Why is Gothic series so culty?

[Ryan muller]

illiterate dumbfuck.

>select witcher style, brew a potion
>click until it dies
>watch animations

truly great combat, so tactical

skill issue, git gud.

you dont need a journal tracker at all in that game, but I now understand why you think w3 is such a revelation.

Of course i dont need it, obviously i have crystal balls and should know which quests did i broke by sequence breaking the game and the ones which happen to fail because of how buggy the game is. truly incline

oh what? daggerfall did this in 1996 by having a well done quest tracker which actually made clear if you had failed or not a quest? nooooo that cant be a thing before the casual era

It's like reading a reddit comment. You were dropped on the head as a baby, that's the only way you can claim CnC in Witcher 3.

yes, Keira, literally my favorite female character in the whole game died because i didnt do a side quest. sure, no cnc at all

Yes, every single side quest and every map marker. I saw as much of that game as possible. Level scaling exists, which it shouldn't at all, ON TOP OF THE FACT there's level 30+ lowly bandits sitting around stronger than huge monsters. My point stands.

A lot of classic games have level scalling, not even as an optional thing, daggerfall itself suffers from a much worse level scalling than tw3, which is again, optional and wasnt even in the game at its release data.

also, no bandit camp has bandits at level 30+ when playing without level scaling in the base game.

you either went throught blood and wine, which has some such as the one in knight for hire or played the whole thing with level scaling turned on as a big casul you probably are.

 

[BosanskiSeljak]

illiterate dumbfuck.

>select witcher style, brew a potion
>click until it dies
>watch animations

truly great combat, so tactical

skill issue, git gud.

you dont need a journal tracker at all in that game, but I now understand why you think w3 is such a revelation.

Of course i dont need it, obviously i have crystal balls and should know which quests did i broke by sequence breaking the game and the ones which happen to fail because of how buggy the game is. truly incline

oh what? daggerfall did this in 1996 by having a well done quest tracker which actually made clear if you had failed or not a quest? nooooo that cant be a thing before the casual era

It's like reading a reddit comment. You were dropped on the head as a baby, that's the only way you can claim CnC in Witcher 3.

yes, Keira, literally my favorite female character in the whole game died because i didnt do a side quest. sure, no cnc at all

Yes, every single side quest and every map marker. I saw as much of that game as possible. Level scaling exists, which it shouldn't at all, ON TOP OF THE FACT there's level 30+ lowly bandits sitting around stronger than huge monsters. My point stands.

A lot of classic games have level scalling, not even as an optional thing, daggerfall itself suffers from a much worse level scalling than tw3, which is again, optional and wasnt even in the game at its release data.

also, no bandit camp has bandits at level 30+ when playing without level scaling in the base game.

you either went throught blood and wine, which has some such as the one in knight for hire or played the whole thing with level scaling turned on as a big casul you probably are.

1. Never said or even implied it was tactical, you're an illiterate dumbfuck

2. The difference is, the shit tracker doesn't mean anything because you can easily play the game without it. It's not hard, and it's not completely useless, can still use it to remind you of quests. Witcher 3 however is designed in such a way you HAVE to stare at your quest markers, mini map, and keep a journal of dozens of shitty quests. It's hilarious how you think that's somehow an improvement.

3. There are bandits who are ridiculously powerful despite being some poor village shitters. Stop sidestepping the point, even the biggest twitcher3 stans on reddit can admit its shit design and breaks immersion. Yet somehow you can't?

4. Ah, yes, Keira, the one who shows up only one more time after the time she could be killed, who's presence means nothing in that short time shes there, and then immediately leaves never to be seen again. Your best example is pure fluff. Can give you many of those for W1, so you gonna start talking about how amazing W1 is now?

 

[Ryan muller]

illiterate dumbfuck.

>select witcher style, brew a potion
>click until it dies
>watch animations

truly great combat, so tactical

skill issue, git gud.

you dont need a journal tracker at all in that game, but I now understand why you think w3 is such a revelation.

Of course i dont need it, obviously i have crystal balls and should know which quests did i broke by sequence breaking the game and the ones which happen to fail because of how buggy the game is. truly incline

oh what? daggerfall did this in 1996 by having a well done quest tracker which actually made clear if you had failed or not a quest? nooooo that cant be a thing before the casual era

It's like reading a reddit comment. You were dropped on the head as a baby, that's the only way you can claim CnC in Witcher 3.

yes, Keira, literally my favorite female character in the whole game died because i didnt do a side quest. sure, no cnc at all

Yes, every single side quest and every map marker. I saw as much of that game as possible. Level scaling exists, which it shouldn't at all, ON TOP OF THE FACT there's level 30+ lowly bandits sitting around stronger than huge monsters. My point stands.

