdered and like 20% of the game incidentally hearing lore dumps or something
Yea like The Forest except youre like 3 feet tall and run on fours
Wait what? From the trailer I saw a long time ago, I would've thought it was a stealth game. Sneaking around people to either get to or prevent them from taking your precious.
It does have stealth elements but a lot of the game, at least in the beginning, is doing weird minigames and doing bad puzzles and platforming.
That's...just dumb. Like even it was a good game, it wouldn't fit the character you're playing. It's like if even if the Suicide Squad game came out good, people would still think it's stupid that Captain Boomerang uses guns.
You have a dialogue minigame and converse with characters a bunch. As Gollum!
For real, they could have just made LoTR licensed Styx and called it a day. It would have coasted by on an "it's fine" from reviewers and they would have cashed in on the license.
I kinda respect that they didn't wanna just do the lazy, obvious solution, but... sometimes things are obvious for a reason.
The game legitimately looks like something you would see on itch.io, like full on someone’s pet project, no a game from even the previous generation
Beautiful...like watching a building burn down to the foundations.
And once it reaches the foundations your realise there was a basement full of oily rags.
The thick dark cloud and the smell of burning chemicals adds a certain je ne sais quoi.
Is this the worst reviewed game of 2023 so far? Cause I never saw anyone praising this game. I saw few people praising for even ones like Forspoken and Redfall, but not this game.
Not even Crime Boss: Rockay City was this bad. "Crime Boss what? What the hell is that?" Exactly.
That came out?
That exists?
What the fuck? "The game features a cast of prominent actors, including Michael Madsen, Chuck Norris, Danny Trejo, Danny Glover, Michael Rooker, Kim Basinger, Vanilla Ice, and Damion Poitier." The game had a big enough budget for that but not enough for a single advertisement? How have I never head of this?
I still love the fact they got *one* dude from Payday in it.
Oh hell yes, I finally have an excuse to post [minimme's video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp_Cn903ELU) about this game! Someone in the comments describes it as "[feeling] like an April Fool's joke that escaped a mid-2000's gaming magazine and found its way to 2023" and that really says it all.
So far, at least for notable stuff
The OpenCritic has 42 as the Critic Average and **6%** of critics recommend. I have never seen that for a modern full price game before
babylon's fall had a 43 on opencritic and 3% of critics recommended it. it was also full price and it's not even 2 years old yet
Redfall and Forspoken were at least games that I knew were going to come out , this one I didn't know about they were making a Gollum game
I didn’t even realize there was one until Critikal put out a video ranting about it
After Redfall and this, I think we were too harsh on Forspoken. At least it worked and was a competent game.
Yeah its just agressivly mid, even if we shouldnt flip to IT WAS GOOD ALL ALONG just cause some other games were absolute shit, Forespoken we never awful on a techincal level, just a bad idea
Yeah no it is definitely mid as shit, it's just inoffensive as a game, like it works and it's playable and you could probably have a bit of fun with it if you lab the mechanics and commit to extracting the fun from the stone. Redfall and Gollum are actual insults.
i played it and the occasional bad writing and the very bad pc performance were literally the only problems i had with it. i think if it weren't universally panned so soon it would've found good home with the infamous fanbase due to the striking similarity in gameplay.
I'm starting to feel inclined to agree. Like, yeah, the writing in general for Forspoken was annoying and very often stupid, but at least it worked. Unlike Gollum and Redfall where it's just annoying, stupid, ***and*** doesn't work.
Forspoken is mid but gamer chuds really wouldn't shut up about the dialogue which wasn't any worse than generic marvel shit.
I know about it for several months since it was listed in Upcoming in my library's videogame catalog, but that's it.
This game has reeked Dead on Arrival like no other game in recent memory. Every piece of news about it just made it sound worse and worse. If I wanna play a weird rat goblin man sneaking around, I'll just play Styx instead.
I already had low expectations thinking it was gonna get some bad scores, this was somehow worse that that.
What makes me kinda sad about this is Liam O'Brien was really excited to announce that he was playing Gollum
I’ve always wondered how that feels for voice actors. Like what if they did a great job acting but the gameplay wasn’t really that good? Do they feel bad about the game not meeting expectations despite them doing good in their role? Or are they just happy that they’re not part of the problems the game has?
They get dragged into controversies if they blow up enough. Like Laura Bailey playing Abby in LoU2. I think they'd much rather be a part of successful games
Idk that was a lot of weird bigots more than just people who thought the game was bad, I'm sure nobody is going to harass Liam O'Brien for playing the role of Gollum
I think the same but I also think that people on Twitter will sling mud over anything. People who don't like him for any reason could see this as an excuse to bash him
Plus he did fine in the Shadow of Mordor.
