The Lord of the Rings: Gollum devs were expected to make an ambitious triple-A game on a tenth of the budget, report claims

rockpapershotgun.com:

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is one of the more notable video game messes in recent years, with the Tolkien spin-off releasing earlier this year to universally negative reviews and claiming the unwanted position of being the worst game of 2023 so far on Metacritic and OpenCritic.

A new report has delved into some of what went wrong behind the scenes at developers Daedalic, alleging a combination of overstretched resources, crunch and ambitions to somehow create a triple-A game on a fraction of the budget.

More than 30 Daedalic staff spoke to German outlet Game Two, revealing that the studio set out with the lofty ambition of creating a story-driven game with a combination of different gameplay ideas. Among the different gameplay elements apparently considered during development was the ability to free climb in the style of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, before the idea was ultimately discarded.

That didn’t stop the game cramming in a number of other half-baked and underused ideas, from different minigames and mechanics from a command menu for companions - which is only used four times in the final game - to the internal debate between Gollum and Smeagol, which at one point was going to be a more ambitious minigame requiring players to hit moving decision bubbles. The mechanic was never fully finished, resulting in an apparent “stopgap” solution making it into the final game.

The game also drifted away from its original focus on narrative but failed to adjust its gameplay to suit, resulting in long stretches where the player simply accompanies characters or stands still while story details are delivered to them. Some scenes meant to include animated characters were altered so that missing animations