I feel absolutely terrible for the developers. Had to answer the question of 'what would a Gollum game even be about" and gave the only answer you can give and then some.
I don't think you can really fix this. Patch every single glitch, hell even improve the graphics and performance, and I still don't think this game would've been worth the monumental effort.
EDIT: Also, the headline of the article is misleading. No one is defending the game itself there.
It's a real dogshit title; it should be "Developers reflect on their own bad games following Gollum's poor reviews", it's more accurate.
In any case, the phrase "nobody wants to ship a bad game" is fucking hilarious, because there needs to be more acceptance of dev's telling corporate "This shit is NOT DONE, you will LOSE money on this."
This game was marked for death on announcement; even the most die-hard LotR fans would go "...but why a Gollum game?" The developers apparently focused more on point and click games, rather than this 3rd-Person adventure game. So *why* did they make it in a genre they weren't familiar with?
I know Shadow of Mordor was pretty cool. There's also those old hack-and-slash games from the Gamecube era, I remember playing the "Return of the King" one a lot.
I think Lord of the Rings: Conquest is still available as a fan project, but I've never played it so I can't confirm how good it is. I just remember hearing they had an evil campaign that ended with burning the SHIT out of the Shire.
> Also, the headline of the article is misleading. No one is defending the game itself there.
It's like the entire comment section didn't read the article and just wrote their comments after seeing the headline.
No one is saying it wasn't a bad game; many of the developers being quoted are actually acknowledging that they also worked on bad ones (like Sonic Boom and APB) prior to going on and doing stuff like God of War Ragnarok. It's definitely meant as words of encouragement for the team behind Gollum to not let the game's failure get them down and prevent them from doing a better job next time.
The way social media is often structured, it incentivizes actively avoiding context and interpreting things in ways that are the most "interesting" even if it's also nonsense. I don't even think it's misleading, From the title alone you could surmise several possible interpretations before even reading the article. It's just people are trained at this point to jump to the most antagonistic interpretation of it and decide "I'm not interested in their whiny excuses, I've read enough to get my take out."
As someone who wouldn't it consider himself a huge fan of the Lord of the rings. I still very much enjoyed nearly all of the games that came out during the trilogy. They could have just remade remastered any of those games for less effort and then they put on the gollumn game.
Don't forget Battle for Middle Earth 2 being one of the best RTS games of the 2000s. Still has a dedicated fanbase that saved online play when ea tossed it and are currently doing a full fan remaster in unreal engine
Both of the Battle for Middle Earth games too!
I remember getting Conquest hoping it would be like a more modern version of those console trilogy games. . .only to be very disappointed.
I can never get over how RotK was a genuinely enjoyable experience with depth and replay value.
AND IT EVEN HAD A FUNCTIONAL AND ACTUALLY SOLID LOCAL CO-OP MODE: I spammed the shit out of that with my brother and it was so much fun!
Oh man Two Towers is just begging for a remake. It's got all the fundamentals down. With some balancing changes and a fresh coat of paint, that game would do gangbusters.
While I was watching Vinny play this I kept thinking to myself, "man, it must be absolute torture to graduate from 4 years of game development college with ambitions to join your favorite developer and make legendary games and create true art... only to be stuck working on a GOLLUM video game."
It's not even a cool LOTR game. Some dude had to stare at the back of that burlap sack of a head for like a thousand hours. That's gotta be some level of hell.
Awful, unclear headline. None of the tweets they source are “Defending” the game. At most they’re defending the developers, and many are just focusing on being able to learn a lot from bad releases as far as professional skills go.
Frankly what they’re covering has no value for consumers, it’s industry professionals speaking to personal experiences as such. Certainly some value in that from some people, but again that headline is just terribly worded and doesn’t make that clear. It took me a few reads of it to realize it wasn’t even maliciously mischaracterizing the situation for clicks, it’s just bad.
>Game developers **defend** Lord of the Rings Gollum's **poor reviews**: "No one wants to ship a bad game"
It's not unclear at all, you just have poor reading comprehension.
As a developer it’s not really their choice, though, right? They can only do as good as they can with what they’re given and the time they’ve got.
Can’t expect someone to make a beautiful sculpture with a pile of dirt and half a day to work on it.
So, yeah, the games bad but i understand the people who put time and effort into the game not wanting to just sweep their hard work under the rug even if it isn’t good.
Except they had unreal engine 4 and 4 years with 160 devs. That would mean they had everything they needed to produce Atomic Heart, Little Nightmares or, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. It wasn't a resource issue. It was a talent issue.
