2023 isn"t even half over, but we have seen an unusual amount of major PC and video games released this year with show stopping bugs. The latest example is Lord of the Rings: Gollum, the third person action adventure game from Daedalic Entertainment that launched on Friday.
However, reviews of the game have not been kind. The game"s Metacritic score is just 36 as of this writing. Many of the reviews have commented on the issues the writers have had while playing the game. Game Informer"s reviewer stated, "I constantly struggled against the controls, camera, and objectives as they were presented."
A few words from the " The Lord of the Rings: Gollumâ„¢ " team pic.twitter.com/adPamy5EjO
— The Lord of the Rings: Gollum (@GollumGame) May 26, 2023
Daedalic Entertainment quickly posted a statement on its Twitter page. It began with a big apology about the game"s release:
We would like to sincerely apologize for the underwhelming experience many of you have had with The Lord of the Rings: Gollum upon its release. We acknowledge and deeply regret that the game did not meet the expectations we set for ourselves or for our dedicated community. Please accept our sincere apologies for any disappointment this may have caused.
The message added that the development team is listening to feedback from players and that it is "working diligently to address the bugs and technical issues many of you experienced."
Of course, we have seen this pattern of a big developer launching a major game, followed by players discovering lots of bugs, and the developer quickly posting a message with an apology and a pledge to fix things with patches.
This seems to happen especially with PC ports of games. This year alone, we have seen this happen with Forspoken, The Last of Us Part 1, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and more. As we mentioned in a recent editorial, more pre-release testing could be done to help cut down on these kinds of issues.