RING BEARER
Under the skin of Gollum, a nextgeneration Lord Of The Rings game
The quest to make a Gollum game begins with the recognition that nobody wants to be Gollum. In case you haven’t had the pleasure, Gollum is the scurrying, gangrel creature who, in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings, joins Frodo Baggins on his journey to return the powerful One Ring to its fiery birthplace. This comes a few centuries after Gollum, then an amiable bumpkin named Sméagol, murdered his own cousin for possession of the Ring and took it into the mountains, where it slowly mangled his body, shattered his personality and spurred him to all manner of evil. “This is really not a character you want to spend 20 hours with,” Daedalic’s art director Mathias Fischer admits. “So our biggest challenge was to make him a bit more sympathetic, a bit more relatable. Maybe brush over the fact that he’s eaten children.”
If you are familiar with Gollum, it’s probably thanks to Andy Serkis’ frothing, motion-captured performance in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations. But the truth is there are many Gollums, much as there are many renditions of Middle-earth besides the glorious, sweeping antipodean landscapes of Jackson’s movies. “Tolkien didn’t give a size reference for Gollum to begin with,” Fischer notes. “So in the first illustrations, he’s gigantic! He’s like
a monster emerging from the swamp.” There’s also the fuzzy green insect you meet in Gene Deitch’s 1966 animation, and the skinny black lizard from 2003’s The Hobbit videogame. Daedalic’s interpretation – whose final design is kept tantalisingly off-limits during our trip to the company’s Hamburg offices – looks like none of these, but nor does it resemble the character’s most famous incarnation.
“We don’t want to displease the folks who have only seen the movies,” senior producer Kai Fiebig tells us. “But in short, he doesn’t look like Andy Serkis. We started with the person he was and then evolved him. You can see that this was once something like a human being, before the Ring corrupted him. We have more storytelling possibilities than the movies ever had, and for us, it was very important to show a different set of emotions. We need somebody you could almost love, and on the other hand somebody you can really be afraid of. And at some points, trust me, you will fear him.”
A stealth-action adventure with an intriguing dual-personality mechanic, gigantic levels and a densely wrought aesthetic inspired by Tolkien’s own drawings, Gollum is a crucial game for Daedalic. It’s a long-sought chance for the developer to escape its niche as a purveyor of point-and-click adventure games. But it’s no less important an opportunity for The Lord Of The Rings as a universe – a way of escaping the long shadow cast by the movie trilogy. In thrusting you into the divided mind of Middle-earth’s least lovely creature, the game will take you to places the films never dared tread, and unearth ways of seeing Middle-earth long-buried by Jackson’s soaring cinematography. Slated to launch in 2021 on “all relevant platforms”, it’s also one of the first nextgeneration console games we’ve had the chance to discuss in depth.
Founded in 2007 and numbering around 80 people, Daedalic is a company at a crossroads. It has made waves as the publisher of indie games such as Barotrauma, but remains best-known for adventure games, such as its respected flagship sci-fantasy series Deponia. As CEO Carsten Fichtelmann concedes, this commitment to a genre so driven by narrative risks becoming a weakness in the Let’s Play era.
“When it comes to classic adventures, we have a situation where there’s still a big audience, but they’re interested only in watching this kind of content,” he says. “We’ve seen lots people enjoying our last Deponia game and State Of Mind, but on Twitch or YouTube. The number of those people who buy the games is not comparable. We don’t have a solution for monetising the spectator audience. This is one of our problems, and the reason we’re shifting a bit into other genres. With Gollum, obviously there’s storytelling,
“YOU CAN SEE THAT THIS WAS ONCE SOMETHING LIKE A HUMAN BEING BEFORE THE RING CORRUPTED HIM”
but mainly it’s an action game.” Fichtelmann recalls American consultants referring to Daedalic as the “Telltale Games of Europe” – he is naturally keen to avoid the latter’s ignoble fate. “They had really big brands, Batman and so on, but when you finally see their numbers, it explains why it ended the way it ended.”
Daedalic has accordingly spent the past decade experimenting with different genres, including an action roleplaying project, Blackguards, and a realtime strategy game, A Year Of Rain. Though hardly mind-blowing success stories in themselves, these projects have given Daedalic vital experience, particularly as regards how to get the most out of Epic’s Unreal Engine. In the end, however, it was Daedalic’s reputation as a spinner of yarns that landed it the keys to The Lord Of The Rings.