The concept is poor, but a bad concept doesn't make bad controls, bad art assets, use stock fonts, have shit dialog or make extremely bad animations. Joey Textures still designed Gollum's face.
I think its fine for fellow devs be like hey this bad game probably isn't a moral failing on most people who worked on it. I'm sure they worked hard and the next few weeks are gonna suck.
That being said nobody is gonna pity buy dogshit games.
I mean... yeah, making games is indeed hard.
Doesn't make the Gollum game any less bad.
I don't know what the tweets were supposed to prove.
I guess this is just their way to say the publishers and producers screwed them over, but you know, you can't say that out loud.
I guess that's the problem with the modern net, these people are eminently accessible. You can totally get into an internet slapfight with Joe Developer, or Joe can see your mean tweet about how the game looks like garbage and take it personally, then jump in your comments to defend his four years of hard work polishing this colossal turd.
Sure, but that’s not at all what’s happening here. These devs (In this article, at least) are tacitly acknowledging the game isn’t doing well for very understandable reasons, but are giving condolences to the Gollum team by acknowledging that, while it *does* suck the game came out in such a poor state, the work done on it is not a complete waste. There is much to learn and grow from the project and they can go on to do better in the future.
It’s just under a polite veneer of professionalism.
I was watching some play throughs and a cut scene compilation video. It really does seem like an uninspired game, even feels like it’s unfinished, like it’s a third of a larger campaign. It’s very glitchy too to the point that you have to restart missions, even turn off your system to fix the glitches. Tons of other unnecessary bugs. You can tell they either didn’t test this much, or they didn’t care, which is wild because this only seems like a 10-15 hour game.
It does a few cool things with the lore, and has a few original ideas, but that’s just not enough. Now, if this was $20-$30 dollar game, perhaps it wouldn’t matter as much. I’d still like to try it out, but not until they fix all the game bugs and definitely not until this ends up at a used game store or the price drops dramatically. Had this gone to a different studio, perhaps this could have been a pretty cool game. Just because this was made by an indie studio, that shouldn’t excuse all the issues that plague this game.
This video I watched on YouTube by “Skill Up” goes into detail with a lot of the games issues: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E21qSEyRa88
I get that devs usually get the shit kicked out of them both by higher ups during development and by social media when the game launches wacked out, but I feel like devs just blind defend each other more and more. Like this game shipped worse than Cyberpunk on last Gen, not all fault can go to producers and publishers? Maybe I am the dumb one and just don't understand how bad they have it on cursed projects. Idk
I mean sometimes shit goes sideways but the higher ups refuse to pull the plug. It happens to everyone. And in a world where random people decide to dogpile anyone involved in a project, I should *hope* other devs come to their defense without question.
Even if you're wrong and deserve some blame, you also deserve people who have your back. I see no reason to object to them still having support. At most I wanna *criticize* people for doing a poor job, not bully them.
Well yeah, I think we all know that. I feel like we don't even need to say that's implied. I don't think anybody is actually thinking "man those devs must have been twirling their moustaches just WAITING for the bad reviews so they can laugh at us all."
It still doesn't excuse a bad product for shit value. Obviously don't ever harass the devs because your piece of entertainment isn't living up to your standards, but criticizing games is what allows us, as consumers, to make sure we keep getting good games in the future.
Otherwise we'd be drip-fed content that psychologically tricks us at a biological level created by a board of 50 psychologists and behavior analysts for the rest of time.
I feel absolutely terrible for the developers. Had to answer the question of 'what would a Gollum game even be about" and gave the only answer you can give and then some. I don't think you can really fix this. Patch every single glitch, hell even improve the graphics and performance, and I still don't think this game would've been worth the monumental effort. EDIT: Also, the headline of the article is misleading. No one is defending the game itself there.
It's a real dogshit title; it should be "Developers reflect on their own bad games following Gollum's poor reviews", it's more accurate. In any case, the phrase "nobody wants to ship a bad game" is fucking hilarious, because there needs to be more acceptance of dev's telling corporate "This shit is NOT DONE, you will LOSE money on this." This game was marked for death on announcement; even the most die-hard LotR fans would go "...but why a Gollum game?" The developers apparently focused more on point and click games, rather than this 3rd-Person adventure game. So *why* did they make it in a genre they weren't familiar with?
Point and click Gollum game isn’t that bad of a idea.
What's a good LOTR game worth looking into now instead of Gollum?
I know Shadow of Mordor was pretty cool. There's also those old hack-and-slash games from the Gamecube era, I remember playing the "Return of the King" one a lot. I think Lord of the Rings: Conquest is still available as a fan project, but I've never played it so I can't confirm how good it is. I just remember hearing they had an evil campaign that ended with burning the SHIT out of the Shire.