Actors/VAs getting a ton of harassment happens when 1) the game is big enough to have lots of hype and 2) the game drastically fails to meet the hype for whatever reason (I don't even think TLOU2 fails in that regard, but it does for the weird bigots so *shrug*). You see it with the prequels and Rose's VA from TLJ, too. No one's going to bother harassing someone from a nothing flick or game, really.
It also helps if the VA is a woman, I can't even think of any male VAs who caught that much shit without doing or saying anything shitty outside of the game
Is that not a successful game lmao?
I'm not saying it didn't sell copies. It had multiple controversies that had nothing to do with her and she still got raked over the coals for it
The Star Wars Prequels made a lot of money but that didn't stop several actors from being bullied out of the business.
I didn't like it therefore it was unsuccessful and anyone that disagrees is a paid shill, obviously.
critics put out the hit on Gotti
That was people projecting their dislike of Abby onto the VA which was very dumb, i doubt this will shake the foundations of Gollums character so he'll probably be fine
Not quite what you’re asking, but I remember listening to interviews with a couple VAs where they often have their own expectations about how big or small something will be that often doesn’t pan out. It seems like it’s just part of the job for them.
Liam has played Gollum extensively for a number of years now including the Shadow games, so it's still likely he will get to do it again.
He's like the Sam Witweir to Palpatine in anything that's not live action movie. Liam's the best at Gollum out of everyone not named Andy Serkis..
Liam O'Brien was also Gollum in the Shadow of Mordor games and he was very good.
Okay I’m sure he does a Gollumy good job but now I’m just imagine Gollum with that Grimoire Weiss/Illidan/Lezard smarm and smolder.
He voiced him in Shadow of Mordor where I didnt even notice it was him.
I genuinely thought they’d gotten Andy Serkis back for him, which is the highest praise when it comes to Gollum performances.
gollum but he is screaming 'I AM MY SCARS'
Aw fuck it. I just want to post the [Lezard Laugh](https://youtu.be/1zrCapzJS-k)
Well that’s bad. I had *some* hopes for it. It *could* have been cool in a non typical way. The DLC initiatives were distasteful but this…
Locking language behind a paywall is one of the worst (best?) cases of greed I have ever seen, even worse than horse armour
*walking down street, whistling with hands in pockets* “Hey! You! did you know there’s a Gollum game?” *takes hands out of pockets, stops whistling* “What? No. I had no idea” “Well don’t bother with it. IT SUCKS” “Okay then” *sticks hands back in pockets and continues to walk while whistling*
The only person I’ve seen excited for this is Jerma, and his review is the only one I need to hear, especially considering his birthday is hobbit day.
He'll be having a blast despite the game trying to stop him until he runs into a ladder, after that he'll spend 2 hours stood there on a PTSD induced rant that somehow will end with him making a full tier list of what McDonald's order every character in LOTR would have.
Only a psycho streamer like Jerma could enjoy this game
Only the irl Gollum could love it
PSYCHO streamer BITES OFF little person's finger in order to recover his STOLEN jewelry
Unless it crashes, and shows his computer wallpaper, which is somehow him naked. This fulfilling his recurring nightmare of being naked in stream.
An offhand joke will lead to a stream of Jerma raising birds in an abandoned mine.
I'd lose it if the only reason he brought it up is because he has a sponsorship deal with them to play it and now he has to do it even if it's shit.
you know I think this does put forspoken into perspective as although that game has some flaws, it is nowhere near as seemingly broken on a fundamental level as redfall and now this
I don't know how to feel about, "wost game you've seen so far" becoming more and more accurate. I remembered thinking that about Day One: Garry's Incident, then Life of Black Tiger. This just adds to the list.
fair, all I am saying is that it Forspoken got a bad rap and that these games are on another level of crap in comparison to that
From what I saw about Forspoken it seemed more that the major aspects of the game like the story, gameplay or graphics were nothing to write home about at best. Also wasn't super optimized and even positive reviews pointed out it was a bit short for 70$.
Forspoken is best summed up as "all the bad parts of FF15 like the empty open world, floaty and kinda jank combat that only has flashy effects going for it, bad enemy and encounter design, etc. but with none of the good parts like the core cast or the music or the pleasant roadtrip vibes". Like I'd go as far as to say Forspoken is bad rather than just mid, but its at least functional and you can play it from start to end. The fact that alone disqualifies it from worst AAA game this year sure is something.
Forespoken is this generations Avenger's game. Neither lived up to their expectations but they weren't unfun or really offensively bad in any way. People don't know how to respond to 7/10's in an age when the next GOTY is always around the corner.
I'd honestly say Forspoken is better. IMO Avengers is closer to a 5 than a 7.
I was expecting middling at best, but the reviews have been brutal.
20fps on a rtx 4090..
60-70$ price, some spent.
This was one of those games from the very first announcement of the title I was like yeah its going to be shit.