Fichtelmann first approached Middle-earth Enterprises about a Lord Of The Rings game in 2014. His original pitch wasn’t for a Gollum game and wasn’t accepted, but the licence-holder was impressed by Daedalic’s familiarity with Tolkien and its relative disinterest in combat. “I think what helped us is that they were a little disappointed that all the Lord Of The Rings games were about slaying Orcs,” publishing director
Jonas Hüsges tells us. “The books are obviously about a little more than that.” The two companies kept in touch over the next two years, even as Daedalic sunk its teeth into another book-tovideogame adaptation, Ken Follett’s The Pillars Of The Earth. “I don’t know what finally convinced them,” Fichtelmann says, “But we saw them at one GDC, and we saw them at the next GDC, and finally we went into real negotiations.”
By early 2019, Daedalic had begun working on the visual direction of its Gollum game ahead of early level prototypes. There were a few gaps to fill in the development team, which by January will number between 30 and 40 people – in particular, Daedalic needed riggers to help its animators keep up with the range of actions in the game. Thanks to its work on A Year Of Rain, however, the studio already had much of the requisite technical expertise in place. It had the tools and the talent. But most importantly, in the all-seeing eyes of Middle-earth’s legal custodians, it had the fans.
Mathias Fischer has loved The Lord Of The Rings since childhood. His most prized possession is an illustrated Tolkien encyclopedia of uncertain provenance, featuring armies of humanoid rhinos. Alas, this treasured artefact has become an object of mockery at Daedalic’s Hamburg
“WHAT HELPED US IS THAT THEY WERE A DISAPPOINTED THAT ALL THE LORD OF THE RINGS GAMES WERE ABOUT S LAYING ORCS”
headquarters, but it has proved inspirational nonetheless. To define the game’s look, Fischer combed through the portfolios of some of Middle-earth’s most prolific illustrators, from Ian Miller, John Howe and Alan Lee to Tolkien himself, an accomplished draughtsman in his own right.
He stumbled into a mesmerising world, but one not entirely suited to the game Daedalic wanted to make. “[The old illustrations] have very unique colour schemes with a palish aura and complimentary contrasts – it’s not something you see a lot in modern media,” Fischer says. This palette is “completely unusable” in stealth games, he argues, because stealth games generally build up a readable playspace via stark light and colour contrasts. Fischer was also worried that the older, more vivid style of fantasy painting might strike a modern audience as too ‘artsy’. But the old illustrations nonetheless gave Gollum its key structural principle, which Fischer terms “stylised verticality”.
“The shapes in classic fantasy illustration are always vertical,” he says. “Even the freaking trees look like variously shaped pillars in some form.” These shapes are not, however, just plain monoliths: they are painstakingly woven out of thousands of smaller shapes, an
intensity of texture that makes running your eye over a mountainside as involving as slogging your way up it. “Tolkien had a way of making the pencil flow in parallel lines that fly into each other, building bigger structures. We try to follow this in our own texture design and surface design.” By taming the palette while retaining these enormous, obsessively worked structures, Fischer hopes to strike a balance between the plainer visuals of the Jackson movies, the practicalities of a stealth game and the wilder beauties of the old drawings.
The artists also, of course, drew upon Tolkien’s descriptions in the books, and in particular, his account of Barad-dûr, the dark lord Sauron’s kilometre-high fortress in Mordor, where Gollum begins the game as a prisoner. Composed of a mixture of metal and crystal called adamant, Barad-dûr is a sleepless war machine encompassing dungeons, barracks, forges, kitchens and sleeping quarters, all of it sunk into cliffs above lava flows or perilously chained to thousand-ton stalagmites and stalactites. It was a vital proving ground for Daedalic’s designers, as they worked to transform Fischer’s
concept artworks into levels. “We want players to draw up a good mental map, and the tower’s division of chapters [by structural] material really went with what we had in mind,” game designer Martin Wilkes explains.
Barad-dûr brims with Orc guards, who correspond to some familiar enemy archetypes like tank or grunt, but these aren’t the Orcs from the films. “They never see sunlight,” Fischer says. “Because they live in a volcano their skin has almost no pigment whatsoever. Their hair is ashen white. There’s some lore that says the Orcs were originally tortured Elves, bred using dark magic. We get this in there – they are torn, they have scars.” The Orcs preside over an underworld society of enslaved humans, tamed beasts and other, stranger creatures. Explored by stealth, Barad-dûr reveals itself for an oddly domestic setting. While looking for your chance to slip by, you’ll be able to eavesdrop on conversations and watch Orcs carrying out chores. “We don’t go as far as having a complete biography of each individual Orc,” Wilkes says. “That would be too far-fetched, but we want to tell little stories when you take sidepaths, you learn about some of the characters and what drives their lives.”
