Risen

[Paula Tormeson IV]

Lord of the Rings Online has a cool compass system. It directs you with the standard dot, but when you get close enough it goes away and shows a giant blob colored area instead. The point being, here's the general area, now you find it.

It's a nice compromise between being on your own and blindly navigating by dialog alone, and having a big obnoxious arrow lead the way until you're two inches from your destination.

Ever heard of real maps?

Games should have locations marked on a map as accurately as would be realistic in the context that the location is marked on the map. They could have maps with different scaling. A world map, a town map, even a building map (such things exist), except the player would have to either buy or find and steal such maps.

What they shouldn't have is a fucking player arrow moving on the map like magic, unless the game is really fucking exceptionally good at rationalizing it as real advanced magic that everyone uses like the internet in the real world. Otherwise, learn to read a map, please, and accept that if your target moves, you won't get to know its exact location until you actually find it.

(I guess someone might say that the arrow is there because it's the PC who does the map-reading for the player. My counter to that would be: such games are crap, and they wouldn't need to be. Remove the arrow, because it's NOT immersive. A game isn't immersive if the player doesn't do the things that he would do if he were the character in the game world. Moving your party of half-naked fags from one cutscene to another is about as immersive as drinking shit diet coke while watching the newest crap from Ron Howard. Shit.)

Exactly what gothic had (and from memory Risen's map works the same way) - you had to buy a map before you could access it, and there'd be different maps for the city and island, and quest markings would be pseudo-handwritten markings and circles on a faux-ink map.

..and they would come complete with an incredible self-adjusting player arrow. Yes, I remember.

 

[Admiral jimbob]

What the fuck just happened to the plot/lore at the end of chapter 3? It was always a bit vague and unexplained, but was at least reasonably compelling and made sense. Now the backstory seems to be that control of the world has seesawed between the Gods and the Titans forever, and now Titans are destroying the mainland even though nobody seemed to know this earlier on (how do they know now? Was it always happening? Why wasn't it a bigger deal and why was everyone surprised by Titans being brought up? ARE they destroying the mainland?) and the hero is a short-sighted tit who, despite having helped Mendoza get to the Fire Titan in order to use it as a weapon, has suddenly decided it's not worth sacrificing the lives of three farmers and a crime syndicate to save the world even though nobody's explained why they would all die anyway.
Was something lost in translation here?

Game is starting to get to be a bit of a drag too. Meh, I'll see it out. First couple of chapters were fucking great.

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

On the plus side, the NotR maps were slow to look at - your character would take it out of his bag, open it slowly and carefully, only then look at it. If NotR had a mini-map (the worst thing you can have in a game), I don't remember ever using it, so looking at the map felt a bit like you were looking at a real map. (I never said the Gothics didn't do everything much better than other games of the same type.)

 

[Darth Roxor]

even though nobody's explained why they would all die anyway.

It was explained. The titan trapped under the volcano is iirc the essence of magic (the holy flame) on the island, and freeing it would cause some protective barriers to disappear (or something? I don't quite remember but it was along these lines) which would make the volcano asplode and destroy the island (or it would get covered by the raging ocean... heck, I don't remember precisely, but it was explained for sure, and it was something like this).

 

[Admiral jimbob]

All I got was that it would dispel the barriers keeping the other Titans away from the island. You play in English?

 

[tarkin]

Presence of the Fire Titan itself is keeping the other Titans away, i don't remember any mumbo jumbo about "protective barriers", only barriers that are keeping him in place. So freeing him basically means that the Fire Titan can do as he pleases (it would please him to destroy the island i gather) and it's an open invitation for the free roaming Titans looking to party.

But yeah, the last chapter is just a fuckton of combat and pretty much nothing else. I also didn't finish the game, after the last fight with the titan started i exited the game and watched the final cutscene on youtube.

 

[Darth Roxor]

All I got was that it would dispel the barriers keeping the other Titans away from the island. You play in English?

Polish, but it only had Polish subtitles.

Presence of the Fire Titan itself is keeping the other Titans away, i don't remember any mumbo jumbo about "protective barriers"

Maybe I'm imagining things *shrug*

 

[Ammar]

Having played it in both English and German I can say that there definitely differences about the story details you get. The English Version is actully better in that regard - I am thinking of the dialogue when you become a Mage/Order Warrior in particular.

This being said, the story being rather terribad towards the ends. The dialogue with Ursegor(sp?) is a good example for that. It's important for me that you can ask the questions that arise naturally for the player in an RPG - even though the NPCs might not know the answer or will not share it.

 

[Murk]

Yeah, there's nothing about barriers - it is explained that the Fire Titan is just so powerful that his energy being harnessed into the Holy Flame acts as some kind of deterrent itself against the other Titans.

 

[314159]

I've got the game and will start to play it soon. Would you, gentlemen, kindly inform me whether it's big or not, landmass-wise? Compared to, say, Gothic 1 (I didn't play the second one )

 

[dr. one]

Compared to, say, Gothic 1

it´s roughly the same landmass-wise.

takes slightly longer to finish, feels shorter in retrospect since the game lacks Gothic´s spark and its second half sucks.
Gothic 2: NotR is a must, don´t miss out on it!

