Adventure Gamers - Forums

Nothing against Daedalic, I’ve enjoyed a couple of their games, but I have no idea why you would hand them a project like this.

Aye. Seems like Nacon who bought them for 60 mil in 2022 are you fairly average, anti-gamer, anti-consumer corpo publisher. We assume it is them who decided to paywall lore entries and make additional voice acting DLC…but Daedalic are now between a rock and a hard place.

It looks like they’re going (to have to) double down and dig their hole deeper. Their best recourse would be to denounce Nacon, that would likely mean breaking NDA and yes, losing their aquisition altogether.

Here’s the problem. If they don’t do that, they can just keep digging that corpo grave they’re already four foot deep in. But its also understandable that they could stand to lose a lot even if they did. One thing they would definitely redeem is some reputation amongst gamers. I don’t really put it to Daedalic myself, to favour gamers over corporate overlords. But an explicit statement that they disagree with Nacon’s decisions or handling of the project is the only get out of jail free card they really have, and that opportunity is quickly fading. They are choosing the corpo “we’ll fix it” routine which doesn’t even apply because the problems are inherent, baked into the game’s design and vision (or lack thereof).

If I remember rightly it took them 6 odd years to make and release Pillars of the Earth (adaptation) so in my eyes the problems with them as a studio were already present. I may be wrong about Pillars specifically, but I certainly recall them sending me a bunch of material for AdventureX 2011 or 12 only to find out a couple of years later all those projects were cancelled, or one was Pillars of the Earth and therefore in development for many years after until its eventual release. And that was when they actually had the MVP creative force Doom speaks of? Here at AG.com we all know what it’s like to lose an MVP…

Back then it felt like they were the type to play a big promo game without actually being able to deliver, and when they did deliver it would be “mid” at best. And boy oh boy has this notion been firmly set in stone now with Gollum. Yet again, they played a big old press game and managed only to release a steaming turd at the end of it.

Granted, with no special love also means I hold a particularly cold view, but I think their actions can potentially rub off unfavorably onto other indie devs/publishers. To get 1/10 scores and “disgrace” mentioned in numerous articles… Seriously? That’s where point and click developers are headed? Of course not, but we all take a bit of a reputation hit no thanks to Daedalic. It also irks me that collectively, 60 or so of them, couldn’t have stood up for something better, internally. Standards and all that.

Anyway what’s done is done, they’ll forever be known as “that Gollum game” and not a whole lot else anymore. But hey, it’s not like anyone outside of the P&C community ever played Deponia anyway. So maybe they still carry some favour in communities like this… but the wider one? Yeah, no. LOL. How to earn yourself the “dunce” hat in one fell swoop…

I mean, we’d all like it if they went back to the days of deponia, edna&harvey;,and go back to being our quirky modern lucas arts with a dark edge…. But thats just not who the company is anymore, and if you want a large market the types of games they are making makes “more sense.” They actually had a couple of point&click; games at the con booth i visited them at. They seemed pretty good. But yeah the reception of gollum feels like a repeat of silence. A whole bunch of time and resources used and its not landing with people. And comparatively people liked silence.

Daedalic has decided to stop developing games. From now on it’s publishing only.

Yeah i saw the news. I dont know if this means the recently announced deponia game is cancelled. Daedalic was co-developing it, so maybe not.

As i suspected, people on the dev team confirmed in the steam forums that surviving deponia is not cancelled because another developer is handling the technical stuff while daedalic is supplying story content.
Anyway, its a spin-off title and headed for early access. Not ready to judge it beyond that.

Yep, Daedalic killed themselves. Not sure there’s much room for remorse. If you make point and click games for 15 years and then decide you’ll genre hop to something completely out of your league without working your way through to that point of competence with some projects to help you cross the boundaries - well you have only yourself to blame.

Don’t try to run a 20 mile marathon when you’ve barely the experience of running the 100 metres… I’ll stop short of “good riddance” but honestly not going to applaud the guy who decided to look down the barrel of a gun and press the trigger to see what happens. Because THAT is Daedalic and “Lord of Ring: Gollum” (their words) in a nutshell.

They didn’t want to earn it. Instead, seemed to want to skip over developing years of experience in the 3D action-adventure genre and jump straight to the fortune and glory part. And now they’re dead because of it. This should be a STARK warning to other game developers thinking they can genre-hop to glory overnight. It doesn’t work like that. Daedalic will become the encyclopedia entry on such a matter lol.

FromSoft is a good example of how you have to make a bunch of crap to build your skills in a particular area, genre, game style etc and eventually - after many years - you create a Dark Souls, because you earned it through the time you put into experience, learning and iterating. They certainly didn’t make one of those in their first foray into 3D games, not even the first 10 games if I remember rightly. Daedalic needed to create smaller, less ambitious 3D action-adventures but as I say they chose to skip that part and decided a “triple A” 70 dollar cross console game would be the perfect place to “try to learn” (partly self-admitted in another recent press release). That just makes them ******* idiots and not a lot else.

I will agree it is “sad”, but sad like OceanGate - for all the wrong reasons and totally avoidable. #gollumgate . When you strip away the parts, the decisions, the technical prowess etc, even the bits that seemed all for “the best intentions” still have a certain level of incompetence or misguided judgement about them. Personally felt this from day 1 about Daedalic myself but I know that puts me in a minority around here! So it’s also sad because this vindicates something I felt about them for a long time now… the spark is always being extinguished by the corporate…I don’t know, greed? Lack of awareness? Lack of SELF awareness?

Daedalic is like an honorable experiment that never quite found the perfect strain and then ended up exploding the lab. And you’re right - it’s probably the explosion most will come to remember. But hey from the ashes a phoenix can rise. Hopefully one with a bit more common sense, though