I recently watched the documentary this article talks about on why Gollum had to fail the way it did. It was a very informative piece, questioning a lot of the devs and the company in question, and receiving in-depth answers from them (sometimes anonymous).
It boiled down to exactly what you would expect. Overworked developers and artists, who regularly were subjected to crunch, while also being criminally underpaid (some of them even weren’t considered real employees and just voluntary interns, so the company could dodge german minimum wage).
None of them made a bad videogame on purpose, they were just insanely underfunded, not experienced enough in this new genre and the new engine and on top of that, the rights to the LotR IP were time-limited, so they had to release it sooner or later.
The “apology” that was tweeted out, was actually sent out without any of the devs input or knowledge, by their parent company “nacon”. And yes, ChatGPT was likely used for it.
I recently watched the documentary this article talks about on why Gollum had to fail the way it did. It was a very informative piece, questioning a lot of the devs and the company in question, and receiving in-depth answers from them (sometimes anonymous).
It boiled down to exactly what you would expect. Overworked developers and artists, who regularly were subjected to crunch, while also being criminally underpaid (some of them even weren’t considered real employees and just voluntary interns, so the company could dodge german minimum wage).
None of them made a bad videogame on purpose, they were just insanely underfunded, not experienced enough in this new genre and the new engine and on top of that, the rights to the LotR IP were time-limited, so they had to release it sooner or later.
The “apology” that was tweeted out, was actually sent out without any of the devs input or knowledge, by their parent company “nacon”. And yes, ChatGPT was likely used for it.
Source here (it’s in german, but english CC are available)