Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum - stealth action game by Daedalic

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014



https://af.gog.com/game/the_lord_of_the_rings_gollum?as=1649904300

Daedalic got Middle-earth license, and the first game will be a Gollum action adventure game to be released in 2021: https://venturebeat.com/2019/03/25/the-lord-of-the-rings-gollum-daedalic-entertainment-announcement/

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is Daedalic’s first game in new Middle-earth licensing deal

The-Lord-of-the-Rings-Gollum-.png

Above: The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is Daedalic's new adventure game.

Image Credit: Daedalic Entertainment

Daedalic Entertainment has built a reputation for story-rich adventure games since Cartsen Fichtelman and Jan “Poki” Müller-Michaelis founded it in 2007. But last week at the Game Developers Conference 2019 in San Francisco, the German publisher made the biggest news — and maybe its greatest risk — of its 12-year existence: a game about Gollum, the most conflicted character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings epic.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a narrative adventure game that Daedalic is targeting for a 2021 release for PC and “all relevant consoles platforms at the time” (so expect PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Switch here along with even Google Stadia). It’s the first game of a new partnership between the German publisher and Middle-earth Enterprises, the company that handles licensing work for Tolkien’s books. Daedalic is using Epic’s Unreal Engine to make the game. The deal represents a shift for Daedalic from focusing more on its own intellectual properties and lesser-known works like author Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth to working on one of the biggest franchises in entertainment.

“Our first game we’re doing is about Gollum. The conflict is always in the main character, in the protagonist,” Fichtelman said in an interview with GamesBeat at GDC 2019. “You have the two characters talking to him continuously. From a storytelling perspective, it’s a good starting point to do whatever we want to do.”

Gollum is the star

The story takes place in the same timeframe of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book of The Lord of the Rings. It follows the path of Gollum and what happens before Frodo and his companions find him trailing them in the Mines of Moria.

“We’ll tell his story until he first shows up” in The Fellowship of the Ring, Fichtelman said. “Sometimes they mention some things that happen to Gollum, but nobody knows exactly what happened. That’s our task, explaining what exactly happened there.”

It’s an ambitious project — Gollum is a complicated character (essentially, two personas in one between the loathsome Gollum and pittable Sméagol, or as Sam called these personalities, “Stinker” and “Slinker”), and Andy Serkis turned in what could be seen as the defining performance for Gollum in Peter Jackson’s film trilogy. The scene in which Gollum argues between his personas in The Two Towers is one of the best examples of acting, digital animation, and overall filmmaking in the entire series. Living up to this is going to be one of many challenges that Daedalic’s team faces in creating this Gollum game.



This scene shows one important aspect of Gollum: that there’s both something loathsome and pitiable about this miserable creature. That’s part of the task that Daedalic faces.

“When you play Gollum, you’ll play Sméagol at the same time. You need to make some decisions, maybe some decisions that are more or less from Sméagol, and some that are from Gollum. You can decide for yourself what you’d like to see more,” Fichtelman said. “When you decide some things, it could be—this is reflected in the mechanics. The game forces you to convince yourself and find one of these two positions. When it comes to other iconic characters in the universe, in Middle-earth, we’ll see what happens around Gollum.”

Fichtelman said Daedalic is no stranger to taking on ambitious projects. He points to Follet’s works as an example.

“But doing something ambitious is better than doing something everybody does, he said. “When we approached Ken Follett about doing a game based on Pillars of the Earth, which is 1,400 pages, we said, ‘Yeah, it’s doable. We’ll bring a fresh look at it.’ It’s quite niche, but all the experience we’ve had with Pillars of the Earth and the other games we’ve produced, and also action games like The Long Journey Home—I think we’re now capable of this.

“Everything we’ve done when it comes to storytelling, we already have that in our genetics. Now we can bring an action part to this. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum will be an action-adventure. … It’ll be the first game in a series of games. It will be premium. It will come out on all relevant platforms we have in 2021, which means, after the announcement from Google, this is for sure PC and console, but with that technology it seems like you should also be able to play on your iPad or whatever.”

Gollum isn’t the first adventure game set in Middle-earth — we saw some text adventure games in the 1980s — but it’s been years since anyone made one.

A new adventure
thefranzkafka.png

Above: Daedalic Entertainment’s The Franz Kafka Videogame earned awards and nominations.

Image Credit: Von Daedalic Entertainment


Daedalic has 85 people at its studios in Hamburg (its HQ) and Munich. It’s won a bevvy of awards from Germany’s development scene, including several studio of the year awards. Fichtelman said “in those categories, we’re the record-holder. We’ve won more awards than any other company in Germany at these two ceremonies, based on games you can find on Steam.”

Even with this success, Fichtelman said Daedalic made fewer games in 2018 than in previous years, and that his company is facing a landscape in which people aren’t buying storytelling games as much as they once did. Which is one of many business reasons why he signed a deal for The Lord of the Rings.

“We face maybe the same situation Telltale faced last year, when they went down. The audience for storytelling games is still out there, but the problem is that this audience only likes to watch these kinds of games, which then you make a game that’s meant to be played on PC or console, and the audience maybe only wants to watch it on YouTube or Twitch,” Fichtelman said. “For us, we see big numbers of people who only watch our content, but we have no solution to monetize this audience.”

So a few years ago, Fichtelman rang up Middle-earth Enterprises.

“Due to the fact that we’ve released so many storytelling games – we have quite a good international standing when it comes to storytelling – I called, four years ago, the guys from Middle-earth Enterprises in Berkeley, like Peter Jackson did 20 years ago. I said, I’d like to do games about The Lord of the Rings. … This is one of our solutions for facing the storytelling situation.”