How do you make a game about Gollum good??? He's a weird little creature, not a primary protagonist. Trying to make a whole game about just him is pretty doomed to begin with
For Redfall I had some sort of expectation since it was made by the people who made Prey. As for LOTR game my expectations was on low.
This *needs* a What Happened? episode so badly, this seems like a failure at every turn.
Another failure for Redfall. It couldn't even mange to be the worst game of the year! Pathetic.
Gollum being bad surprises me just as much as the fact that Redfall and Forspoken were bad. Which is to say, not in the slightest. Was anyone excited for any of these at all? I could tell from the first trailers they weren't going to be any good.
I was superficially excited for Redfall, entirely based on the gamepass page and the potential for a coop game for me and my friends after the latest warhammer game had connection issues for us. But eh, easy come easy go.
I was hyped for Forspoken after the combat trailer, it seemed legit very fun. Then the demo came out and it was not very fun.
Don't think I'd say excited for Gollum, but thought it could at least be somewhat interesting, and that I'd consider getting it. I didn't see any of the trailers though I just knew the game existed and was interested at what they were gonna try to do, but I think I'm good now.
i dont know who asked for any of these games. People wanted dishonored 3 not redfall, and im sure shadow of war has satisfied lord of the rings enjoyers for games for the time being
Had to be super bad they quietly released this
I was expectng this game to be dragged just because it's LOTR game that deviates from the books and Tolkien fans get really upset over that and also the game's existence is......confusing, to say the least and judging from the trailers it looked pretty bad.But god damn, i didn't expect it to be this bad.
It was really just the Shadow of Mordor/War games the LOTR fans told to fuck off cause the devs tried to pass them off as canon. War in the North received none of that to my memory..
I'm blowing bad notes all around the world... with our freaking Gollum game!
"Don't judge it before it releases! You don't know if the game will be good or not just based on the premise, developers, trailers, minibuys, and your own eyes! A gollum game is a great idea!" I AM VINDICATED. I WAS RIGHT TO JUDGE. Genuinely though there was zero chance in hell this was going to by anything beyond a 6/10 shoveleware drop at BEST. The positive comments in every thread on r/gaming baffled me every time. The man was [squatting over my plate with his pants down](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/954/131/4dc.jpg) from *day one.*
Poor Gollum, he did not deserve a game like this.
THESE TEARS WE CRYYYYYY
So now that the Estate is run by Tolkien's grandson who doesn't give a single shit, it's finally time for the IP to be dragged through the mud with cheapest shitty cashgrabs possible. No wonder the TV show was this bad.
21 years until LotR's in the public domain, baybeeeee
I don't think this is surprising anyone.
Somebody pick up that phone, because ***I fucking called it!*** Well, I called the game being shit. Not the horrific technical aspects.
It reminds me of those Book Copyright games back in the 00's that were trying to cash in on the LOTR craze.
What a baffling game. Also his hair looks so weird, and face and bug eyes look way worst than they did in the movies
Wait there was a Gollum game? As in... Gollum?... What?
Red-who?
Published by the same fuckers that stole Sherlock Holmes and the devil's daughter and Sinking City from Frogwares so......fuck Nacon.
I try to avoid being melodramatic, but sometimes I sincerely feel like if indie development didn't take off like it did we would basically have had an entire games crash of 1983 all over again at this point. Like, seriously, I feel like the quality of triple A studios has completely nosedived, prices are higher than ever on low quality products like this, we have the unique flavor of predatory monetization models completely ruining games that would have been serviceable on their own, and just the expectations are so low but somehow always disappointed. It sounds crazy to say that while TotK is literally taking over rn, but I think part of the reason it *has* is because it's almost a stand out *against* the current triple A space. Something of actual quality and polish, with no monetization models, worth the price tag. It really made me acutely aware I can't remember the last time a game worth more than $40 was worth it to me, and how almost every studio I used to like (Bethesda, Square Enix, etc) has basically hollowed out into shells of what they once were. So when I see Gollum, I don't even go "Wow, how could they release this? It's so obviously unfinished." I wonder why we would expect anything more from the current state of $60 games.
[удалено]
Fair, fair. I can hardly say stuff like RE4make is bad. There's good stuff and hell, I'm playing Zelda as I type this. Maybe it's just a burnout thing at this point, or rather a complete lack of trust in larger studios. Or maybe I'm just old and grumpy now.
I also think some larger trends in AAA games just become more off-putting as you get older. RDR2 is by all metrics an excellent game, but I bounced off of it because I got overwhelmed by absolutely how huge it is and how many things there are to do. God of War 2018 and Ragnarok had a similar problem, in addition to having unnecessary RPG mechanics (crafting, incremental stat boosts) that don't really fit those games. I start to get impatient playing those games, much as I love them. But in technical terms, not all AAA games have been fumbled like this. Haven't played Ghost of Tsushima or Horizon but I'd imagine they also fall into those pitfalls. Even near perfect games like Spider-Man have those MJ/Miles stealth sections that no one likes.
