Where’s all the good-game luv? This board was absolutely SWARMED around the release of Oblivion. I guess Gothic 3’s been better marketed 'round in Europe, being a German game and all.
Anyhow, it’s really great. Yeah, it’s got a lot of small, annoying bugs and glitches. But the worst have already been fixed - like the nasty boar stunlock things - and I find myself constantly gaping in awe at the amazing things they have done. It’s a great game that can have you soaked in sweat after a running 45 minute battle with everything from sneaky throat-slitting to outright sword-work in open streets to liberate one of the game’s 20-something towns! (It’s even optional!)
I am seriously drenched. So many glorious moment, like the one time where I . . . well, imagine a losing sword fight between me and this nasty, wicked-strong Orc leader-character. I’m yielding backwards through the street and it’s settling into a nasty routine, where I give one yard a stroke just to stay alive. Just when I turn around into a dead end and he’s spinning that NASTY king-sized zweihander, he suddenly pitches forward, past me, with five arrows sticking out of his back! SCORE! Turns out the rebels had finished mopping up the rest of the town we were attacking and bid their time to make a dramatic finish up
(Sorry if that wasn’t coherent, I’m still full of giddyness)
Anyhow, to the more serious review. The game isn’t without it’s flaws, and it loses some of the great intimacy the previous games had, to it’s sheer size. This is, of course, regrettable, but one hopes that the coming expansion pack will resolve this to a good degree. The gameplay is sound, with viable options in any of the fighting directions - melée, archery and magic - and there’s plenty of nonlinearity going around. The story is a bit loose and unfocused, at times, and the quest log is atrocious but after a while things start picking up. And, for once, you don’t have to start out as a complete pussy when you begin the game! Whoo!
I patched it up and started playing over the weekend and I’m loving it after the beautiful but shallow experience of Oblivion.
It runs fine on my ageing rig with all options except shadows on and although it does not have all the dumb blonde beauty of Oblivion it has character and story. I’m particularly enjoying the combat and the levelling system. Simple yet so flexible and characters with some depth to relate to. I was particularly please with my Invinsi-Boar solution.
Attract their attention with arrows and then lure them to the orcs around the farmhouse
I haven’t even finished Gothic II yet. The original came out before I was in grad school, and so I was better able to free time for the hard core RPG elements – inventory management, ability tweaking, questing and gathering. Like the original, Gothic II has few sign posts telling you where you are powerful enough to try and go. You have to save often and keep trying your might against various obstacles until you work out the path of least resistance the hard way. I would say that Oblivion is also for a hard core RPG crowd, but that game constantly adjusts itself for a just-right level of difficulty, to the point where one is often ambivalent about leveling up since it doesn’t allow you to explore the world further, or achieve anything you couldn’t have achieved last level.
I enjoyed Oblivion as a hack and slash RPG-Lite. I just didn’t like the ‘game adjusts itself to your level so the only thing that can kill you is your own stupidity’ feature.
I’m the kind of RPG player who accepts being handed his ass if you get out of your depth for the fun of coming back and handing out ass-kickings once I’ve got stronger and better tooled up.
Slaying uber-vamps at level one or being hounded by suddenly-uber goblins when half way to being a god just didn’t feel right. Didn’t stop me having fun and admiring the many pretty views but in the end I prefer the greater challenge and more gritty feel of the Gothic series.
I appreciate the theory of encounter scaling, but applied universally it will tend to take the thrill out of character advancement. In console-style RPGs I used to work hard on random encounters in order that I’m more than ready for the encounters that advance the plot. But now you can’t work hard enough in the Final Fantasy games to save yourself the burden of having to do set encounters with all their lengthy and often unskippable cutscenes over and over again.
The mod community for Oblivion has done a good job overhauling the scaling system. You don’t have to play with random bandits suddenly bristling with daedric arms and armor. The time you invested in building your character actually pays off at least in that you can easily dispatch random thugs. You can choose your level of challenge, a risk vs. reward level that maximizes fun. That is, unless you got the X-Box version.
Overall, I tend to prefer a little bit of nose-ringing. That is, the story guides you to a reasonably optimal path on which the difficulty is comensurate with your level, but otherwise the world is wide-open, and that includes places you will be very sorry to go. The world of Gothic is mostly deadly for most of the game, and you pretty much have to figure out for yourself how to carve out your destiny. When you do, when you can finally defeat those orcs keeping you away from that tower, you feel like you’ve accomplished something in a way you wouldn’t get if the encounter had been scaled for whatever level you’re already at.
One of these days I’m going to replay Oblivion with one of those mods, although nothing can get round the hand-holding compass stuff. But I had fun playing it - I just treated it like Doom or Quake or a 3D Diablo. I got well over a hundred hours of fun out of it so I’m not complaining.
I’m taking my time in G3 as I’m worried about all the alleged bugs. I do like the idea of my choices having consequences. I missed that in OB.
This board was absolutely SWARMED around the release of Oblivion. I guess Gothic 3’s been better marketed 'round in Europe, being a German game and all.