My thoughts on Arcania

Alright. I admit it. I picked it up for Xbox last night. I was bored and looking for something to play on the big screen, and my computer can't handle it.

I am pleasantly surprised. Here's my thoughts after about four hours playing. Mild spoilers for the first part of the game below:

1. The beginning sequence (without giving much away) is terrible and made me think the game was going to be awful. Thankfully it was fairly short but still felt long. Bad, bad way to start things off.

2. It looks pretty damn good. Not the greatest graphics ever, but some really nice environments and gorgeous lighting effects during the daytime, especially sunrise and sunset. The night sky leaves a little to be desired, but I spent one night exploring during a thunderstorm, and the woods were suitably dark and scary as they should be. The running and jumping animations are funky, but the battle animations are really good. The main character looks good, but the secondary character models are not so great. It's like they went too far putting texture on the faces… everyone looks old and kind of scary, even your fiancee. Less would have been more here. The monsters look decent to good. I wish I could zoom in to get a closer look, but the wolves, for instance, look pretty ferocious and vicious. The goblins look good and have nice animations. One monster type actually startled me and was ugly and scary. Well done.

Cool thing I noticed is that when you approach them, the goblins are sometimes sitting down and then get up to attack. In one case two goblins were on a cliff edge looking out at the view as I approached. Really nice touch that they're not perpetually standing with drawn weapons. Again, I wish I could zoom in on them to see more details, but well done.

The caves I've seen are only OK. The glowing crystal things and mushrooms look out of place, like they are straddling the line between World of Warcraft cartoon-style and realism. The caves are early game small places so far, but not much to look at so far.

2a. The frame rate is pretty bad and gets annoying. But it's not really that bad… hell, I played for four hours, right? I installed the game to the hard drive, and it still feels choppy. Having multiple enemies (4-6) attack did not seem to affect this one way or another. It feels consistently choppy no matter what. There are some moiré patterns that happen and jagged edges on things, but so far these feel like small unpleasant elements in an overall nice looking painting.

3. It's really, really easy. Once I got the hang of the controls and the trick of rolling to avoid hits, I was pretty untouchable, even with multiple bad guys. I used healing items a few times, and there's a crazy amount of them available even early on. I collected 41 bandages and have not used even one. Crafting healing potions, meat, etc. is too easy as well. I was playing on Normal, then switched it to Hard. Not much difference between the two as far as I can tell, once you start rolling to dodge attacks. the most damage I took was towards the end of the night when casters were hitting me with fireballs from behind while I was distracted fighting something else.

4. Voiceovers are mostly OK. Again, I haven't played that much, but so far it's not as bad as I have read. The witch character is beyond awful, as has been said many times. It's like the actor was doing a parody. Head-shakingly bad, but that's only about 3-5 minutes of my whole experience so far. Noticed a couple discrepancies in the subtitles to what is spoken, but not bad at all.

5. As mentioned 1000+ times, it's really linear.

6. Sound is good. Music is unobtrusive. I vastly prefer very sparing use of music, but I hardly even noticed it here.

7. Too much loot in my opinion. I like finding interesting things but seeing magical items in chests along with recipes, money, potions and bandages this often early in the game is discouraging. I'm not a fan of the unlimited inventory, and selling loads of stuff all the time is silly to me.

8. The quest marker system is a bit odd. In some cases (perhaps if the location is too far, though I'm not sure exactly) it does not show you where to go, which made me think I was doing something wrong. Spoiler - For instance: There's a quest to find a wooden leg. This did not show upon the quest marker. I played with it on and off to see how it is. I personally like having a quest marker system available, as I don't have tons of time to play very often, and sometimes you want to just get some stuff accomplished without a huge long search. It's just a little weird that it works in most - but not all - cases. I need to play more to get a better feel for how it works. I think it makes some of the quests too easy, so I'll probably turn it off unless I get frustrated.

Overall it plays much like Fable 2 crossed with a much better version of Two Worlds. I'm liking it, but I wonder how long the appeal will hold up. It's a relaxing game that is pretty fun so far.

I'll post more thoughts here as I play more.

Originally Posted by Ovenall
2. It looks pretty damn good.

The game starts with an ugly witch telling you that she is carrying your baby and you have to please her father in order to marry her , no?
I 'd say that things look very shitty from the very start.

Originally Posted by Tragos
The game starts with an ugly witch telling you that she is carrying your baby and you have to please her father in order to marry her , no?
I 'd say that things look very shitty from the very start.

