The Gollum apology was allegedly written by ChatGPT
When The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, developed by Daedalic Entertainment, released in May this year, it was met with so many complaints that Daedalic issued an apology online.
A recent interview with German news site GameTwo suggests that the apology may not have been written by apologetic staff at all, but by an AI software without the developers knowledge.
The Gollum ‘nonpology’ was allegedly written by AI
Gollum is one of the most critically hated games of the year, and is currently sitting at a critic score of 34 and user score of 1.2 on Metacritic.
Twitter user Knoebel spotted that a German interview from GameTwo about Gollum, which had several staff members speaking out about why the game went wrong, included a few anonymous employees stating that the subsequent apology was written by AI.
Knoebel said: “My favourite part [of the interview]. The nonpology from Nacon was written with ChatGPT.”
The sources also claimed that developers had no knowledge of the apology or what it said before it was published, and that it was handled solely by the game’s publisher Nacon.
People noticed issues with the apology back in May
When the apology was first released in May, people noticed that something about it was off, and several comments mentioned thinking that it had been written by AI.
One of the stand-out problems with the initial post was that the name was spelt wrong, being written as The Lord of Ring: Gollum as opposed to The Lord of the Rings: Gollum.
The video explained some of the reasons Gollum was so disappointing
Despite having a team of experienced developers working on Gollum, the development budget was reportedly only around 15 million euros. This is a very modest sum for a AAA game in 2023.
Former Daedalic senior developer and technical director, Paul Schulze, told GameTwo: “There were people working on the game that have been developers for 10,15,20 years, and they’re good, but they can’t do magic because they weren’t given the funds.”
The video also states that time constraints led to characters and cutscenes being hidden from the player.
An example of this is when Gollum was supposed to eavesdrop on a conversation between two major characters which was never animated. To get around this, Gollum looked in a window as the voice recording played.
Similarly, the argument system was also seemingly never finished and didn’t live up to the promises which were made in the trailer.
