With the release of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Daedalic Entertainment plans to provide us with a fresh viewpoint on Middle-earth. We’ll be able to employ Gollum’s abilities to sneak and climb our way through numerous areas, including Mirkwood, Cirith Ungol, and Barad-dur tower, as we experience Tolkien’s beloved world from his point of view. As we make choices during the quest, Gollum’s dual nature will also come into play, with each side presenting a unique strategy.
The Lord of the Rings’ official release date is now known. In September, Gollum will be released on the PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. A Switch version will follow at a later time. Now that the release date has been established, it will be intriguing to watch if Gollum’s forthcoming adventure will be showcased at E3 2022. However, there is always a chance that there could be further announcements.
Read on to learn everything we currently know about Lord of the Rings: Gollum, including gameplay features, story information, and more, while we wait for the summer gaming season to begin.
What is Lord of the Rings: Gollum?
The German developer Daedalic Entertainment, known for its point-and-click adventure games, released The Lord of the Rings: Gollum in March of this year. While the Deponia series is the studio’s most well-known creation, you may also be familiar with Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun and State of Mind from 2018. Daedalic and Middle-earth Enterprises signed a contract to collaborate on this project, therefore the game will be based on the novels rather than the movies.
Lord of the Rings: Gollum release date and platforms
On September 1, 2022, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum will be available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X, according to an official announcement from Daedalic Entertainment. The developer revealed the adventure will arrive on Nintendo’s device “later in the year,” even though it is still scheduled to debut on Switch as well.
Originally scheduled to debut in 2021, Gollum’s arrival was postponed to 2022. We can all update our calendars now that we know the precise date.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum will take advantage of PS5 features
According to Jonas Husges of Daedalic Entertainment, Gollum will make advantage of PS5 next-generation technology, as we reported in November 2020. When Gollum runs out of energy, his physical struggle is directly related to how the game is played, making his behaviours more palpable, according to Husges. This suggests that The Lord of the Rings: Gollum will make use of the haptic feedback feature of the PS5 DualSense, which will probably apply additional resistance to the triggers when Gollum is exhausted or under severe stress.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum will have ray-tracing
Husges commended the PS5’s SSD in the aforementioned interview and asserted that it will benefit the Lord of the Rings: Gollum significantly reduce load times and produce a sizable explorable world. The world of Gollum will likewise be exceptionally well-lit as a result.
According to Daedalic art director Mathias Fischer, “Clean, ray-traced shadows enable for maximum effect in player direction in establishing stealth tunnels while dynamic and shifting light sources bring in the extra challenge while Gollum is roaming around the darkness.” All of these factors, of course, have the pleasant side effect of giving the game a sense of vastness and making the surroundings we are constructing for free roaming characters appear as magnificent as Middle-earth deserves.
Lord of the Rings Gollum story – When will the game take place?
According to Daedalic, who spoke with The Hollywood Reporter(opens in new tab), the game is set before the events of The Lord of the Rings and will take place in the years after Gollum obtains the one ring. “The primary things we will see in our game are everything that happened to him before he emerges in the book.”
According to Carsten Fichtelmann, CEO and co-founder of Daedalic Entertainment, “We have the plot that we all know from the book, but everything that occurs to him before he appears in the book are the primary things we will see in our game.” We’ll describe what happened before he first appeared in the novels.
In January 2020, Edge Magazine published a world-exclusive preview of the game that included additional plot elements. The first scene of the game takes place in the castle of Barad-dur in Mordor, where the monster is being held against his will. Recently, Daedalic defined the impending adventure as a look at Gollum’s experiences from “behind-the-scenes” in the opening chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring, when he flees the foggy mountains after losing the ring to Bilbo.
We got to watch Gollum in Barad-Dur as he attempted to get to a gate and escape the tower once and for all in the very first gameplay peek from Daedelic. According to the developer, the game will venture outside of Mordor to other regions of Middle-earth, such as the elf country, where we’ll encounter a number of Lord of the Rings characters. It’s a brilliant choice to set the game in this historical period since it gives Daedalic a lot of creative leeway to explore the murkier parts of the lore that Tolkein didn’t focus on as much.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum characters
The Nazgul and King Thranduil, who is, for those who don’t know, the father of Legolas, will also appear in the game in some capacity along with a “variety of friendly or unfriendly faces”! We were given a quick glimpse of the elven king in the land of Mirkwood during a hands-off preview for The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, as well as Gandalf, who will also be present during our time with Gollum. We already know about a young elf named Mell who Gollum meets in Mirkwood and Greshneg who we’ll encounter in Barad-dur. There will also be some new faces that we’ll encounter during the levels that can help us along the journey.
Importantly, the Gollum created by Daedalic will not resemble the character made famous by the Lord of the Rings films. Producer Kai Fiebig says, “We started with the person he was and then evolved him. “You can see that before the Ring corrupted him, this was something like a human person.” So when it does release, don’t anticipate hearing or seeing an Andy Serkis clone in-game!
Lord of the Rings Gollum gameplay details
Gollum’s stealth-based abilities and parkouring capabilities that he can employ as he moves through each level were first revealed during gaming. He must rely on his sense of hearing and night vision in order to use dimly lit areas to subdue his attackers because he can’t defeat opponents by charging into fight. Gollum is a skilled freestyle climber who can also jump across platforms, hang from ledges, and squeeze through narrow spaces to get away from or around his enemies. He has developed his skills over the past 500 years. Gollum’s stamina gauge will be depleted by every action that takes some sort of force, so you must be aware of how much stamina you still have before launching into another difficult climb.
The conflict between Gollum and Smeagol, his inner Hobbit, will also be a major component of the gameplay. Gollum “already has that tremendous struggle in the character,” according to CEO Carsten Fichtelmann, “which implies there is a strong reason there are decisions to be made in the game: the Smeagol decisions or the Gollum decisions.” These options have thus far been presented as dialogue responses or as selections that correspond to his various on-screen personalities, but according to Daedelic, the system is still vulnerable to change while the game is still being developed.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum levels
We’ve already seen brief glimpses of three distinct places that Gollum and I will be exploring. The most recent glimpse, in contrast to the first, which displayed the shadowy depths of Barad-dur, displayed the Cirith Ungol mountains in Mordor and Mirkwood. Despite the fact that the game’s stages are all described as being “very linear,” you can exploit Gollum’s diminutive size and climbing prowess to take advantage of a variety of various routes to advance.
As a result, Daedalic’s visual aesthetic is intended to avoid “the uncanny valley” and prioritise strong design over authentic realism. The team is attempting to “create something that constitutes a statement,” according to Fichtelmann’s initial assessment. Given Tolkein’s rogue’s gallery of creatures, the game has a lot of leeway if it wanted to include some elements of the horror genre. Gollum’s transformation into a hunchbacked creature will undoubtedly be shocking then. Daedalic would do well to emphasise the imposing dread of some of Tolkein’s animals when facing an unarmed, helpless creature like Gollum and not say, an all-powerful wizard or warrior king, by placing the player in the shoes of the unconventional hero.
It appears that the game will attempt to elicit from you different, possibly more uplifting and sympathetic feelings for the horrifying creature than you may have previously encountered in books and novels. There is a lot of space for experimentation in this story, especially for a studio that is so experienced with branching narratives because Gollum is by nature a tragic character.