To me, she isn't a witch at all, just his girl-friend.
Where does the game show she has witch-like abilities ?
Im referring to the demo.

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
To me, she isn't a witch at all, just his girl-friend.
Where does the game show she has witch-like abilities ?
Im referring to the demo.

Just look at her face, it is pretty obvious that she rides broomsticks at night

Originally Posted by Tragos
Just look at her face, it is pretty obvious that she rides broomsticks at night

Ovenall never said faces. I agree with him - it overall looks really good for an RPG. Very few RPGs beat it in terms of graphics.

Originally Posted by Tragos
The game starts with an ugly witch telling you that she is carrying your baby and you have to please her father in order to marry her , no?
I 'd say that things look very shitty from the very start.

That post is a comment on "It looks pretty damn good. ".

Wooo so now in RPG "all women should look nice and pretty".

The faces in Arcania fall into the category of "Uncanny Valley":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

I wish videogames would move away from realism towards a more stylized approach. Arcania went overboard putting textures and lines on the faces to give them character and ended up looking revolting. As a related aside, I recently played Enslaved for Xbox. Stupid name, but a really fun game with great, imaginative art direction. And without a doubt, the very best faces and facial expressions I've ever seen in a game. It's not an RPG, but I recommend it.

I don't think the girlfriend character at the beginning of Arcania is as bad looking as people are saying, either. She's definitely a tomboy type and looks like she spent her life outdoors. But what would you expect from a woman who lives in a tiny rural village with medieval technology?

Worse to me is the bizarre pose that some women in the game take on. They stand with their hips thrust out and backs bent unnaturally. Why anyone thought this was good, I can't say. Frankly, none of this bothers me very much though.

Mild spoilers - More troubling to me is what happens in the first city you come to (where you meet Diego again). Suddenly, after 4-5 hours of killing monsters and running around doing fetch quests, they throw a bunch of back story and political intrigue at you. I love back story and political intrigue. But the way it's presented here is simply confusing. I don't think it's a translation issue either. It's more that it's a barrage of information about a bunch of characters that you're barely familiar with is thrown at you in a very short period of time. I was really glad to have a detailed quest log and pointers at this point, because I was confused by what was happening, what I should do, and most importantly why I should do it… or even care!

After reading over the quest logs, I decided to search for Liuvan. This is another example of a quest that does not show its location on the map even when you have quest markers activated. I can pinpoint the exact location of a boy in the wilderness outside a farm on my map, but I do not have this option when I'm looking for a woman I was just told to look for… and who turns out to be really nearby where I was when I was told to look for her in the first place. Just weird that the game helps in some instances and not in others, for no apparent reason, and with no explanation as to why. As I mentioned above, I've been playing with markers on and off to see how it goes. For the most part, the quest markers on the map aren't really extremely helpful, as the maps are pretty straightforward and so far I think you are given pretty good directions.

By the way, still playing on Hard level. The difficulty has ramped up at this point, though I still have not died even once! And the amount of potions and crafting materials I have is pretty huge. Oh, and spell-effects are disappointing. The electrical one is OK, but the cold spell is really underwhelming. Haven't tried the fire spell yet.

More thoughts to follow as I keep playing. Please let me know what you think of these posts.

In one case two goblins were on a cliff edge looking out at the view as I approached.

I remember that scene. I really really really felt bad whacking on them. They were just sitting on the edge of the cliff, enjoying the spectacular ocean view. If I ever replay that part (just before the magic forge area) or this game, those goblins live. Funny, but I've just about completed the game and so far that goblin-cliff scene is the only Gothic type moment I've experienced in the game.

Update with mild spoilers:

I got to the area with the Orcs before Silverlake, and the difficulty has spiked immensely. I can't figure out a way to go through the area without getting swarmed by enemies. Try to pull a bloodfly and you are swarmed by 6-8 bloodflies and lake wasps. Same thing with the orcs. Try to isolate one and get 3-4 of them on you at the same time. The only response is to run like hell until they leave you alone. I don't mind difficult battles but this is a cheap tactic, considering there's no area effect spells (at my level at least) aside from about 10 fireball scrolls I've found.

I've set the difficulty back to Normal for now. Not happy about this. The game went from really easy to very difficult in an unfair seeming way (outside of running and slamming health potions, which isn't my idea of fun). Getting mobbed on all sides over and over is not fun.