 

[Disconnected]

I haven't played G1 since it came out, but I believe it and Risen are roughly the same size. Then again, that might just be the BSE speaking.

Edit: redundancy rules...

 

[314159]

That's small, well, I hope there are ten brazillions monsters at least.

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

That's small, well, I hope there are ten brazillions monsters at least.

Night of the Raven has three detailed maps, the best I've ever seen in any comparable game, each of its three maps about the size of the first Gothic, if not bigger. (One of the areas is pretty much a remake of the original Gothic game world, i.e. the prison valley, only much better this time.)

 

[Disconnected]

That's small, well, I hope there are ten brazillions monsters at least.

Yes and no. The monsters mostly don't respawn, but there's tonnes of combat in the game. There are a fair selection of enemy types, but they're pretty much all melee enemies.

On the positive side, the melee mechanics work brilliantly. It quickly starts to feel like a simplistic beat 'em up (think Soul Calibur). That could have sucked because you'll get really good at it and the AI isn't that challenging. But the game saves it by increasing enemy damage output and numbers as you get better, and as you might have gleaned from the beat 'em up comparison, you kind of can get hit with combos and facing more than a single opponent can get seriously tricky.

On the negative side, ranged attacks are way, way, waaaay overpowered and dull as hell. There's virtually no encounter in the game that isn't a certain win if you kite with a crossbow or something similar. And we're talking 1 skillpoint+worst crossbow in the game here. Still, I suppose it's easier than looking up the godmode cheat code if you find yourself stuck. Yeah, I'm trying hard to be kind. It's mostly a very good game.

 

[Admiral jimbob]

Should I play G1 or skip straight to G2+NotR?

Last time I asked that, I got the response "play G2 vanilla first, NotR is a bit hard for newcomers", so all other opinions were rendered invalid by proxy to the massive display of homosexuality

 

[Micmu]

Play Gothic 1 first, bumface.
Really really do.
It's set in a prison colony so lots of violence and buttsecks are ensured.
G2 isn't as cool

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

That's small, well, I hope there are ten brazillions monsters at least.

Yes and no. The monsters mostly don't respawn, but there's tonnes of combat in the game. There are a fair selection of enemy types, but they're pretty much all melee enemies.

On the positive side, the melee mechanics work brilliantly. It quickly starts to feel like a simplistic beat 'em up (think Soul Calibur).

If Soul Calibur is anything like Soul Blade, your comment doesn't make much sense. It doesn't make much sense in either case, except that the mechanics are indeed brilliant. They're nothing like any beat 'em up I know, and it will take a complete playthrough to learn them decently, which is a good thing. It's not a monster-killing game like Diablo, it's a travel quest-solving game. If you want a monster-killing game that's relatively close to Gothic's look, play Two Worlds. There isn't much combat in G2 unless you go looking for it, and even then there won't be much of it.

It's always possible to avoid combat except for a few encounters and the dragons, which can be killed with spell scrolls, so you don't actually ever *need* a strong character (nor will you get one simply by beating the few monsters in the game ... in fact, killing monsters is such a weak way to accomplish anything on higher levels that you'd have to LARP a monster-hunter to rationalize killing them instead of avoiding them, especially when many of them are dangerous as fuck ... think dragon snapper).

And nothing in the game level scales, although with new chapters some new monsters occasionally appear in old places, often due to the requirements of story.

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

Should I play G1 or skip straight to G2+NotR?

Last time I asked that, I got the response "play G2 vanilla first, NotR is a bit hard for newcomers", so all other opinions were rendered invalid by proxy to the massive display of homosexuality

Play Gothic 2: Night of the Raven first, as I did. If you want a challenge, that is. (Remember, the monsters aren't there so that you can get xp, they're there to make your travel-quests more difficult.)

 

[Darth Roxor]

Should I play G1 or skip straight to G2+NotR?

Play G1 first. Some things in G2, like a couple of people or events from the prequel, might not make sense to you if you skip 1. Plus, eventually in G2 you return to the areas of G1, and it's pretty cool to visit all those places you've been to again and see how they changed.

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

Let me spell it out for you.......If you're a story fag, play G1 first. If not, go straight to NotR.

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

Oh, and USE THE DEFAULT CONTROLS FOR GOTHIC 2, AS THE DEVELOPERS ADVISE IN THE INI FILE. Faggots at the Jowood forums always advise you to use the modernized controls because the default old ones are "clunky". The fact is, the modernized controls are crap and make the game easier to boot.

 

[tarkin]

story fag

Man, are you stupid or what?

Just play G1 then G2:NOTR and don't bother with vanilla G2. If you can't stand the heat...

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

story fag

Man, are you stupid or what?

LOL.

Manboon.

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

Tarkin, did I mention you are a moron?