The Lord of the Rings: Gollum Elvish DLC costs extra because language lessons aren't cheap
Seems fair enough.
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The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is getting Elvish language DLC, but it's charging for it because the devs had to train the game's voice actors to speak it.
It's probably a safe bet that most of you won't be playing The Lord of the Rings: Gollum in Elvish because it's your native language, but it is there if you want it. The only problem with that is that you have to pay extra for it by getting the Precious Edition (of course it's called that). Not everyone was happy to hear that they have to pay more to get this option, but the reasoning behind it is quite simple: Daedalic Entertainment had to fork out 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 in their tongue (Sindarin) from time to time. On top of that the Sindarin VO expansion adds additional Sindarin lines to some of the characters in the background. While traversing through Mirkwood and other parts of middleearth Gollum will be able to listen to various dialogues between Elves. These dialogues add to the atmosphere and worldbuilding. With the Sindarin VO these dialogues will be held in Sindarin.
"Daedalic went the extra mile here and hired professional voice actors, who were trained in Sindarin by our lore experts. It is a DLC for the real Tolkien Devotees who want to immerse themselves even more into the world of Middle-Earth."
There's of course been plenty of occasions where being charged for DLC has been a bit unreasonable, but having the whole game redubbed in a fictitious language that the voice actors didn't speak beforehand and then charging for that seems like a reasonable thing to do.
After numerous delays, Gollum is almost here, launching May 25 on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, with the Nintendo Switch version coming later down the line.