A lot of classic games have level scalling, not even as an optional thing, daggerfall itself suffers from a much worse level scalling than tw3, which is again, optional and wasnt even in the game at its release data.

also, no bandit camp has bandits at level 30+ when playing without level scaling in the base game.

you either went throught blood and wine, which has some such as the one in knight for hire or played the whole thing with level scaling turned on as a big casul you probably are.

1. Never said or even implied it was tactical, you're an illiterate dumbfuck

2. The difference is, the shit tracker doesn't mean anything because you can easily play the game without it. It's not hard, and it's not completely useless, can still use it to remind you of quests. Witcher 3 however is designed in such a way you HAVE to stare at your quest markers, mini map, and keep a journal of dozens of shitty quests. It's hilarious how you think that's somehow an improvement.

3. There are bandits who are ridiculously powerful despite being some poor village shitters. Stop sidestepping the point, even the biggest twitcher3 stans on reddit can admit its shit design and breaks immersion. Yet somehow you can't?

4. Ah, yes, Keira, the one who shows up only one more time after the time she could be killed, who's presence means nothing in that short time shes there, and then immediately leaves never to be seen again. Your best example is pure fluff. Can give you many of those for W1, so you gonna start talking about how amazing W1 is now?

1: you implied it by describing tw3's combat as worse by being a mindless hack n slash, while you are not technically wrong, its mindless combat with enough feedback and with more movement and manual input than literally pressing a Button and watching animations.

Tw1's combat isnt remotely acceptable and implying that only makes you a laughstock.

2: dont get me wrong, the game is easy in fact. Its ridiculously easy. It doesnt change the fact the journal is still terrible and the game is still buggy, it doesnt matter yet still problems like gaymond's quest are still memed to death and notorious due to the terribly broken nature of this shitty game and its terrible journal which are worst than a game in 1996, truly amazing.

And you are not winning me change the subject to the existance of quest markers at all. This is falacious and you know.


3: Ok, point me bandits which are level 30+ in vanilla game without level scalling being on. Link a video, a wiki page or even a damn thread about it.


4: theres atleast 3 quests revolving keira in the game, it doesnt matter if she isnt a main part of the plot. You can get a good portion of the cast dead at the end, which is CnC regardless of the strawman you try to use. I also never pointed CnC in witcher 1 as lackluster, iliterate dumbfuck.

 

[cvv]

Story: Overall, from a technical point of view, W1 has the best written plot & ending.

Nah, W2 has by far the best plot, narrative structure and endings. The plots in W1 and W3 are in comparison kindda simple minded.

W2 is the worst Witcher in everything else but the story (not dialogues, characters or quest writing mind you, just the overall story) is top notch.

Agreed with everything else.

 

[Baron Dupek]

 

[Laz Sundays]

Americans lecturing others on brainwashing never gets old. Or wars, genocide and freedoms, rights and wrongs. Lecturing anything to anyone, it's hilarious. A culture of passive-agressive interactions, greatest Social experiment Show on the planet. Youngest, loudest, nastiest nation praising platforms and plastic. Put your grasses on, ffs. Steadily imploding. Eating themselves from the inside. Healthcare, jobs and education worse than that of Etiopia. Obsessing over insignificant details due to boredom of their very soul, rallied by simple phrases like "terrorist/racist/whateverist", so they can feel useful and purposeful. One pull of a plug, and offline equals Death.

We reached 2023. You look as free and strong as ever, West. Hating, or feeling any emotion towards you is as pointless as speaking to you. Do you feel that tiny red alarm from within you, your neglected intuition telling you how wrong things went? It's not too late. Come, move to and live in Europe. Time to remember life and living.

 

[Justicar]

 

[NotSweeper]

There's a simple reason for it, it's the perfect RPG. There is not a single aspect of Gothic 2 that isn't designed and executed to perfection.
They call it eurojank, but that's merely due to the fact that Amerigolems have never, and will never create anything on the level of Gothic 2.
I say this as someone who hates G*rms, but when something's a masterpiece you gotta recognize.

 

[akagifron]

Because Gothic falls into the Middle European and Eastern European sense of freedom. Freedom is when you first run errands for influential people, and then you start profiting from everyone and rising in this hierarchy of assholes. Plus, the second Gothic has a really good map with adventure elements, it’s a fun to explore. But the most important thing is that you find yourself in the atmosphere of a conscript army and are trying to curry favor. Also, when Gothic came out, dark fantasy was on the hype, this subgenre was young, but it had not yet bothered anyone and it really sold. How noir sold Sly Cooper

 

[Aholf Ditler]

Gothic is the father and Kingdom Come is the son

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Not exactly. I absolutely love the good Piranha Bytes games (Gothic, Gothic 2, Risen, ELEX), and I absolutely love KCD, but they are somewhat different.