Beginning to get tired of all the fetch quests.

Another thing I forgot to mention: The default graphics settings for the Xbox version absolutely suck. After fiddling with the settings for about 60 seconds, the game looked much, much better… really pretty, even. Why the hell they have the default graphics looking washed out and drab is beyond me. There's a bizarre level of quality control here in almost every aspect. Some details are lovingly crafted, and other things are thrown together.

And it rains too often. Does it really need to rain 3+ times per day? Just stupid.

Originally Posted by Ovenall
And it rains too often. Does it really need to rain 3+ times per day? Just stupid.

Guess they wanted to show off their rain puddles

Really, really wish there was an option to sleep in this game. I'm getting to hate adventuring at night. It's ugly and the rain just makes it worse. I'm getting to think I might not finish this, though I'm still having fun. I just wonder how fun it's going to be in another ten hours.

Worst AAA rpg in years; this is a joke compared to the other gothics
And if u consider it a series reboot , is still a piece of crap. the only positive things are the graphics and music

The AI is so limited (even on the highest difficulty) , stupid dialogues with pathetic voiceacting, game stopping bugs, extremely artificial world, unconvincing story, things cut out for dlcs, rpg system way to simple and so on and so on.

I haven't played it much in the last few days, but here's my update:

The swamp area with the giant tree is simply the best looking and most realistic swamp environment I've ever seen in a game. It really looks like a thriving ecosystem versus the typical fantasy trope of the "spooky" swamp. The duckweed floating on the surface of the water in some places is an awesome simple touch. The giant tree is pretty cool too.

The ruins in this area are pretty lame though. The exterior is neat… reminded me of a small Mayan pyramid. But get inside and it's one big "battle room" after another, linked with narrow hallways. Go from one big, empty chamber, kill a bunch of skeletons, then proceed to the next. The huts and hovels in the swamp are more fleshed out than these mostly empty, boring rooms.

Still having fun, though I admit I'm starting to hurry through areas to get to the next place. The monastery on the big hill is pretty cool, but again, travelling there at night takes away so much impact. The graphics are simply stunning during the day and at night it's… well, it's dark. It should be dark, but I hate adventuring through the nights because it's just not as much fun to look at. And NO OPTION to rest and start in the morning… So, so stupid.

Finally I made it through part of the volcanic area past the monastery. So far it's a pretty dull area. I'm probably going to finish this eventually, but it's going to take a while. It no longer grabs me.

Update after a long time:

I'm still playing a bit on and off. Overall, I think it's a really good Xbox game, but I can't see playing this on a PC… it's the kind of game to relax with, kick back in a comfy chair with a beer. It's a lot of fun in small doses.

The main character gets pretty funny sometimes getting fed up with doing tasks for people. It can be seen as an indictment of the game, but it's a pretty funny commentary on the whole genre, in my opinion.

Some very nice environments. Many if not most of the battles are the same though. And there's still some pretty high spikes in difficulty from time to time, which keeps you on your toes a bit. There's far less healing potions available as you go farther, which is good. I've lost track of what's going on in the story though, which is a shame.

I still recommend it as an Xbox game.

Have you played any of the previous Gothic games Ovenall?

I've been playing it for a few days and I'd say so far (just got past Silverlake to where you start to see your first orcs) if I judge it on it's own merrits I'd say it's passable, not good but not all that bad. But compared to the other games in the series, as the next GOTHIC title I'd say it's abysmal. A great many of the cool, core gameplay elements from the other games have been completely removed.

I think the combat is boring. I think the graphics are horrible. I agree with you that the lighting is great and the enviroments look lush, but everything looks kind of… fuzzy. If you look at something in the distance it looks like a big blurr. In addtion the frame rate is abysmal. Either the game is very badly coded or the 360 simply isn't powerful enough for it. And I think the dialog and writing is awful.

It's also very linear so far. You go to a new area, do a few quests and complete whatever story quest is required for you to continue then you head off to the next area and do it again.

I played a very small amount of G2 and a bunch of G3. G2 was too twitchy in the controls for me. I found it annoying and kind of ugly to look at. G3 was a buggy mess that was nice to look at.

Everything you say about Arcania I agree with, except I really like the graphics. You are right about the frame rate, though.

Arcania is extremely linear, probably even more so than Fable 2. But I'm still playing it from time to time when I want a relaxing game. Not everything has to be Citizen Kane. Sometimes you want to settle in with something simple.