I am sorry... I just don't see it that way.
I dunno what's with the whole giving out medals for the effort thing. If they decide to do something, and that was out of their comfort zone, then its on them. They worked on it for years. They saw the state it was in. And they released it anyways. Why the fuck should we have sympathy for them, did they have sympathy for all the poor saps that paid money for that game? Are they refunding them? You cant nw come and say well it was their boss's fault. Tome, everyone should be held accountable.
look at something like The Order 1886... Crap game, stupid short and near archaic mechanics. But the game excels in certain areas. So even if they failed to build their original vision, their talent still shone through even in the failure.
Can you point out one single good thing in this game? Just one?
Sure. With only watching a few playthroughs, I can say the character models (e.g. Golem and Borocs), environment design, and music range from serviceable to good. The gameplay holds some interesting ideas with the players choice to empower Smeagol or Golem. From what I've seen it just doesn't amount to enough to feel impactful.
The major flaws of the game seem to be repetitive puzzle design and poor optimization. Given another shot, perhaps the studio could put out a better product from lessons learned. It's my understanding that this studio has made multiple well regarded point and click games.
To your other point though, you don't see holding everyone to the same level of accountability as reductive? There's a reason that a managerial role holds much more weight than a crewman. If the people at the top can't direct a project in congruence with the other departments of a project then it's going to fail regardless of how well any individual person works. Even further up you've got directors and producers who actually decide on which project a studio will take on. There are different levels of decision making within a project and each have varying levels of impact on the project as a whole. To hold every level with the same degree of accountability is just unreasonable. You don't hold a fry cook accountable for a popular item being replaced with a shitty one.
Ultimately, it's on the studio as whole how well their product turns out. That's the nature of the beast. Drop this ridiculous notion though that expressing
sympathy is equivalent to handing out gold stars to everyone and saying the game is totally good. You can show understanding that failing sucks and wish people the best while also acknowledging their product sucked balls.
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