PorkyThePaladin
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2013
- Messages
- 5,174
Fired up Gothic 3 today with the community patch, and rage quit 20 minutes later. Yet again. Probably for the 10th time since it released in 2006. Although back then, it had to do more with loading times.
And by the way, what retard at PB thought that starting off the game literally in the middle of a battle would be a good idea? Especially since it features an all new control scheme for combat. Trying to figure out how combat works while 4-5 orcs are wailing away at you just makes me wonder what kind of drugs they were doing at the time?
But I did play around with the Gothic 3 combat scheme this time, for all of those 20 minutes, and came away very disappointed. What made Gothic 1/2 combat work (and also Risen 1 and ELEX) is that in all of those games, it flowed nicely and was relatively homogenous. There is a flow of parry/counter-attack, parry/counter-attack or succession of combos that goes nicely together and just lets the player focus on the timing (of either parry or the next move in the combo), which is elegant.
In Gothic 3, they introduced the Holy Grail of dumbass melee combat ideas, the infamous Power Strike. Not only is a power attack inherently retarded because something so slow and telegraphed would never be used in any form of real combat, but it ruins game systems. Because it goes through parries, it basically divides Gothic 3 combat into 2 parts, the parry against normal attacks, and the quick strike against power attacks. And this takes all the elegance and fun out of it, because video game animations (especially in a 2006 game) do not convey visible differences between different kinds of strikes as well as real life. So your poor brain is stuck trying to figure out in a very short period of time if the enemy is doing a regular or a power attack, and then it has to figure out what to do, since the quick attack is a short press, while to parry you need to hold the mouse button down for a bit. With practice, I am sure it can be done, but it's about as fun as pronouncing tongue twisters.
Throw in the 3 different types of attacks (regular, power, and quick), and the "special" moves like parry-attack or what not, and it just makes the whole combat system in this game feel really disjointed. You are given a lot of tools for different situations, but effectively using them together feels like getting a prostate exam.
This is not an argument against combat complexity, which I like, but the complexity is only fun if you have elegant means of handling it. For instance, Mount & Blade has a fairly complex parrying system (with 4 directions),but because it's just one move, couple with the direction button or mouse movement, the overall result is still elegant and manageable.
And by the way, what retard at PB thought that starting off the game literally in the middle of a battle would be a good idea? Especially since it features an all new control scheme for combat. Trying to figure out how combat works while 4-5 orcs are wailing away at you just makes me wonder what kind of drugs they were doing at the time?
But I did play around with the Gothic 3 combat scheme this time, for all of those 20 minutes, and came away very disappointed. What made Gothic 1/2 combat work (and also Risen 1 and ELEX) is that in all of those games, it flowed nicely and was relatively homogenous. There is a flow of parry/counter-attack, parry/counter-attack or succession of combos that goes nicely together and just lets the player focus on the timing (of either parry or the next move in the combo), which is elegant.
In Gothic 3, they introduced the Holy Grail of dumbass melee combat ideas, the infamous Power Strike. Not only is a power attack inherently retarded because something so slow and telegraphed would never be used in any form of real combat, but it ruins game systems. Because it goes through parries, it basically divides Gothic 3 combat into 2 parts, the parry against normal attacks, and the quick strike against power attacks. And this takes all the elegance and fun out of it, because video game animations (especially in a 2006 game) do not convey visible differences between different kinds of strikes as well as real life. So your poor brain is stuck trying to figure out in a very short period of time if the enemy is doing a regular or a power attack, and then it has to figure out what to do, since the quick attack is a short press, while to parry you need to hold the mouse button down for a bit. With practice, I am sure it can be done, but it's about as fun as pronouncing tongue twisters.
Throw in the 3 different types of attacks (regular, power, and quick), and the "special" moves like parry-attack or what not, and it just makes the whole combat system in this game feel really disjointed. You are given a lot of tools for different situations, but effectively using them together feels like getting a prostate exam.
This is not an argument against combat complexity, which I like, but the complexity is only fun if you have elegant means of handling it. For instance, Mount & Blade has a fairly complex parrying system (with 4 directions),but because it's just one move, couple with the direction button or mouse movement, the overall result is still elegant and manageable.