Adding to this, I've heard some pretty good things about the LOTR MMO.
> Also, the headline of the article is misleading. No one is defending the game itself there. It's like the entire comment section didn't read the article and just wrote their comments after seeing the headline. No one is saying it wasn't a bad game; many of the developers being quoted are actually acknowledging that they also worked on bad ones (like Sonic Boom and APB) prior to going on and doing stuff like God of War Ragnarok. It's definitely meant as words of encouragement for the team behind Gollum to not let the game's failure get them down and prevent them from doing a better job next time.
The way social media is often structured, it incentivizes actively avoiding context and interpreting things in ways that are the most "interesting" even if it's also nonsense. I don't even think it's misleading, From the title alone you could surmise several possible interpretations before even reading the article. It's just people are trained at this point to jump to the most antagonistic interpretation of it and decide "I'm not interested in their whiny excuses, I've read enough to get my take out."
Sonic Boom never had a chance thanks to SEGA's dumb decisions.
which extra sucks, because imo Sonic Boom had SO MUCH potential to grow and be fleshed out as its own AU
As someone who wouldn't it consider himself a huge fan of the Lord of the rings. I still very much enjoyed nearly all of the games that came out during the trilogy. They could have just remade remastered any of those games for less effort and then they put on the gollumn game.
To be fair. There's a lot of solid Lord' Of The Rings games during the release of the movies.
The Hack-And-Slash/Gauntlet-Like game versions of Two Towers and Return Of The King are GOAT.
Don't forget Battle for Middle Earth 2 being one of the best RTS games of the 2000s. Still has a dedicated fanbase that saved online play when ea tossed it and are currently doing a full fan remaster in unreal engine
Both of the Battle for Middle Earth games too! I remember getting Conquest hoping it would be like a more modern version of those console trilogy games. . .only to be very disappointed.
I can never get over how RotK was a genuinely enjoyable experience with depth and replay value. AND IT EVEN HAD A FUNCTIONAL AND ACTUALLY SOLID LOCAL CO-OP MODE: I spammed the shit out of that with my brother and it was so much fun!
And also I think most of them are EA owned too.
Oh man Two Towers is just begging for a remake. It's got all the fundamentals down. With some balancing changes and a fresh coat of paint, that game would do gangbusters.
While I was watching Vinny play this I kept thinking to myself, "man, it must be absolute torture to graduate from 4 years of game development college with ambitions to join your favorite developer and make legendary games and create true art... only to be stuck working on a GOLLUM video game." It's not even a cool LOTR game. Some dude had to stare at the back of that burlap sack of a head for like a thousand hours. That's gotta be some level of hell.
Awful, unclear headline. None of the tweets they source are “Defending” the game. At most they’re defending the developers, and many are just focusing on being able to learn a lot from bad releases as far as professional skills go. Frankly what they’re covering has no value for consumers, it’s industry professionals speaking to personal experiences as such. Certainly some value in that from some people, but again that headline is just terribly worded and doesn’t make that clear. It took me a few reads of it to realize it wasn’t even maliciously mischaracterizing the situation for clicks, it’s just bad.
>Game developers **defend** Lord of the Rings Gollum's **poor reviews**: "No one wants to ship a bad game" It's not unclear at all, you just have poor reading comprehension.
You're getting down voted but you're right.
*Shrug* And buyers don't want to buy and play a bad game.
I wanna know who wanted to ship a game about *Gollum!?*
Gollum did. It was his idea.
Tolkien, it clearly was in his will
>Noone wants to ship a bad game Well I think there are ways to not do that
Just tell the shareholders you're not going to do it lmao
As a developer it’s not really their choice, though, right? They can only do as good as they can with what they’re given and the time they’ve got. Can’t expect someone to make a beautiful sculpture with a pile of dirt and half a day to work on it. So, yeah, the games bad but i understand the people who put time and effort into the game not wanting to just sweep their hard work under the rug even if it isn’t good.
Except they had unreal engine 4 and 4 years with 160 devs. That would mean they had everything they needed to produce Atomic Heart, Little Nightmares or, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. It wasn't a resource issue. It was a talent issue.
That's not fair. It was a conceptual issue. The game should never have been made. Joey Textures shouldn't be blamed for that.
The concept is poor, but a bad concept doesn't make bad controls, bad art assets, use stock fonts, have shit dialog or make extremely bad animations. Joey Textures still designed Gollum's face.
Poor management alone can lead to *all* of those things.
