this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Well by all reports they did a shitty job, so....
I mean, yeah. That's because they were tasked with something they had never done before. Given a product that's absolutely awful from even a marketing perspective. Gollum? Really?
Yeah, I was skeptical about this one from the start. It didn’t sound fun.
They choose to do this. Delicious has historically been a point and click developer, but they wanted to diversify, especially since their previous title "pillars of the earth" flopped. They first tried their have at rts with "a year of rain" which is simply not that good, and then looked into Gollum.
You also can't raid make the argument that the project was rushed out the door, considering the game was supposed to release in 2021 (two years ago).
They tried something they had no experience in, not through coercion but because they wanted to, and produced a game of shockingly low quality. Since this wasn't the first flop, but just the latest in a huge series of flops, (though it was the most expensive and high profile one) the studio closed.
The managers chose to do this, and they chose a horrendous concept.
The developers just tried to execute, they also failed but the project was doomed from the start.
I see no indication that this was a to down forced decision from management (just from having talked to some developers at Gamescom a couple of years ago).
The concept really wasn't horrible it just looks like it now having seen the product, but a stealth have themed after Gollum is not a dumb idea.
There's lots of stuff you could do, like e.g. use the ring for temporary invisibility but at the cost of losing some e.g. sanity resource you need to recover.
The problem with this game is that the idea being bad doesn't even really factor into its quality since just the actual bare-bones graphics and fundamental gameplay is so broken that the lack of original ideas isn't really a factor.
If this was just a no-thrills e.g. thief clone with a Gollum skin, nobody would bar an eye. The problem is that even this low bar of "some stealth game+Gollum" is not reached.
In fact, we have a very direct comparison to a different "Gollum like stealth have produced by an indie developer" that was a smash hit: "Styx: master of shadows" is a climbing based stealth have featuring a small green goblin like protagonist that has to deal with a powerful but risky to use substance.
You don't have to make excuses for an independent company that willingly took on a project and was in no way coerced into it.
From what I had heard they were pretty much setup to fail. Wasn't the game made into a LOTR title specifically so the publisher could hold publishing rights?