Gothic - Matt Chat

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That's exactly what I meant. These games seem to be beyond criticism these days. Even debating their weak spots is considered heresy.

You're not talking about weak spots though, you're just claiming all those games "suck".

Maybe you should at least try being a little more realistic. You're on par with a movie critic who claims that Citizen Kane, Casablanca, The Godfather, and Star Wars, all "suck".
 
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the original combat in Gothic 3 was a vast improvement over the predecessors
Haha.
Worst UI in gaming history? Yessir.
Not really. It sucks for sure, but items have quite big pictures and rolling through inventory and barter interface is fast so you don´t really spend that much unnecessarily surplus time in these.
Skyrim´s, Oblivion´s and likely KoA´s UIs (at least on PC) are more unwieldy in the long run.
Gothic's controls are not complex - they are bad. Everything else is fanboy thinking.
They´re neither complex nor bad, they´re some of the most effective when it comes to action RPGs - allow for a very good degree of pc control and performing wide variety of actions via few keys (+mouse). They contain one clearly redundant element (action key needs to be accompanied by "up" key to talk to people or pick up items), but that alone does not make them bad.
IIRC, some of the functions are not well communicated in-game, but that´s a problem external to the controls themselves.
Everything else is just unadaptive mentality.


As for the "slow starts" of G1 or G2, if anything, these games start too fast by today´s unfortunate standards.
Neither has an hour long pop-up ridden tutorial and in both it´s possible to encounter enemies way over the pc´s head very early.
Not controlling a badass right from the start does not mean a slow start.
That some players may have problems accommodating to some aspects does not constitute a slow start either. By this logic we could say that Betrayal at Krondor starts slow because it takes some time to get used to its graphics, or Fallout starts slow because it´s isometric. These aspects are not inherent to the pacing of the respective games.

Also, I fail to see how all this I´m-playing-games-since-1900 stuff is relevant.
People who played games in 1983 are different people now.

Even debating their weak spots is considered heresy.
You were not really debating anything.

I haven´t played the games above, but it´s quite obvious both are (or at least attempt to be) adventure/RPG hybrids, similarly as Quest for Glory games are.
I´ve googled Fifth Disciples and two entries I´ve checked say: "features elements from point-and-click adventure games and fantasy role-playing games" and "an odd blend of adventure and simplified RPG-style turn-based combat".
Seems like you did not close the case at all.
 
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That's exactly what I meant. These games seem to be beyond criticism these days. Even debating their weak spots is considered heresy.
Oh c'mon, of course you're entitled to your opinion and more than welcome to post it, but don't get upset if others don't share your opinion.

Besides, I was not trying to stifle discussion. I was just so astounded by your posts/opinions, that all I could do was to post that picture (they say a picture is worth a thousand words).

Other than that, I think JDR13 and DeepO said it better (above) than I could have put it myself. QFT for their posts.
 
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People have different receptions to UI. I grew up with flight simulators so complex and even bad UI are not that of an issue to me as long as it is designed proparly for a PC (correct boarder/font/icon sizes with correct mouse sensitivity and appropriate shortcuts) - and yet I shy away from tablets with touch screens and large nice icons!
 
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There's no way around it. Gothic 1's UI is BAD. It is so bad that after I bought G1 I shelved it in favor of a few other games I wanted to play at the time, thinking I'd get around to tackling the UI of G1 later.

Around that time I discovered this sight (I'm pretty sure it was this site, back then known as RPGdot.com) and after lurking through many threads about G1 discussing various aspects of its gameplay I decided I'd made a big mistake and gave it another go, sooner rather than later.

Gothic 1's UI isn't really all that bad once you get the hang of it. But the UI is anything but intuitive which is not a good thing. Proper consideration of mouse and keyboard would have garnered the franchise a lot more fans right from the start of the series.

Beyond the UI however, G1 is an absolutley fantastic game. It truely is the spritual successor to Ultima VII. Back in November 2011 I replayed G1 and G2 back to back. Both games are so good sometimes I could hardly believe what they have to offer as I play them.

In the meantime, PB bettered their UI with each successive game in the series (with each game netting a few steps forward despite taking a step or two backward with regard to the UI), culminating with Risen's UI (a new franchise in the spirit of the Gothic games, by the same developer), which was just fine with me I had no real complaints with it.
 
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The inventory was really bad, i remember i had some difficulties understanding how to drop stuff, swimming under water was terrible too. Easily worth a few minutes of figuring it all out though. How someone can think the combat in Gothic3 is better than G1-2 baffles me.
 
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I can't think of any UI worse then gothic's. Other then that though, the game was good inpsite of the UI...sorry deepo, none of the games you mention come close to how bad it was in gothic.
 
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Strangely I had no problems with the UI.
Once I had figured it out, that is.
 
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These games are considered adventures but contain level progression.

Case closed.

Case reopened.

But they are not very popular here. I doubt that the majority of adventure games players know them.

Yes, I have heard of the Fifth Disciple, but I put it into my drawer labelled "RPGs".

The greatest majority of adventure games *still* has *no* character progression, and I would even say that these two games are hybrids, not "pure" adventure games - no matter how they are labelled.

To be fair, the very last King's Quest game also had character progression.
 
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Gothics UI very quickly became second nature to me. Although I remember the frustration of not being able to hit meatbugs, that MAtt also encountered, lol!)
So I at least would say that it wasn't exactly BAD - its main problem was that it just threw out every standard already established at the time and did it completely different. To be honest, in retrospect that really makes me wonder what they were thinking, in that respect. It may have been less of a problem for me, because at the time I had not played any other 3rd person games like Gothic, and only one or two shooters, and the likewise weirdly controlled UUW and Daggerfall... so I had little preconception about how the UI SHOULD be.
 
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To be honest, in retrospect that really makes me wonder what they were thinking, in that respect.

I think that using a gamepad or so this UI would have been almost perfect.

But that's just a guess - I have never played Gothic (or any other game) with a console-ish controller ...
 
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