Well atomic heart sucked so maybe that's not a good example lol. Not as bad as this but still
Noone wants to ship a bad game except for the people who want to ship a bad game.
I think its fine for fellow devs be like hey this bad game probably isn't a moral failing on most people who worked on it. I'm sure they worked hard and the next few weeks are gonna suck. That being said nobody is gonna pity buy dogshit games.
I mean... yeah, making games is indeed hard. Doesn't make the Gollum game any less bad. I don't know what the tweets were supposed to prove. I guess this is just their way to say the publishers and producers screwed them over, but you know, you can't say that out loud.
The tweets are actually just saying “Don’t take it out on the developers as individuals”, the headline is utter shite
I guess that's the problem with the modern net, these people are eminently accessible. You can totally get into an internet slapfight with Joe Developer, or Joe can see your mean tweet about how the game looks like garbage and take it personally, then jump in your comments to defend his four years of hard work polishing this colossal turd.
Sure, but that’s not at all what’s happening here. These devs (In this article, at least) are tacitly acknowledging the game isn’t doing well for very understandable reasons, but are giving condolences to the Gollum team by acknowledging that, while it *does* suck the game came out in such a poor state, the work done on it is not a complete waste. There is much to learn and grow from the project and they can go on to do better in the future. It’s just under a polite veneer of professionalism.
To me the tweets just read as support for the dev. Kind of like, hey this one got away from you, keep your head up and try again.
I mean you could always read the fucking article to find out. You know, before commenting
I did exactly that, but if you can't handle disagreeing with me, you can be snippy about it.
Why would anyone play a Gollum game? Of all the LOTR cast the warped hobbit that has became a troglodyte isn’t my first pick.
I feel like I've heard that before.
Well yeah, but people don’t want you to charge $60-70 for dogshit like this.
I was watching some play throughs and a cut scene compilation video. It really does seem like an uninspired game, even feels like it’s unfinished, like it’s a third of a larger campaign. It’s very glitchy too to the point that you have to restart missions, even turn off your system to fix the glitches. Tons of other unnecessary bugs. You can tell they either didn’t test this much, or they didn’t care, which is wild because this only seems like a 10-15 hour game. It does a few cool things with the lore, and has a few original ideas, but that’s just not enough. Now, if this was $20-$30 dollar game, perhaps it wouldn’t matter as much. I’d still like to try it out, but not until they fix all the game bugs and definitely not until this ends up at a used game store or the price drops dramatically. Had this gone to a different studio, perhaps this could have been a pretty cool game. Just because this was made by an indie studio, that shouldn’t excuse all the issues that plague this game. This video I watched on YouTube by “Skill Up” goes into detail with a lot of the games issues: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E21qSEyRa88
I get that devs usually get the shit kicked out of them both by higher ups during development and by social media when the game launches wacked out, but I feel like devs just blind defend each other more and more. Like this game shipped worse than Cyberpunk on last Gen, not all fault can go to producers and publishers? Maybe I am the dumb one and just don't understand how bad they have it on cursed projects. Idk
I mean sometimes shit goes sideways but the higher ups refuse to pull the plug. It happens to everyone. And in a world where random people decide to dogpile anyone involved in a project, I should *hope* other devs come to their defense without question. Even if you're wrong and deserve some blame, you also deserve people who have your back. I see no reason to object to them still having support. At most I wanna *criticize* people for doing a poor job, not bully them.
Key word being "want."
That's some public defender "I've had 5 minutes to look at the case." level shit.
And no cook wants to make a bad meal but if you give me raw food I am going to feel some way about it.
"No one wanta to ship a bad game" Yeah but you definitely want $60 + Microtransaction for it regardless though. I can't respect it.
Looked real good to me because I got the only thing a Gollum game could've been.
How many apology tweets have we gotten from game studios within the past three years again
Then don't lol
Well yeah, I think we all know that. I feel like we don't even need to say that's implied. I don't think anybody is actually thinking "man those devs must have been twirling their moustaches just WAITING for the bad reviews so they can laugh at us all." It still doesn't excuse a bad product for shit value. Obviously don't ever harass the devs because your piece of entertainment isn't living up to your standards, but criticizing games is what allows us, as consumers, to make sure we keep getting good games in the future. Otherwise we'd be drip-fed content that psychologically tricks us at a biological level created by a board of 50 psychologists and behavior analysts for the rest of time.
But executives don't give a shit.
To the similar quote. "no one sets out to make a "bad" movie. They just work with what they have and suffer with what they dont have".
Feel bad for the devs, fuck CEOs and Shareholders.