Even aside from the historical focus of KCD versus the fantasy angle of PB games, as far as world design, exploration, power curve, factions, no one does it like Piranha Bytes. They are the elite of open world design (when they can make it work, obviously they also release shitfests regularly).

KCD games on the other hand, shine with the historical immersion, the more complex combat system, and more interesting narrative, and some of the simulation aspects.

 

[cvv]

Because Gothic falls into the Middle European and Eastern European sense of freedom.

Kwans love freedom too, that's why open-world games sell so well over there.

But there's one crucial difference. Yuros in general jive with groundedness - in aesthetics and general design - while Kwans prefer spectacle. In Yuro the closer to reality a game is the better, in Kwa it's the opposite. (And Japan is Kwa on steroids in this regard).

It makes all the sense in the world to me Gothic wasn't a smash hit anywhere but in Yurop. It you could ride dragons, jump on huge purple mushrooms and if every level up was announced by wild guitar riffs and showers of pink confetti the game would sell oodles in America and even more in Japan.

(Yes, I do think a preference for groundedness and restraint is associated with higher intelligence and more prestigious taste).

 

[Nikanuur]

OP, you meant *cuty* of course!?! Har, har, har, I love Gothic too, man, I doo. NO, REALLY!

Anyway, it's a rather long story. It all began when it was raining cats and dogs, down in schmutzige Essen, and one Michael Rüve came to one Michael Hoge, and told him, "I have dze greatest plan on how to torture dze PC gamers by forcing dzem to use dze keyboard in unsprochenverbötlichekultzgesagt most horrible ways! Iz dzere somesing better, or what?"

And Michael Hoge, frolicsome guy as he was, said, "Why, jaa, let's graft it on a combat system dzet would add some great frustration on dze top, and dzen have many laughs together over players trying to cope with dzet, har, har, har!"
...
Skip 10 years or so, and the community, jolly guys as they always had been, had to come up with a reason why they delved with much passion into such a sado-masochistic product (other than it having great stories, that is) that would let them keep their faces. So, they started to challenge each other over who liked the game more, who played it the longest before even hitting the second level, who shot the most arrows per kill, who spent the most time trying to use something from the inventory, and many other awesome similar laugh-and-chill-with-dze-germans gaming elements.

Aah, the whimsical good old days!

 

[Zeriel]

Because Gothic falls into the Middle European and Eastern European sense of freedom.

Kwans love freedom too, that's why open-world games sell so well over there.

But there's one crucial difference. Yuros in general jive with groundedness - in aesthetics and general design - while Kwans prefer spectacle. In Yuro the closer to reality a game is the better, in Kwa it's the opposite. (And Japan is Kwa on steroids in this regard).

It makes all the sense in the world to me Gothic wasn't a smash hit anywhere but in Yurop. It you could ride dragons, jump on huge purple mushrooms and if every level up was announced by wild guitar riffs and showers of pink confetti the game would sell oodles in America and even more in Japan.

(Yes, I do think a preference for groundedness and restraint is associated with higher intelligence and more prestigious taste).

This really doesn't reflect reality in my opinion. If anything it's just a long stroll through stereotypes that really aren't borne out by looking at tastes in American culture. Like... TV shows? Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, while they definitely have their issues, are these known for their absurdity over groundedness? I think Gothic's failure in other markets is easily explained by a lack of exposure/big publisher behind it, insufficient marketing, etc, and the arcane control scheme + poor (but beloved) english voice acting.

The irony is that Gothic is really only relevant in terms of people still talking about it because of non-German countries acceptance of it over time. There are games that are really only a thing in Germany and popular there but untouched elsewhere, Gothic is not one of those.

Ultimately though I don't think even the control scheme was a big deal. It's more about the timing. Gothic's time in the sun was when RPGs and PC gaming in general was still niche; those who were in that niche definitely knew about Gothic, I played it and enjoyed it the year it came out. And if you go and look at DOS era games, arcane control schemes are fucking de rigeur, so it's not like this ever stopped the enthusiast crowd. It just didn't make a reputation for itself (nor was it designed for) the console era/crowd. Which thus makes it hard for big corporations to care about it later. For its era and niche I'd say it sold fairly well.

 

[Nikanuur]

With Gothic you have nothing else. Even PB abandoned most of what made the first two games great (with the exception of risen 1).

Gothic 3, Risen 2+3, Elex 1+2 not the same as Gothic 1+2. Hmm, let's see.