Barad-dûr is but one of many giant, persistent environments, each harbouring several questlines and a range of friendly or unfriendly faces. Going by the concept artworks, you’ll later rub shoulders with Elves and even Daedalic’s own version of Gandalf. Gollum’s methods of exploring these spaces are rather less exotic: this is a workmanlike thirdperson stealth game, as lean and bare as Gollum himself, with a strong emphasis on climbing and platforming. There’s little in the way of special abilities or gadgetry (though very much on Gollum’s mind, the invisibilityconferring One Ring is many leagues away at this point in Tolkien’s narrative): it’s all about moving slowly and hugging the shadows, with radial indicators letting you know when you’re in somebody’s eyeline. You can throw stones, and free trapped animals, to create diversions. Conflict is best avoided, with Gollum dwarfed by most opponents. You may be able to murder an Orc if you catch him from behind, but you’ll need to hang on for dear life as the victim thrashes about.
It’s difficult to tell from the prototype character we’re shown, but Daedalic says you’ll feel every decade Gollum has spent navigating Middle-earth’s seamy underbelly in the way he moves. “He’s not trained, he doesn’t have perfect form,” Wilkes says. “His movements are very effective, but not optimised and not very elegant. We want to show the struggle, the effort. He’s out of breath,
“WE DON’T GO AS FA R AS HAVING A COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF EACH INDIVIDUAL ORC… BUT WE WANT TO TELL LITTLE STORIES”
groaning, swearing.” That extreme age also explains why there are no skills to acquire in the course of the game. “It just wouldn’t make sense for a character this old, after 300 years of surviving, to suddenly squeeze roleplaying mechanics into this.”
If Daedalic’s Gollum may not sound that exhilarating to embody on paper, this disregards the fact that Gollum is actually two people in one body – the malevolent survivor whose disgusting throat movements gave the character his name, and the childlike remnant of Sméagol. The balance of power between Gollum and Sméagol is central to the story and colours every moment of the game. For one thing, it supplies a more immersive answer to the question of how to steer players without breaking the illusion. “In many games, it’s unintentionally funny when characters say, ‘Hmmm, I won’t be able to get through there, it’s full of guards’,” Wilkes says. “We’re able to give the player direct guidance about navigation, because Gollum talks to himself all the time anyway.”
Sméagol and Gollum wrestle for ascendancy continually. At one point in our hands-off demo, we enter a cavemouth above an Orc guarding a gate. Gollum wants to throttle the sentinel before he can raise the alarm, but all Sméagol can think of is running away. In such moments you’ll need to arbitrate between characters, but this isn’t as clear-cut as, say, picking Jedi or Sith actions in Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic. “It’s not just choosing to be
Sméagol or Gollum, because for Gollum as an entity it’s not that easy,” Wilkes says. “Each personality is being attacked by the other; each has to defend himself.” Making decisions involves a hallucinatory quick-time struggle for dominance, which senior producer Kai Fiebig compares to picking out a card as the deck is mashed around a tabletop.
Whichever aspect of Gollum prevails, you can nonetheless expect a variety of consequences, little and large. Some outcomes trigger scripted sequences – for example, if Sméagol overrules Gollum and flees from that guard, he’ll bring the horde down on your head. You’ll also be able to tell which persona is dominant from the animations: Gollum moves like a predator, Sméagol like prey. And then there are the choices that shape the unfolding story, such as whether to partner with other prisoners as you search for a route out of Barad-dûr. The plot has a fixed conclusion, ending at approximately the beginning of The Fellowship Of The Ring, but leaves things open about how you get there. “You will have maybe two, three or four conflicts per chapter that lead to a final decision point,” Wilkes says. “And at this final decision point, it will be harder to pick Sméagol, for example, if you’ve always fought for the Gollum side before.”
