Joseph Anderson - Joe's Final Thoughts On Gollum

[@AndersonClips]

HE HATES IT!

[@__casparin__3864]

Nah, HE LOVES IT!

[@cokeMONSTERps3]

LOVES Gollum.

[@AndersonClips]

@@cokeMONSTERps3 LOVES forspoken

[@JayTohab]

Personally, I think this could have worked as a horror/simulation mix. If we're playing as Gollum, the experience should be immersive, but emotionally uncomfortable. He was hammed up a little in the movies, and nowadays he's mostly considered a meme. A good Gollum game should remedy this, stripping away all the story elements down the most unsettling aspects of his character. The environments should be scary, and Gollum should in his own way be scarier. The fact that they focused so much on the external- the slavery, the orcs, Gandalf, and all that stuff- is, in my opinion, what hurts the game most. It doesn't help that they tried to make it a cartoony 3D platformer, though.

[@WasLilChrisnowbigish]

They should of just made a short 2-3 hour experience type game like a LotR Scorn. I have no idea why the thought making a game where you have to be play as a Slave Gollum for 10+ hours would be fun, there is nothing fun about it, like who asked for this?

[@cokeMONSTERps3]

​@@WasLilChrisnowbigish Length is a major factor in justifying a price tag to the majority of customers. Even experienced devs rarely tackle a short focused experience when asking for full price.

[@Imperial_Squid]

Exactly, I feel like it needs a dash of some Hellblade style fuckery with the player/mental instability of the character shenanigans

[@Amaror2]

Not only is it bad ... a sequel is already in development. This comes from a german studio whose previous work consists of mostly point and click adventures. They have basically never made something like this, but they had attempted and failed in recent years to appeal to more mainstream audiences by upping the visual fidelity of their point and click adventures. This costs them a lot of money for not a lot of return and now this game was their attempt to "make it big" with the LotR franchise. And they already got about 2 million euros from the german government for a sequel before this game even released, lol.

[@HenryWayat]

I don't think that it's a sequel to gollum specifically, more like the new game in the LOTR universe.

[@АндрейНеугодников-м6е]

Of course they got money from the government they support rapefugees

[@crakhaed]

They're still going ahead even though this game was a colossal flop? Surely they'll take the feedback into consideration and improve...right?

[@Amaror2]

crakhaed The plan for another game was apparently already greenlit for subsidies before the game released.

[@sporepda]

All this is so sad to me, because Daedelic Entertainment is by far my favorite game studio and their games played a big role in my childhood. Seeing this and now that shit with Deponia... it hurts on a personal level

[@SlamBolts]

this game makes some licensed movie tie in games look like AAA masterpieces

[@joelmiller9134]

This could've been great if it took inspiration from Little Nightmares

[@Imperial_Squid]

"Could this ever have been good?" I feel like, at a fundamental level, a Gollum game is just a mix of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and Styx: Master of Shafows (tonally like the first and mechanically like the second), both of which are phenomenal games

[@Nightfurygaming247]

it really reminds me of Styx. i doubt Joe would play it but i'd be interested in him playing it to contrast gollum.

[@mechanicalmonk2020]

"It won't even start" should be a 0 wtf is he on about.

[@LucasOe]

I feel like this game would be better if it didn't start

[@Bizbappo7171]

Cursed from the start. A static, tertiary character from a novel/movie franchise isn’t something you can build a good video game about

[@EdnaKonrad4MVS]

They might as well have made 'Star Wars: Jar-Jar Binks'.

[@lillieampurra]

​@@EdnaKonrad4MVSyes but then you can use the 'jar-jar was secretly a sith lord' meme as a part of the plot. gollum's limited by the fact that he dies.

[@EdnaKonrad4MVS]

@@lillieampurra Although Gollum is doomed by canon, several works (Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Halo: Reach, Better Call Saul) have shown that it is possible to be emotionally invested towards ill-fated characters. Gollum, on the other hand, was deliberately written to be an obnoxious figure (which is acknowledged in 'Keeping up with the Daedalics’) and highly depraved (it's heavily implied that Gollum has consumed infants, among other things) - making it very hard to sympathize or root for him as he attempts to go back to his busy schedule of sabotaging his own life. If anything; you'll *want* to simply put Gollum out of his misery - which is what most players ended up doing. Still; they *could* have made it a comical retelling, much like 'LEGO The Lord of the Rings', rather than making the journey as bleak as possible.