I´m really curious and wondering about their new
AI and
Balancing and what it has been able to do for fixing the low combat system, which had been, quite frankly, a true insult to the well designed original from the initial titles.
There you had a rather simplistic (except controls for some, maybe), but very effective game mechanics, which especially and above all was serving perfectly this one important deed:
- Sense of Achievement
Gone with the key role of statistics-heritage from P&P which had you reading your progress mainly from increasing values alone.
Instead here you were with a set of realistic moves - and your were in the driving seat with the direct control scheme provided.
(Aside from
long range) there were two melee fighting schools available to choose from along with their respective skill and pool of weapons:
One-handed and
Two-handed, the first relying more on speed and variability, the other on strength and damage power, hence representing the more
allround vs. the more
offensive combat style (and a better, more evolutionary implementation of
shields would have made the acc. style a perfect addition as the
defensive one
).
The mentioned set of strikes and swings was expanding over certain thresholds you would reach in your skill.
Your more gradual basic improvement became evident to you through how the game played it easier on you with the delicate combo timings the better you were getting in your combat skill.
After all, the difficulty posed you with problems even facing a young wolf at the start, where later you could feel your growth when you could knock out its parents with a few standard blows. Therefore the game presented you with tougher opponents requiring more swiftness and tactical wits to overcome - resulting more than often in true dances with the blade, making this an exciting and rewarding experience.
The greater honours in that context were reached when you were developing individual combat strategies for various foes
- like the hit and run in circles around the huge trolls
- restoring distance with two fast steps after attacking against animals and beasts like wolfs, wargs and shadow runners or some orc attacks
- for the latter and humanoid opponents also the knowledge about the best moments when to block, revert or attack, reading and anticipating their moves,
- dragging a string of orcs along the wall before the mine valley castle, gradually decimating them with well dosed counter blows/mini-combos (worked at least in
G2 classic )
- avoid the deadly lightning fast left-right-left sweep combo of Orc Veterans
and more...
And the level design, carefully distributing those opponents of varying strength across locations helped it a lot.
In a nutshell:
Most rewarding combat system i ever had played.
[ And that´s me, s.o. who´s not that much blessed when it comes to tasks requiring a good deal of manual dexterity (in German called a
`Grobmotoriker´ ).
So the timing issue presented me with quite a challenge to master, let alone the tuning between combos and char movement.
But once adapted to it... - among the effort ~100 consecutive fights against arch enemy
Bullco on level 3 and without leather armor yet rsp. with and level 6 in NotR
- ... there couldn´t be anything better! ]
I know, there probably had been games doing such before, maybe even better.
But they largely had been combat-heavy.
In
G1/G2(NotR), however, it blended perfectly with all the other enjoyable gameplay features (story & quests, NPCs & dialogue/language, locations, setting, other skills, exploration, items, great vistas & sound/music, dimensions of movement - walking/running, climbing, swimming/diving, etc.) contributing to a well-balanced, rich CRPG.
Top!
And vice versa disappointing to the same degree in
G3, therefore.
Ragon, the
Gothic Paladin (2nd run
Merc)