* The world and its creatures sort of 'rebuild' or 'renew' themselves 2-4 times during the course of the game. CHECK
* The player can find treasures, artifacts, bits of lore, quest starter items, bits of puzzles, etc. in every other strange and hidden cranny, fog-covered-crevice, seemingly unreachable platform, behind the waterfall, etc. CHECK
* Beginnings are harsh, git gud is stronk. CHECK
* Quests can be solved in many ways depending on whom you talked to, which faction you are member of, or which item you have or don't have prior to solving the quest. CHECK
* Story(ies) tied to following one of several factions. CHECK
* Several worth of playthroughs depending on factions. CHECK
* Unresponsive, clumsy, whimsical, loved-n-hated by fans combat CHECK
* Characters and factions equipped with great responsiveness depending on your prior actions. CHECK
* System of semi-unique trainers. CHECK

Anything else? Yeah, much. Anyway, this 'not the same anymore' trope makes my consistency meter squirm every frikking time I read it.

 

[thesecret1]

* The world and its creatures sort of 'rebuild' or 'renew' themselves 2-4 times during the course of the game. CHECK

Not true. New creatures spawn each chapter, regardless of whether previous creatures were killed or not.

* Unresponsive, clumsy, whimsical, love-n-hated by fans, combat CHECK

The combat in Gtohic's great, if a but exploitable if you know what you're doing. WTF are you on about?

this 'not the same anymore' trope makes my consistency meter squirm every frikking time I read it.

The difference is that the latter games are of much worse quality, not that they have a different set of mechanics. Are you retarded?

 

[Odoryuk]

I don't understand it as well. I played the first two as a kid and greatly enjoyed them, especially the second one, but, unlike Morrowind, this series stayed in my childhood, couldn't return back to it.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

I like to stay optimistic about later PB exploits, but pretending that post R1 games did not drop a lot of cool stuff that made the older titles so unique is going a bit too far.

 

[thesecret1]

I like to stay optimistic about later PB exploits, but pretending that post R1 games did not drop a lot of cool stuff that made the older titles so unique is going a bit too far.

The main thing that dropped was the quality of basically everything. Worse level design, worse combat, worse balance, worse story and setting... Archolos showed the difference between old Gothics and newer games pretty well

 

[cvv]

it's just a long stroll through stereotypes that really aren't borne out by looking at tastes in American culture.

Stereotypes are almost always anchored in reality, those that aren't don't ring true and therefore can't survive.

America is a big place, you can find p. much everything in some quantity there, even smart and tasteful people, but for every Breaking Bad or The Wire there are oodles of brain-destroying reality shows, retardaloozas like Jerry Springer, soap operas, televangelist shows and monster truck rallies.

In comparison, I'm sure not everything produced by the BBC or Dutch, French, German or Swedish TVs is brilliant but it'd be completely unthinkable to find such profound retardery there.

One of the best examples illustrating the difference between a typical Yuro and Kwa TV production is Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, the British vs. the US version. The former is smart, funny, authentic and full of moving, deeply human stories, while the US version is loud, stupid, showy and plastic with "drama" background music.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

I like to stay optimistic about later PB exploits, but pretending that post R1 games did not drop a lot of cool stuff that made the older titles so unique is going a bit too far.

The main thing that dropped was the quality of basically everything. Worse level design, worse combat, worse balance, worse story and setting... Archolos showed the difference between old Gothics and newer games pretty well

That too. But bigger (like an actual open world with difficulty spikes gatekeeping) and smaller, but very important and cool (like training or pickpocket dialogues) things disappeared completely depending on the game.

 

[Maxie]

I enjoyed Morrowind much more.

You fucking idiot

 

[Laz Sundays]

I started with Gothic 3, actually. Thought it was a nice game but it was too buggy to finish and decided to try G2. The difference was fucking enormous. Completely shocked at how better it was, I finished G2 and went to play the OG one, which was easier to get used to after G2. And again, the difference in worlbuilding and questing was huge from G3. There is absolutely zero chance that I will ever again call G3 a "nice game" or attempt to play it again.

If you can't tell why first two were better, that's your problem. However, don't expect others to take you seriously.

 

[BosanskiSeljak]

Gothic 3 is literal shit in every conceivable way. Even this "amazing music" people talk about , might be nice to listen to when separated from the game, but ruins immersion in game and doesn't fit the setting or atmosphere of Gothic. Same shit that happens with a bunch of other games that go more "hollywood" instead of acknowledging music for video games should be different ( Witcher -> Witcher 3, Mass Effect -> ME2/3, Gothic 1/2 -> Gothic 3, etc.)

 

[thesecret1]

G3 was PB biting off way more than they could chew. The map was enormous compared to previous games and it was obvious they couldn't handle it, hence the shit, low-effort content strewn about, the whole "liberation" questline that kinda went nowhere and was scuffed as hell, vast stretches of landscape devoid of anything interesting, and the obviously rushed aspects of the game. PB reached for the stars only to fall on its face and never recover. I respect the ambition, at least. Had they succeeded to deliver G2-level quality at the scale they attempted, it'd have been the greatest RPG ever made.