Gollum devs used AI to write apology over game being rubbish, it's claimed

May saw the release of Daedalic Entertainment’s The Lord of the Rings: Gollum and it’s safe to say that it was not received well. It was received so badly, in fact, that the developers took to social media to issue an apology, an apology that may have been written by ChatGPT.

Telling the tale of Gollum on his journey to find his Precious, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was Daedalic’s first and last experience with the action-adventure genre as the studio shut down shortly after the game was launched. As it stands, the title currently sits at a ‘mostly negative’ rating on Steam and is the worst-reviewed game in 2023 so far. With repetitive gameplay, none of Tolkien’s flair and a whole lot of bugs and performance issues, it is no surprise its developers had to issue an apology.

Check out some gameplay from The Lord of the Rings: Gollum below!

However, it has been recently claimed that the apology issued on 26 May was written by the AI text tool, ChatGPT. Suspicion was first raised with the apology when many readers noticed plenty of spelling and grammatical errors, including the studio calling its game “The Lord of Ring”. Now thanks to Youtube channel Game Two and its video titled ‘Why Gollum HAD to fail’, we know a lot more.

The video, which is in German but can be translated using Youtube’s auto-translate tool, features a deep dive into the game’s development, featuring interviews with the developers themselves who revealed that the apology wasn’t written by them, but rather by publisher Nacon. Game Two then claims anonymous sources told him the apology was written by ChatGPT rather than the publisher and was not double-checked.

Nacon are yet to confirm if this is true at the time of writing, but it would answer for all the errors found in the apology. It is yet another blow for The Lord of the Rings: Gollum but at least it will go down in history... just for all the wrong reasons.