Middle-earth Enterprises did not return a request for comment.


This is NOT the Poki's new game, fortunately. From a long interview with Daedalic CEO: https://venturebeat.com/2019/03/25/...-fichtelman-dives-into-middle-earth/view-all/

For the Edna and Harvey series — my cofounder Poki did both of those games. And also in Deponia, you have many characters who have split personalities. But especially Edna, she has the little toy Harvey who’s her conscience and she talks to her. Poki [Daedalic cofounder Jan “Poki” Müller-Michaelis] won’t be involved in Gollum, but as a company we have something like a writers’ room.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Boleskine

Arcane
Joined
Sep 12, 2013
Messages
4,045
When I think of Lord of the Rings, and at the same time I also think of action, the first thing that comes to mind is... Gollum.

“We face maybe the same situation Telltale faced last year, when they went down. The audience for storytelling games is still out there, but the problem is that this audience only likes to watch these kinds of games, which then you make a game that’s meant to be played on PC or console, and the audience maybe only wants to watch it on YouTube or Twitch,” Fichtelman said. “For us, we see big numbers of people who only watch our content, but we have no solution to monetize this audience.”

And their solution is to make the same mistakes Telltale did?
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Tidbits from the long interview:

Now, we’re doing it with a deeper storytelling approach in an action adventure type of game. Imagine Lara Croft or Uncharted without that much fighting. Some of the mechanics are clear — stealth, climbing, tricking other characters. But one thing that’s also quite important for us is to do something that’s unique. You said that this is ambitious, but it’s also unexpected. This is quite important. If we then hopefully create a great experience, then there’s no more need to another Gollum game. Which then means, hopefully the game stands for the next 30 years. You have all the possibilities, which means that we then created something that stays—graphically, it means we don’t go too deep into the uncanny valley. We’ll try to do something that, when it comes to colors and shapes, is something that can stand like The Lion King from Disney, for the next decades.

When it comes to Gollum, the best comparisons are the action-adventures you normally see on the consoles.

GamesBeat: When did you first read The Lord of the Rings?

Fichtelman: Twenty years ago? I’m not that fresh with—I’m not the main author of the game. But interestingly, our main author was also in charge of Blackguards and the Dark Eye games. One of the most important things about working on The Lord of the Rings for Middle-Earth is having a Middle-Earth expert working on the game. We asked, at one of our last meetings—normally this is a hand-picked person. They have five or six people around the globe, and you work with them on writing whatever you do. Our lead author, Tilman Schanen, he’s already presented to Middle-earth about what he’s planning for Gollum. We asked in that meeting who we should work with, who should be our consultant. They said we already had him in Tilman. When it comes especially to questions about the world, I would normally say Tilman is a better person to ask, aside from me.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Interesting article from July: https://www.gameswirtschaft.de/wirtschaft/bastei-luebbe-stoppt-daedalic-verkaufsplaene/

Google Translate:

Because of Lord of the Rings: Bastei Lübbe stops Daedalic sales plans

Since summer 2018 the Cologne Bastei Lübbe AG is looking for a buyer for the games subsidiary Daedalic Entertainment. Now the board comes on the brakes.

9 million euros, the Hamburg publisher Daedalic Entertainment ("The Pillars of the Earth", "The Long Journey Home") recently contributed to the 95-million-euro sales of Bastei Lübbe AG. This was announced by the listed publishing house in the run-up to today's annual press conference for the year 2018/19.

In recent months, Chief Executive Officer Carel Halff has, among other things, been busy finding a future for the games business. Bastei Lübbe holds 51% each in Daedalic Entertainment GmbH and Daedalic Entertainment Bavaria GmbH . The reasons given for this were the increasing internationalization of the games industry and the rapidly increasing investment requirements for the development of games. As a result, several options have been reviewed for Daedalic - sale, ownership, joint venture.

The annual report released today states: "For now, we have interrupted this process to focus on the realization of a global blockbuster: Lord of the Rings. The announcement of this license has triggered a worldwide media response and now requires the concentration of forces. "

Is meant "The Lord of the Rings: Gollum" : The action adventure based on Tolkien's Middle-earth universe was announced in March, to 2021 appear for PC and console, and is the largest project in the twelve-year corporate history. Daedalic boss Carsten Fichtelmann put the budget on beyond 5 million euros.

For the financial year 2019/2020 Lübbe expects first a games turnover of 11 to 12 million euros. The increase is to be achieved through contracts with external studios in which Daedalic acts as a publisher - similar to the case of "Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun" .

Core business of Bastei Lübbe are novels, non-fiction books and audiobooks - bestselling authors like Dan Brown, Andreas Eschbach and Ken Follett are under contract with the Cologne. The publisher has had turbulent months, including a balance sheet scandal , resignations of the supervisory board, changes of the board, deep red figures and strategic reorientation. The restructuring measures introduced are showing initial successes: the share price, which has collapsed in the meantime, has noticeably recovered since the beginning of the year.

Or, as Lübbe's CEO Halff puts it: "The ground is ready, it can now go up again."
 

thesecret1

Arcane
Joined
Jun 30, 2019
Messages
5,675
They should just go wild with it. Fuck the books - Gollum's in your hands now and he's taking control of this shit. Shiv Frodo and get the ring, blackjack a Nazgûl before stealing his mount, sabotage the goddamn eye of Sauron with blackpowder before setting Gollum up as the new leader of Mordor. Also add stats so that I can pump points in STR and turn Gollum into 150kg of pure muscle.
 

oldmanpaco

Master of Siestas
Joined
Nov 8, 2008
Messages
13,609
Location
Winter
They should have a mini-game where Gollum steals babies for a midnight snack like in the books.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom