7.5 hours: halfway through the 15-hour campaign. I stopped there not because I’m lazy, not because I’m mendacious, not because I felt I’d seen it all – but because I couldn’t stand any more. I thought about playing for the same amount again, and I felt incredibly tired. I thought of all the other things I could do instead (most of which, admittedly, involve staring at the internet), and I felt deeply sad. Games shouldn’t do that.
That didn’t happen because the game is awful (it’s not; if you want so absolute a qualifier, tell me a suitable term that lies perfectly between ‘awful’ and ‘ tolerable,’ and that’ll do the trick nicely), but because I felt like I was wasting my time. To be mediocre, to inspire no emotion – that’s the worst crime of all, most especially for a roleplaying game, something that’s supposed to inspire a feeling of adventure in an unknown land, a sense of otherness, place and purpose. I felt nothing. No care for anyone or anything – even the salt-tingle compulsion of levelling up and looting barely activated the hungry lizard-portion of my brain. I didn’t feel hate, anger or even contempt. I felt nothing.
Here’s what Gothic 4 is: it’s an MMORPG without the MMO. It’s mindless, time-consuming fetch quests, running along roads and skipping past characterless dialogue from characterless characters until they give you your next, fetch-based objective. Without a sense of being in a living world, the emptiness of such pursuits is inescapable.
