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Incline Gothic turns 15 years

Wunderbar

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Nov 15, 2015
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8,809
I think Gothic must have been a strong influence on Morrowind, or what do you guys think?
omething tells me early 00s Bethesda haven't even heard about Gothic, let alone was influenced by it. There's only one year between release dates.
 

Cryomancer

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Glory to Ukraine
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Gothic is EXTREMELY different compared to Morrowind. Morrowind is far more high fantasy. Gothic quest design and design philosophy is completely different, The world building, lore, melee combat, ranged combat and magical system, guild system, learning and progression system, attribute(...) are also EXTREMELY different.
 

Invictus

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The Real Fanboy
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Divinity: Original Sin 2
Kind of hard to believe you have never played Gothic before Octavius, it a damn great game

As for your comments about the chapters and getting a bit railroaded; the game has a “set” storyline that you can pretty much follow from point A to B to C but not because it has “gated content” because 90% of the game its available to your character if you know what you need to do and can avoid or handle higher leveled enemies to go to areas where you are not supposed to go early on

That is why Gothic is so fantastic, it takes the best approach to make an open world really open if your skill and knowledge allows you. In case you want to focus doing the storyline and not really explore, the quests from later Chapters will take you to all the areas at their “appropriate” level in case you missed them before so you get the best of both worlds; open ended content from the start... if you have the skill or knowledge for it
I usually delay joining a camp too and just enjoy the small things like raiding the lab beneath the waterfall, looting a chest I wasn’t supposed to go until way later in the game by climbing around the Orc encampment or sniping some dinos from a fallen Tree trunk and luring them to fall from a chasm as the scramble to try to get me

As for the items I am kind of surprised you didn’t mention the great trading system or the fact that it allows you to focus on atmosphere and setting rather than cosplaying Naruto
 
Joined
Dec 17, 2013
Messages
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Just completed Gothic and thought I'd jot down some of my impressions. ...

I am glad you completed it, and overall enjoyed it. However, and yes, I am a bit biased since Gothic 1 is one of my all time favorites, I think 4/5 is way too low for what I consider to be one of the greatest RPGs ever made.

I think Gothic must have been a strong influence on Morrowind, or what do you guys think?

No, I don't think so. They came out too close together, and also in all the ways that Gothic shines, Morrowind was terrible. However, you are on the right track. Gothic had a lot of influence on Oblivion, though as far as I know, Bethesda never acknowledged it, and moreover, botched all the great ideas it took from Gothic:

NPC Behavior: this was amazing in Gothic, a true continuation of U7:TBG, but in Morrowind, NPCs were just cardboard cut-outs. In Oblivion, Bethesda copies the Gothic approach and implemented RadiantAI™. However, I would disagree with you, and claim that Gothic NPC behavior was miles better than Oblivion's. The schedules in Oblivion were very dull and simplistic, NPCs would just stand in one place during the day, or walk around randomly, and go to sleep at night. In Gothic, they had realistic looking schedules (probably more hand scripted), where they'd sit, walk around in a realistic manner, cook, fix up their hourses, piss, etc. It just looked like RL compared to Oblivion's automatons. I know, sometimes Oblivion NPCs did weird shit due to the AI, but it was so rare and weird, that it never really impacted my game in a meaningful way other than "wtf is that guy doing". In Gothic it was all logical and real.

Combat: Again, it's hard to appreciate how great Gothic combat was for the time. This was an era of spam clicking on aRPGs, either straight up spam clicking (Morrowind, Arx Fatalis), or slightly nuanced spam-clicking (Daggerfall, UUW). Gothic had a timed block (parry), combos, directional attacks, and animations improving with skill gain. The first three are the foundation of today's aRPGs (Dark Souls, Witcher 3, Dragon's Dogma, KCD, etc), and the last still hasn't been reproduced as far as I know. Oblivion tried to copy the ideas behind Gothic combat (blocking, combos, more action-y combat), but completely messed up in the typical Bethesda way (for example, timed block became hold up block, why would you do that?).


Also, compeltely disagree about the exploration being weak. Are you sure you spent time on it? The first two Gothic games have a tremendous amount of hand placed stuff to find in out of the way places.
 

octavius

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The rewards for exploration were not excactly great. I found an Axe which was the best weapon for a while, and I found a 2H Axe right before Golem Alley, which by the time I had enough Str to use was obsolete. Apart from that I don't recall finding much of interest in the wilderness.

I'm not saying exploration was bad, but it was not the game's strongest suit either. I think Morrowind, Ultima Underworld and the Might&Magic games did it better.
 

Rahdulan

Omnibus
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I'm not sure if I would agree with it entirely, but this image has been floating around for a while when it comes to comparing Gothic and Morrowind in terms of content delivery mechanisms.

G1-MW-unique-walking.jpg
 
Joined
Dec 17, 2013
Messages
5,107
Well done Piranha Bytes games (G1, G2, Risen 1, and ELEX) have a certain IT about them that's kinda hard to explain, but some people just understand it instinctively after playing them. Maybe it's a matter of taste to some degree, but I would say there is a certain emptiness and sterility about most popular open world games (Bethesda games, Rockstar games, Ubisoft open world games, even Witcher 3) because it just feels like the developers plopped down a ton of content somewhat randomly, for the player to play around with, but there is no cohesion between it. Good PB games are not like that, they have a certain cozy tightness to their world, everything fits together really well, and you feel like you are in a real, organic world. One of the reasons I enjoyed Breath of the Wild also is because I got some of the same vibes from it as well, although in a different way. Designing open world stuff is a very underrated endeavour.
 

