The Apology Tweet From 'The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum' Revealed To Be Made By ChatGPT

Business is harsh, and it will forever be that way.

In the gaming industry, competition is becoming fiercer as more and more developers create more and more games, thanks to the advancements of technology, hardware and software. And not to mention, the increasing demand of the market makes the business a lucrative one.

But for Nacon, the game's publisher had to create a formal apology for creating one of the worst games of 2023.

In a tweet, Nacon said that it "sincerely apologized for the underwhelming experience" gamers had when playing the 'The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum' game.

While people at first made fun of how the apology message made a typo about the game, through the misspelled "The Lord of The Ring" where the word "ring" should be plural, not a singular noun, there is yet another thing that people have discovered: the apology posted by its publisher, Nacon, was generated by ChatGPT.

According to a report, Daedalic Entertainment, the developer behind the The Lord of the Rings: Gollum game, has claimed that the apology was generated by the famous AI-powered chatbot, and that the developers themselves had no knowledge of this apology being written.

It's said that the apology was made based solely on Nacon's decision.

Because the apology was made by ChatGPT, some people said that the tool happened to be translating on a message, previously spoken in German.

According to a YouTube video by GameTwo, the team at Nacon used YouTube’s auto-translate tool to get a real-time translation of what’s being said in German.

And this apparently created the typo.

The misspelled word is considered the biggest indicator in hindsight of how this apology was written without any oversight.

Alongside that, Daedelic Entertainment employees also went into detail about what had gone wrong with game, which mostly happened during its development.

Lord of the Rings: Gollum became one of the lowest-rated games of 2023, with critics and fans cited the game's technical problems being the biggest factors to this negative reception.

With poor graphics to the gameplay that is considered uninteresting, and how its narrative also isn't a big selling point, many people who played the game considered the game a failure in all possible fronts.

The game also reported failed to to capture anything interesting about JRR Tolkien’s fiction.

The developers have spoken up about what had happened during the game's development, which is said to be troubled.

It's said that the development budget is reported to have been around €15 million, which is small for a game piggybacking a popular title in 2023.

In comparison, the average development budget of a AAA game in 2023 is usually around $50-$300 million.

"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," said former Daedalic senior developer and technical director, Paul Schulze.

It's also said that the team had to work to meet a deadline that was running out. This resulted to several characters and cutscenes that were meant to be animated were simply hidden from the player.

For example, one scene that was supposed to see Gollum eavesdrop on a conversation between two major characters was recorded, but never animated, so Daedalic had Gollum to just look at a window, and have the audio recording play, and never having to show the characters that were speaking.

"You can’t just throw more money at something like that, hang on for another year and then everything will be fine. That’s unrealistic because the game underneath it doesn’t support it," said Schulze.

Long story short, the game's troubled development is attributed to a lack of funds and time, leading to downscaled features and a rushed release.