In a fairly damning tell-all interview with German gaming outlet/YouTube channel Game Two, former developers at The Lord of the Rings: Gollum studio, Daedalic Entertainment, have made some alarming claims about the production, release and subsequent fallout of the game.
Probably the most notable of these is the claim that an official apology message that was shared on the game’s official social media channels and signed off by the team at Daedalic was, in fact, written using controversial AI software ChatGPT and was created and posted without the studio’s knowledge by publisher Nacon. That the apology was written by an AI is perhaps obvious in highlight, given it opens with a total misspelling of the game’s titles as “The Lord of Ring: Gollum.”
A few words from the " The Lord of the Rings: Gollum™ " team pic.twitter.com/adPamy5EjO
— The Lord of the Rings: Gollum (@GollumGame) May 26, 2023
Elsewhere in the video from Game Two (which you can see in full below, though you’ll need YouTube’s translated captions if you don’t speak German), former Daedalic employees claim that this post-launch apology wasn’t the only thing brought public without their knowing.
The first “gameplay reveal” trailer for Gollum, which pretty well spelled the end of any cautious optimism from fans about the game, was apparently also a surprise to some of the team, either due to the rough quality of the assets used to produce it or even its very existence. The result was that widespread negative reaction to the trailer took a toll on the studio, which was already struggling to get the game up to quality with the resources and time allocated to them and was supposedly crunching out of necessity.
We gave The Lord of the Rings: Gollum a very sad 3/10 in our review, saying “I struggle to think of a positive experience over the thirteen-odd hours I spent playing this game. Gollum is uninspired and dated and The Lord of the Rings fans deserve better than this.”
