If it’s true that Nacon participated in the game industry’s pathetic innovation without Daedalic Entertainment’s knowledge (which we’ll just call apology.jpg…), then this is a very cheeky move on the part of the French publisher. (Or maybe it’s just a bit obvious, since they pulled WRC 8 from Steam about two weeks before its release and then moved it to the Epic Games Store…)

Below, we’ve embedded a video from the German publication GameTwo (but don’t worry, there are English subtitles too!) in which several ex-Daedalic members talk about the development of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum and where they went wrong. After the game’s release came apology.jpg, in which Daedalic talked about an “underwhelming experience” that the studio “deeply regretted” for falling far short of expectations, and then promised to fix it with future updates. (Though there were layoffs right after that).

According to their sources who spoke to GameTwo, the apology.jpg was not the work of Daedalic, so it could not have been made by anyone other than the game’s publisher Nacon, but that’s not the only problem, it’s also a lazy scumbag company if they used artificial intelligence, i.e. ChatGPT, to write the statement! And that sounds amazing: is that how much Nacon gives a damn?!

Paul Schutze, former Senior Developer and Technical Director at Daedalic, wrote that the staff included developers with 10-15-20 years of experience, but they were not allowed to develop as they wished and had a budget of around 15 million Euros, a very small amount for a AAA game. In addition, despite repeated delays, they ran out of time and had to hide several scenes and characters because they couldn’t animate them. (That’s why Gollum was looking through a window somewhere, and that’s where he heard the recorded dialogue between the two characters).

Throwing money at the system was not a solution because the game itself did not support systems. For example, the argument between Gollum and Smeagol was a temporary, quick fix, not what Daedalic had in mind (they originally wanted to have movie-style dialogue, with the camera changing angles depending on who was talking; this was shown in the trailers, but was eventually cut).

Source: VGC