Developer Daedalic Entertainment has belatedly explained why it's so late: "The Lord of the Rings: Gollum," which will be released on May 25, will have paid DLC that will add the Elvish language to the game. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum" will be released on May 25th. As part of the game's pre-order campaign, the perfectly named "Precious" Special Edition (opens in new tab) comes with four extras that players of the standard edition can purchase as DLC. One of them is the Elvish Sindarin voice-over expansion, which basically makes the elves speak more in their native tongue while wandering around Middle-earth in this version.

Well, all players will hear Sindarin, but this expansion will add more Sindarin, and according to the studio, the price reflects the effort to add it as a spoken language.

"Elves in the base game sometimes speak in their language (Sindarin)," Daedalic said in a statement to Eurogamer (opens in new tab). Besides, the Sindarin VO expansion will add Sindarin dialogue to some of the background characters." While traveling through the forests of Meek and other regions of Middle-earth, Gollum will hear various dialogues between the elves. These dialogues add to the atmosphere and accentuate the worldview. In Sindarin VO, these dialogues are in Sindarin. [But] the studios want an understanding of the process of adding fictional language, both spoken and written." Daedalic did something special here, hiring professional voice actors, who were trained in Sindarin by our lore experts. This is DLC for real Tolkien devotees who want to immerse themselves further into the world of Middle-earth."

Not a bad description, I suppose: go all out for fans interested in something like Sindarin's voice acting, make them pay a little extra for it, and give the standard player a little of it for worldbuilding purposes. I like "Lord of the Rings" well enough, but not enough to want to learn the Elvish language or particularly care whether the game's voice actors are Sindarin or not; Daedelic itself describes the Sindarin DLC as being for "ardent fans who want to further immerse themselves while exploring Tolkien's world," and fans" who want to "further immerse themselves while exploring Tolkien's world.

"The Lord of the Rings": Gollum will be released soon on May 25, and the last time we played it, Ted Litchfield felt as conflicted as Gollum himself (open in new tab). The adventure, set in a world before "The Lord of the Rings," focuses on an odd combination of traversal and stealth, and from the trailer, seems to be more enslaved to them than influenced by the Peter Jackson films.

In addition to the Sindarin voice pack, the Precious Edition includes three pieces of DLC: a concept art collection, a "lore compendium" (surely a copy of the book), and the OST. It is also priced about £10/$10 more than the standard edition, which may seem trivial, but it is not as if Daedelic is driving up the price with this special edition. In any case, it's clear that there are plenty of people who want a return trip to Middle-earth: Sindarin voice pack or not, Gollum is already gold.