Gothic 4: Arcania

On the upside I have to say I did enjoy playing this game. I just didn't enjoy it anywhere near as much as Risen (PC DVD), which was more immersive and had more satisfying melee and character progression, and to be honest I'm very unlikely to replay it, where normally I love to go back and replay an RPG game with experience of how to better create a character etc. This game has actually made me want to go and replay Risen instead.

I found the game was very linear, it soon became apparent you were working within very contained environments, limited side quests and a pretty unimaginative main plot. Some of those environments were pleasant enough, and dungeons avoided the predictability of Oblivion. The way the environments were handled generally felt unpolished however. Entering the water was simply an instakill, where Risen did this in a much more stylish way for example. Clipping was infuriating ... although some activities seemed to encourage you to explore, it was unpredictable which rock or slope you could actually climb or not, which becomes very immersion-breaking when you hit yet another inexplicable invisible barrier, only to go board-rigid and float away back down to where you are 'allowed' to be. It was actually a pleasant surprise in a couple of places to find I could get onto roof tops for example. I wasn't expecting Assassin's creed or Batman but this did seem to further feel like a heavy handed stage-managed limitation. Many interiors had an unfinished feel, with the same world objects being reused and becoming over familiar or interiors being sparse and unconvincing in places.

My rig handled Risen without a problem, but there were performance concerns here (poor frame rates primarlly) which I therefore doubt were the fault of my system as much as the optimisation of the game itself. I only recall one crash though, so that was a considerable improvement over earlier Gothic games. Distant character animation was the most odd, where they moved in stop-motion until well within bow range. Most cut-scenes played sound but not audio, but worked if I quit and restarted the game.

My biggest irritation with the game was the voice direction. It wasn't so much the voice acting (generally the voices and characterisation were fine), but the way the lines were delivered. To me it sounded like the actors had been given phrases to speak without context or direction, and in isolation from other actors, and these phrases had been stitched together at a later point. The end result was emphasis and intonation that made absolute nonsense of many if not most conversations. In some places the voice changed noticably. An NPC who at one point went from an overdone screeching witch voice to a relatively sultry normal voice mid conversation, and then back to mad witch again.

I felt the plot / story telling was confused too. There were bits that I guess might have relied on earlier story items from the gothic series I'd forgotten, but even within this series there were a plethora of similar sounding names and character motivations that just left me increasingly less interested in the plot as the game went on (whereas Oblivion had many times the characters and quests but kept me interested in the detail of the story).

Melee fighting was simply boring - again Risen had subtlties that made this fun, and player skill counted. There was supposed to be something about your weapon glowing to signal the player to click to begin a flurry. Didn't see that at all, and button mashing combined with dodging just worked fine to kill most things.
Bows - I love bows in RPGs when they are done right. Ok so this wasn't a game where you could retrieve arrows, but at least arrows were shown realistically flying and impacting which we didn't used to get. However I just found that in spite of working on the skill it was more interesting and effective to use magic at range. There was supposed to be head shot bonus but the shot opportunity was very very rare : the targeting reticule goes red when you can get this bonus, but I could never get it to work at distance (i.e. on that first critical shot where you are most likely to be able to achieve a head shot) and instead found it only appeared if I was toe to toe with the enemy.
Magic was way over simplified for me. Even Risen was more imaginative with magic (one of my best memories of that game was levitating off a mountain just for the fun of it).
All in all fighting was fun enough and I did like that there were several areas where enemies were tough enough to make it satisfying to break through.

In summary, don't avoid but if you are choosing between them get Risen instead.

Having waited ages to play this, it was released briefly in the UK back in October but I missed out then, I was very pleased when it finally arrived and I could look forward to many hours in the same universe as 3 of my favourite games, Gothic 1, 2 and 3.

But this is not a "Gothic 4" as you would expect from that series even though this has Gothic 4 written all over the packaging, disc and game. This is something different.

OK, so putting my high expectations (yes I did enjoy Gothic 3) to one side what sort of game is this? Well, the Gothic series was known for having few stats but what you had was noticeable, this one has even fewer stats and the impact is probably more marginal. There is a flurry attack which can be increased through skill point allocation which essentially pins back whatever you are attacking and sometimes if there are a group of baddies the others kindly wait.
Exploration nods its head to the other games, but this is much more linear as each area opens up once you have cleared certain quests in the current area. Side quests are OK, but you do get the feeling that nothing is happening, and you are the only one in the game world not fixed in place (except for Diego and a couple of others who magically pop up ahead of you).
Graphically it looks very good but with cheesy dialogue and far too few NPC's faces, it's a bit disconcerting when everyone looks like each others brother!

Overall, I really enjoyed the game despite the above and put in over 50 hours. I did want to keep going back and finishing quests, gathering items, killing all manner of baddies (all the usual Gothic suspects are here) whilst carrying more weapons than on display in the Royal Armouries. On that basis the linear nature of the game didn't bother me much and the fact that this was not a true successor to Gothic 3 (which is really Risen) has not influenced my score.

For me this game is well recommended, in a similar way to Divinity 2 which was also much different to its predecessor but also highly enjoyable.

Not an avid gamer... did WoW and realised that the time required to seriously game had a negative impact on my ability to function in a monetary world... so this is a nice way to kill an hour or two without having to think about or remember what is going on... think of it as a great toilet game or a Gemmell 'novel'.