Raskens

Learned
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While I'm not sure if the rewards for exploration are good or bad, I do think that just exploring for the exploring sake in G1, G2 and Risen is very enjoyable. I can't wait to see what's around the corner in these games.
 

octavius

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I'm not sure if I would agree with it entirely, but this image has been floating around for a while when it comes to comparing Gothic and Morrowind in terms of content delivery mechanisms.

G1-MW-unique-walking.jpg

I'd say Gothic actually has more repetitive walking.
In Morrowind you have fast travel with Stilt riders, Mark and Recall, Levitation and Boots of Blinding Speed.
 

T. Reich

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Apr 15, 2013
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not even close
I'm not sure if I would agree with it entirely, but this image has been floating around for a while when it comes to comparing Gothic and Morrowind in terms of content delivery mechanisms.

G1-MW-unique-walking.jpg

I'd say Gothic actually has more repetitive walking.
In Morrowind you have fast travel with Stilt riders, Mark and Recall, Levitation and Boots of Blinding Speed.

TP runes are a staple of all the Gothic games.
 

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
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Feb 6, 2016
Messages
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IMO the best part about Gothic is that whenever I walked I knew I was going to run into something good. Morrowind's combat is pretty underwhelming because enemies don't give out classic EXP, but skill EXP, and that's pretty insignificant when you kill an enemy with one blow. And because Gothic's enemies don't respawn, it made killing everything worth your time. Not to mention Potions were genuinely useful. It's been like three years since I played Gothic, but I don't remember feeling bored at all.
 

Zlaja

Arcane
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Aug 17, 2006
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Swedex
I tried it, but didn't like the forced 3rd person view and the UI, so I only played about 15 minutes

Your old self sounds awful.

I really don't see why the NPC dialogue in Oblivion is so problematic

Really? Almost all NPCs sound like mindless drones who've had a lobotomy performed on them.

Exploration, since there's really not much to find.

There may not be tons of shit to find but what is out there is handplaced and not some randomized level scaled crap.

So, a good game that could have been great if the beginning was not so slow

The slow beginning is intentional and works great to immerse you properly into the setting and make you long for better tools and skills to tackle on all the fucks pushing you around.

Very limited equipment. No helmets and shields, only armour, melee weapon, missiles weapon, one amulet and two rings

Thank God. Nameless hero doesn't need all that clutter. He knows that helmets are for pussies.
 

TheSoul

Scholar
Joined
Jun 15, 2018
Messages
155
One of the things that always impressed me about G1 was how npcs would comment on wildlife. You'd have hunters near scavengers, weed farmers hated bloatflies, and miners warned you to stay the fuck away from minecrawlers.

A lot of rpgs just have monsters for fodder/free exp, so the environments stuck with me the most since I played it.
 

ERYFKRAD

Barbarian
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Strap Yourselves In Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Exploration, since there's really not much to find. Not a single armour until suddenly Ponytail Dude says to Xardas that he needs to find a better armour
Armour made a significant enough impact on survivability that I can let that slide.
 
Unwanted

Horvatii

Unwanted
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Dec 15, 2019
Messages
563
People who like Gothic are Bethestard niveau children.
The only reason the game is not Oblivion level trash is forced gating design wise.
If there was not a mandatory camp choice with the resulting gear and abilities, it would be Bethestard level trash of a warrior passing the mage exam.
A narrative on par with rat fighting. Laugable mechanics.
And the eternal WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

I still remember sitting a friends house when the game came out and him showing me the game and for MINUTES all I would see was him pressing WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWw
and rotating the mouse. And I was just wondering, wth is going on in his head? My opinion of him never recovered... I also discovered that COMPUTER VIDEO GAMES can be made boring!
 

ERYFKRAD

Barbarian
Patron
Joined
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Messages
28,237
Strap Yourselves In Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
People who like Gothic are Bethestard niveau children.
The only reason the game is not Oblivion level trash is forced gating design wise.
If there was not a mandatory camp choice with the resulting gear and abilities, it would be Bethestard level trash of a warrior passing the mage exam.
A narrative on par with rat fighting. Laugable mechanics.
And the eternal WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

I still remember sitting a friends house when the game came out and him showing me the game and for MINUTES all I would see was him pressing WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWw
and rotating the mouse. And I was just wondering, wth is going on in his head? My opinion of him never recovered... I also discovered that COMPUTER VIDEO GAMES can be made boring!
Found the üntermensch.
 

Elwro

Arcane
Joined
Dec 29, 2002
Messages
11,746
Location
Krakow, Poland
Divinity: Original Sin Wasteland 2
I remember that when I first played G2 I was standing outside Khorinis, next to a wall, and thought I stumbled on an amazing secret and was eavesdropping on an actual conversation that would reveal something interesting. Well, after it repeated 3 times it occurred to me that these were just city residents chatting on the other side of the wall, which the game considers not to be an obstacle for sound
 

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