The game is quite choppy at times, especially during larger battles. Still, there are some noteworthy hitches when it comes to frame rate, and a few other quirks. Reasonable art makes these sylvan settings look pretty good in an Oblivion-ish sort of way, and seamless transitions between most areas mean you can immerse yourself in the adventure without sitting through loading screens. Maps are also very big, with outdoor areas loaded with intricate pathways and trails that loop back on each other and circle around hills. This generally gets you where you need to go, although in today's GPS world, it's a little annoying to have to deal with vague comments such as "turn east at the watchtower and head up the hill." As a result, you have to follow the directions given out when you are offered a quest. Bull's-eye icons mark quest locales on the minimap, but they show up only when you're practically right on top of the place, person, or thing that you're looking for. The map is far too small and limited in scope, with the fog of war seemingly so tight that you can't see anything on the map that you can't see on the main screen. Instead of talking to other human beings, it's more like you're pulling random work assignments off a bulletin board that occasionally puts on a dress and pretends to be a fat medieval bar-wench.Ī few design issues in Arcania interfere with your ability to wrap up these quests. There is no depth to any of their personalities, and the strained dialogue makes it tough to accept any of the non-player characters as real people. The exact same jobs have been doled out in other RPGs for a couple of decades now, and none of the characters that you interact with are the least bit memorable. Nothing about these fetch assignments is interesting. Every single person you visit needs a job done, so you play a never-ending game of "you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours." You're constantly traipsing around the countryside looking for specific monsters to slay, artifacts to pick up, herbs to pick, and so forth. What you're called upon to do in pursuit of vengeance is also hard to get into. The moment when your fiancee dies in your arms, for instance, has as much emotional impact as watching your stepbrother eat beef jerky. Many scenes seem to have been edited strangely or hacked into abrupt endings. Poor translations and pedestrian voice-acting make the dialogue a blend of the indiscernible and the plain old goofy. The world just doesn't seem real, with cardboard characters that aren't fleshed out and that-like their counterparts in so many other games-never even notice if you wander into their homes and loot their chests of valuables. Nothing about the story is well developed, though. Things get awfully bleak after just a couple of hours of play and a handful of introductory quests, in fact, so in this way the new Gothic resembles the old Gothic. You play as an anonymous hero caught up in a huge war ravaging the realm so thoroughly that his native village is burned to the ground and his pregnant fiancee is killed by Rhobar's troops. Ten years have passed since Gothic 3, and King Rhobar III has been afflicted by some sort of madness that has made him a teensy bit bloodthirsty. There's not a whole lot to do besides killing and looting.ĭespite the many changes in gameplay, Arcania takes place in the same old Gothic land of Myrtana. Where the previous games were perhaps a little too demanding, the current model isn't demanding enough, being little more than a hack-and-slash loot grab noteworthy solely for its incredibly generic personality. Everything that made the first trilogy stand out from the crowd has been dropped by German developer Spellbound, which has turned the new game into a kill-and-loot third-person RPG. That has been tossed out the window with Arcania: Gothic 4, a Gothic game in name alone. They were definitely quirky games, but at least you could count on a hardcore RPG experience. The first three games in the series earned developer Piranha Bytes a lot of fans and a fair number of detractors for brutal difficulty, bleak storylines, and idiosyncratic controls. Of all the epic role-playing game franchises that have come and gone in the past decade, Gothic has always been one of the most distinct.
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