Lord Of The Rings: Gollum Devs Explain Its “Creepy” Elves And Melian’s Role

thegamer.com:

NACON’s Bigben Week in Paris hosted previews of a variety of the publisher’s forthcoming games, but there was only one I was really there to see. Steelrising may have surprised me with its polish, Clash: Artifacts of Chaos was a wonderful, colourful, and surprisingly robust action adventure game that I hadn’t even heard of, and Blood Bowl 3 is vastly improved over its beta. But none of them were Lord of the Rings: Gollum.

I’ve been following Gollum since it was first announced, as have many Lord of the Rings fans. Lord of the Rings games can be hit and miss, especially in recent memory. The Shadow of Mordor series has fun, Assassin’s Creed-esque gameplay but completely bastardises the lore. The Lord of the Rings Online, despite being 15 years old, is still going from strength to strength, and faithfully folds a surprising amount of Tolkien’s world into the MMO. Netease has also created a mobile MMO based on the Tolkien license, but takes more liberties. How would Gollum toe the line? The short answer is that it will be based on Tolkien, but fill in some gaps. The long answer is, of course, a bit more complicated.

Related: Tolkien Experts Saw A Sneak Peek Of The Rings Of Power - Here’s What They Think

I’m going to start at the beginning. Lord of the Rings: Gollum was in a room separate from the other games. The room was striking, every wall adorned with huge eyes of Sauron from the new key art. Two large monitors were showing gameplay. This was a hands-off preview, so two developers had the controllers in hand.

One of these devs was Saide Haberstroh, the game’s project manager, who guided me through two sections of Gollum. The first took place in Mordor – Cirith Ungol specifically – where the first half of the game is