Documentary shows how a “Lord of the Rings” game was supposed to be the first AAA game from a Hamburg studio, but instead brought it down

earthpressnews

The stealth adventure The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is considered one of the worst games of 2023. The game flopped so badly that there will now be no more games from the popular Hamburg studio Daedalic Entertainment. A report shows what went wrong behind the scenes at the game company and why Gollum was doomed to failure.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was actually supposed to be something very special: a AAA game from Germany, which the Hamburg studio Daedalic was supposed to make internationally known with the strong “The Lord of the Rings” license behind it.

When the action game was released in May 2023 after several delays, it was quickly considered a candidate for the worst game of the year. Gollum failed in the international reviews and our GameStar colleague Sascha Penzhorn also had a hard time saying anything positive about the “licensed cucumber” in his test (paid PLUS article).

Gollum flopped so badly that Daedalic publicly apologized and shortly afterwards announced that it would no longer produce its own games from now on and would only act as a publisher. In a nearly 40-minute report, the Game Two editorial team is now getting to the bottom of the question of how it got to this point. You can watch the whole video here:

Recommended editorial content

At this point you will find external content from YouTube that complements the article.

View YouTube content

I agree to external content being displayed to me. Personal data may be transmitted to third-party platforms. Read more about our privacy policy.

Crunch and starvation wages at the supposedly family indie studio

What went wrong? In order to answer this question, the report traces the history of Daedalic Entertainment.

  • After the Hamburg studio made a name for itself with humorous point’n’click adventures such as the Edna and Deponia games, it tried to gain a foothold in other genres.
  • The development that the studio was making was already evident in games like Silence and A Year of Rain: ambitious projects for which there was a lack of experience and perhaps also the budget and which ultimately flopped painfully.
  • Behind the scenes, the working atmosphere is said to have been stressful: Former employees report in the report about an “atmosphere of fear”, and overtime without pay or an opportunity to compensate is said to have been required.
  • While its own production was in crisis, Daedalic celebrated successes primarily as a publisher, for example with Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun from the Munich developer studio Mimimi.

    • When the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing

    When Daedalic was able to secure the LOTR license in 2018 after a long effort, they had big plans. The following year, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was announced as an action game with AAA ambitions and was compared to blockbuster franchises such as Uncharted and Tomb Raider.

    Game Two’s report paints a picture of a studio that has completely overreached itself and lost itself in its great ambitions. It also gives the impression that the studio management made promises that the actual team was completely unable to keep.

    Lord of the Rings: Gollum was poorly received – HandOfBlood plays it anyway, tries really hard, even plays in cosplay

    More videos

    Numerous mechanics were planned that sounded great on paper, but then had to be discarded. Other elements made it into the game, but they are hardly used there. However, this focus on details meant that some fundamental aspects were neglected:

  • Until the very end, we had to work on Gollum’s movement on all fours because we simply had no experience with it
  • The internal struggle between Sméagol and Gollum looked promising in previews, but was not finished and was ultimately only implemented as a quick stopgap solution
  • The approach of first writing a story and then building a game around it had worked well with the classic adventures, but no longer worked with Gollum

    • There’s no AAA game without a AAA budget

    As Daedalic explains in a statement, they did not receive the necessary funding to provide the game with a larger budget or more manpower. With a budget of 15 million euros and – according to the credits – 85 people involved, the project ultimately fell far short of AAA’s original ambitions.

    In order to complete the project for the release – which has now been postponed twice – the infamous crunch occurred with a lot of overtime. However, according to Daedalic, these have been compensated. So the team seems to have tried very hard to save Gollum, despite all the difficulties.

    The employees are said to have been hit even harder by the devastating reviews of the release. 25 of them are said to have lost their jobs shortly afterwards when the development department was closed.

    The report impressively shows that a toxic working environment and crunch are not problems of the large AAA studios that are perceived by some as “soulless”.

    MeinMMO has asked Daedalic for a statement on the allegations in the documentation. As soon as we have this, we will integrate it into the article here.

    CD Projekt Red recently showed how you can fight back after such a disastrous project with Cyberpunk 2077:

    Players start a direct comparison in Cyberpunk 2077 before and after 2.0, showing what they want

    mmod-game