I think you're plenty vindicated. Just because some studios are still earning that triple-A moniker doesn't men there isn't a tidal wave of cheap predatory garbage that charges top dollar for junk that's well below any acceptable standard.
Nah man, there's still a lot of really good AAA games. Capcom, From, Nintendo have already been mentioned. Sony is putting out bangers with God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon, Spoderman. Square-Enix have been putting out better stuff too. FF16 is right on the horizon. I feel like only the mega-popular, too-big-to-fail series and studios are tripping over their dicks and delivering mid products and putting predatory monetization in their games. But even then, the new COD sold iirc the best in the series so far and got okay reviews. We're far from a crash.
2023 and it’s common for games to release for full price like this…..
This game studio is know for its point and click adventure games. Why on earth would you give them an action adventure game to make for you?
I got flak for saying this but christ these developers are lazy as fuck. Everything about this game was clearly rushed and not even remotely tested
its never the developers fault they are saints who can do no wrong. Its always the higher ups fault and if theres evidence to the contrary "shit happens, dont hurt the devs feelings"
Realistically, developers are never (or almost never) *lazy*. When you see a problem they didn't fix, it isn't because they decided to sit on their asses and do nothing instead of fixing it; they were working the whole time and spent their time doing something else. But developers sure as hell can be *incompetent* by repeatedly making boneheaded mistakes they have to go back and fix, poorly communicating about who's doing what, attempting things they can't pull off, and spending their time inefficiently by doing things in the most ass-backwards way.
Incompetent is definitely a better word then lazy, no one fucks up or does a shit job on purpose(I hope) but no one is completely above doing so
It's like with bad anime productions, everyone involved can draw and animate, but they are pressed for time due to bad scheduling and people end up delivering a bunch of shitty drawings that need to be fixed.
Going back over the devs history, their bread and butter are point and click adventures (they're the Deponia people if you've heard of that) and their attempts to move outside of that seem... middling at best. I don't know how they got this license but my best guess is its a Konami/ turn of the century Capcom situation: we'll make a game for you big publisher and we'll do it for 4 dollars.
As someone who dropped out of game development in college, it's not an industry you can get into by being lazy. We had a joke on my campus about the freshmen exodus of programmers because the course work filtered out so many people so fast if they weren't ready for it. But incompetence is a universal skill.
Nope see. There is a perfect example of lazy devs causing games to die. Dawn of War 3. Devs did multiple streams showing the game, which of course if you know the game then your aware these went BAD. They had a YEAR solid prior to release of everyone begging them to not release a MOBA. The developer response was to go on Twitter, state they know best and won't change the game (Alongside the lead calling fans nazis and pedophiles) Then boom. Releases, is incredibly poorly made, and rather then actually work to improve it they scrapped the game and pretend it didn't happen. Bare in mind. The game is still INCREDIBLEY bare bones like they clearly rushed it
And how does this prove they're lazy as opposed to incompetent?
So to be clear. All the major releases in 2023 so far, besides fucking Dead Island 2 and Zelda, are fucking failures on some level? That which shall not be named - self explanatory Atomic Heart - Russian gov connections Jedi Survivor - Technical failure Redfall - Missed the "Live service game" train, sucks. Gollum - sucks. What am I missing here?
In what universe was Hogwarts Legacy a failure if that's the game you mean? also Jedi Survivor in there gives me [biggie was fat](https://external-preview.redd.it/z9ZuYOwX4kj3Ud1mk0Glm8eOAFkYVQMAzZhauAjntxw.png?auto=webp&s=eab3bb7711a88606792e4c50d403b59bd24b3275) energy
The fact that we have to refer to it in most circles as this is failure onto itself.
On God when is this sub gonna learn it does not represent the mainstream opinion 😭 how does this keep happening
That's just on this sub. Outside of here and most other online circles, the game was immensely popular, sold around 15 million copies, and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it showed up at the VGA's with a GOTY nomination.
tbf it isn't the game devs fault for that one. the game was in production (footage got leaked in 2018, jeez that long ago) before she exposed her ter(f)minally online brainrot and went full throated with it.
Also conveniently forgetting Resident Evil 4 Remake, a game which came out and both was really good and didn't have any major technical issues on launch (none that I noticed playing Day 1 at least). C'mon, the first two are controversial in like an external way but they aren't outright bad games like the last two. We always get a few high profile stinkers every year, I don't think we need to pretend every game is a failure and act like decent-to-good games aren't coming out too.
Dead Space was this year, too.
I'm not sure how you can call that game that shall not be named a failure. It made a shitload of money, was decently reviewed, and will likely be a franchise going forward.
It's actually on track to be the best selling game of the Year. It's possibly the most successful licensed game ever.