The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is getting an Elvish DLC, but it’s charging for it because the developers have to train the game’s voice actors to speak it.
Sure, most of you won’t be playing The Lord of the Rings: Gollum in Elvish because it’s your mother tongue, but it’s there if you want to. The only problem is that you have to pay extra by purchasing the Precious Edition (that’s what it’s called, of course). Not everyone is happy to hear that they have to pay more to get this option, but the reason behind it is simple: Daedalic Entertainment had to spend more money to simply teach the game’s voice actors to speak it.
In a statement to Eurogamer, Daedalic provided the full reasoning behind the decision, saying: “The elves in the base game will speak their language (Sindarin) from time to time. On top of that, the Sindarin VO expansion adds additional Some characters in the background of Sindarin lines. When traveling through Mirkwood and other parts of Middle-earth Gollum, you will be able to hear various dialogues between elves. These dialogues add atmosphere and world building. With Sindarin VO, these dialogues will be in in Sindarin.
“Daedalic goes the extra mile here, employing professional voice actors who have been trained in Sindarin by our lore experts. This is a DLC for true Tolkien followers who want to dive deeper into the earth world.”
Of course, charging for DLC is somewhat unreasonable in many cases, but re-dubbing an entire game in a fictional language that the voice actor didn’t speak beforehand, and then charging for it seems like a reasonable thing to do.
After numerous delays, Gollum is launching on May 25th on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, with a Nintendo Switch version to follow at a later date.