The difference between characters is not a question of good or evil, as it mostly is in the films. Sméagol might be less violent than Gollum, but he is also cowardly and naïve. “Sméagol has the desire to be loved,” Wilkes says. “He seeks friendship and he might make temporary allies. But Sméagol’s side of things is quite twisted.” The character’s capacity for kindness may only get him and others into hot water. “It’s a bit like in The Witcher,” Fiebig adds. “You try to be Mr Nice Guy, but then you find out later that being Mr Nice Guy wasn’t really the best approach.” Moreover, one of Daedalic’s bolder aims is to show that even the Gollum part of Gollum has his brighter moments. “He cares for his other half,” lead narrative designer Tilman Schanen says. “It’s kind of his one redeeming quality. He is evil but he does have that goodness in him – he wants himself to be happy!”
Banished from the world of Hobbits, Men and Elves, yet decidedly not at home among Sauron’s minions, Gollum offers a unique perspective on the otherwise
YOU’ LL BE ABLE TO TELL WHICH PERSON A IS DOMINANT FROM THE ANIMATIONS: GOLLUM MOVES LIKE A PREDATOR, SM É AGO L LIKE PREY
stark factional binaries of Middle-earth. “We’re in a grey zone from the very beginning,” Schanen goes on. “So it’s not that important to us if somebody’s good or evil, for our game it’s not that much of a focus. Obviously Sauron is evil, but we don’t really see him in the game.”
In particular, we’re fascinated to find out what this bodes for the game’s handling of race. While Tolkien himself was vociferously anti-racist, his books are awash with stereotypes. They pose an apocalyptic struggle between Anglo-Saxon or Celtic northern societies and swarms of half-breeds, Easterlings and Southrons. By dint of beginning the game in Mordor, Daedalic has moved these potentially contentious elements to the fore. “We’ve had discussions about this within the team,” Schanen says. “And what was important for us was to show, for example, the Haradrim, the eastern people – they fill both sides of the spectrum, with good characters and bad characters. And it’s not like all the slaves within Barad-dûr are white people taken by the Easterlings, because basically everybody in Barad-dûr is a slave to Sauron, even the Orcs.”
“WE’RE I N A GREY ZONE F ROM T HE VERY B E GI NNING. S O I T ’ S NOT T HAT I MPORTANT TO US I F S OMEBODY’S GOOD OR EV I L”
It’s a reasonable answer, but we’re we a little concerned nonetheless by w what we’ve seen of the game’s ‘tribal’ influences. During his presentation, presentatio Fischer sh0ws us a photographic collage c of dwellings from across Africa and an the Middle East. This body of architectural architec styles, styles he says, says “delivers the rawness rawne we need for a fantasy land that has been at war for 3,000 years.” The equating of ‘raw’, ‘tribal’ architecture with a realm of perpetual conflict risks playing into any number of clichés about primitive savages. Pressed about this, Fischer insists that plenty of thought has gone into the choice of inspirations. “[We’re] really respectful in how we implement things. It’s not just, ‘This looks cool, this looks cool, this looks cool’.”
The other, less contentious Balrog in the room throughout our time at Daedalic is the fact that Gollum is a next-gen game. It seems likely that there are Xbox Series X and PS5 devkits in the building, somewhere out of view. Inevitably, CEO Fichtelmann won’t be drawn much on the subject. “I think Microsoft is doing some things better than they did in the past,” he says. “And the PlayStation 5 will be huge.”
Martin Wilkes, who earned his stripes as a developer creating Unreal Engine mods, is prepared to talk more openly about what he’s heard of the new Xbox console. “I’ve only heard rumours about the [Xbox Series X] specs, and it’s huge – very fast Flash memory. Which excites me, of course, but I don’t think that’s relevant to this project, because we’re aiming for PC as well. Especially for level designers, though, that’s a dream come true, because we don’t have to concern ourselves with streaming corridors any more. I think that’s sometimes really painful – to squeeze down these otherwise beautiful, stunning environments because we need another corridor here [to stream in the next area].” Going by what we’ve seen of the game’s city-sized caverns, we can understand his desire for some more breathing room.
As for what the future holds for Daedalic, now that it has been granted access to the realm of Middle-earth, Gollum is only the beginning. After years of worrying about its massmarket reach, the company finds itself in a pivotal position on one of the world’s largest entertainment properties. “In terms of premium [non-mobile] games, there are two companies who have the licence – Amazon, for Athlon’s Lord Of The Rings MMO, and us,” Fichtelmann says. He’s already thinking about the next step, even as this most unexpected of journeys moves into full production. “We have quite a long-running contract. Our goal is to do at least two or three games. And then we can renew our contract, which means maybe the next game is – obviously not Gollum 2. That doesn’t make sense. It could be some other character. But it will be comparable to what we’re now trying with Gollum.”