The Lord of the Rings: Gollum apology was allegedly written using ChatGPT without the developer’s input

According to a recent interview with some former Daedlic staffers, the apology released for The Lord of the Rings Gollum earlier this year was written with the AI program ChatGPT.

I didn’t expect to be writing about TLOT: Gollum again this year, what with Daedalic’s development arm being shuttered earlier this year, potentially because of the failure of the game itself. But as spotted by Twitter user Knoebel, a recent interview between former devs at Daedalic and German gaming outlet GameTwo is alleging that the apology released due to just how bad Gollum came out was written with ChatGPT (thanks, VGC).

The video from GamingTwo that spoke with two sources from Daedalic featured an explanation as to why Gollum failed, with one of the main reasons being that the budget was reportedly only 15 million euros. To be clear, this is an incredibly small amount for a AAA game, if you can call Gollum that, but it’s certainly smaller than what you’d expect for a Lord of the Rings title.

According to the video, the apology was actually produced by Gollum’s publisher, Nacon, and was posted without Daedalic even being made aware of its existence before it could offer its own input. The two sources claimed the apology was written with ChatGPT, an AI program that allows large portions of text to be written with minimal input, but as with all AI it is flawed, leading to the apology to be oddly worded in places.

As well as the ChatGPT claim, it was also alleged that a number of cutscenes had to be outright hidden, despite having been recorded, simply because time ran out. “You can’t just throw more money at something like that, hang on for another year and then everything will be fine,” said senior developer and technical director Paul Schulze. “That’s unrealistic because the game underneath it doesn’t support it.”

Gollum was quickly met with poor reviews, and while it did receive a patch in July with some fixes, it seems unlikely that the game will ever be fully fixed.

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