this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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The idea that only having a €15M budget is what caused this game's issues is ridiculous. It's not a game that had good ideas and just failed to execute them properly; it's fundamentally bad on a conceptual level.
The setting and story concept are bad. When the game was first announced, I don't think I heard or saw a single discussion where someone was excited to experience playing through the story of Gollum in that time period in the story. Or even playing as Gollum at all - he's a great secondary character in the books and films, but he's hardly a character you want to play as in a video game. There's no room for character development either.
The game design is bad. It's just bad. No amount of time, money or polish is going to fix the terrible basic design principles the game is built on. And even if they had 10x the budget and hired a world-class lead game designer from the start, it still would have the issues with the story and character.
The whole project is one that shouldn't have left the brainstorming session it was conceived in.
This is revisionist. There were a lot of people excited to play as gollum and people being concerned.
Source?
I was excited when it was first announced. I was hoping for a stealth game with gameplay like souls games or the shadow of mordor games. Sadly the game wasn't even close to that so I didn't buy it.
Those were your go-tos for gameplay expectations for sneaking around as a pretty weak little goblin man? I would've gone for Styx instead, a game about sneaking around as a little goblin man. (Which I think actually belongs to the same publisher)
Obviously combat would have to be balanced for Gollums powers. 1v1 an orc could have been fine but anything else would overpower him. I didn't play Styx so I can't compare it. I played the Splinter Cell Series and Dishonored, but both offered technology and weapons with range to help with sneaking. So I opted for games with a high fantasy setting. A game with controls like Souls, balanced for sneaking and ambushes as a focus, using the environment as your asset? Feels to me like it could work. Well, nothing like Souls, Shadow or Styx happened and we got whatever the Gollum game was.
I only played one for maybe like 2 hours, but they seem like pretty good games, you could probably pick one up for cheap on sale.
Also when I think of Soulslike Gollum, all I see in my mind is this gormless little creature wielding a 6 foot axe or something and that just makes me laugh.
Anyway, yeah, Nacon/Daedelic had several studios that had more experience making stealth-action games. I mean, besides the guys that made Styx, they also have the Shadow Tactics guys. Isometric tactical stealth could've been another option.
It's honestly like they just made the absolute wrong decision for all things during development.