I think Paul Tassi actually had a pretty good opinion on this. It does seem as though people who played the alpha largely turned into preorders or were at least decidedly more likely to buy the game. It really might be a disconnect between critics/gaming journalists and gamers, but we’d have to wait and see.
I still can’t believe gollum was real. It looked and played like early '00s shovelware. Hell there were probably better thought out games in cereal boxes.
Soo I gather that it’s a half-decent game made by a well-regarded team of developers and creative artists, that were forced to stuff it with bland and boring filler content so that the studio and publisher can get that sweet sweet recurring revenue.