ELEX - The Beserkers

Learn more about the Beserker faction of ELEX:

ELEX - Berserker Faction Trailer

Piranha Bytes and THQ Nordic present a new in-game trailer for ELEX. The new trailer features one of the major factions players can join in the world of Magalan: the Berserkers.

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More information.

I wonder if Piranha Bytes will be open to a modding community (perhaps they are; I personally don't know) much like Bethesda and the Elder Scrolls setting. It amazes me how Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim are perpetually on the radar via such active and highly creative modding communities taking advantage of newer tech. Skyrim itself is 5 years old but replete with excellent mods, some the size of stand alone DLC content, is still going strong.

This game looks interesting enough for me to keep my eyes on it.

Rills said:

I wonder if Piranha Bytes will be open to a modding community (perhaps they are; I personally don't know) much like Bethesda and the Elder Scrolls setting.

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Nope. They have never been open to modding and have no plans to release any official modding tools or offer any kind of mod support at all.
You are also not allowed to recreate any of their games in a 3rd party engine (or elsewise I'm sure there'd have been projects to rebuild Gothic 1/2/NotR in a mod-friendly environment like Bethesda's engines).
All the modding for the Gothics and Risens has always been purely community-driven and it will stay that way with Elex.

Gothic 1 remade for the Xth time..

mercy said:

Gothic 1 remade for the Xth time..

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fabulously optimistic

I wonder why they went with these fantasy thropes here. Setting would be more convincing if factions were more related to it's history/background and evolved from there.
( This can work (Fallout) but PB games don't go for that kind of self aware parody).

Where's the sci fi part? It's a fantasy world with fantasy weapons and tons of fantasy monsters.

And a radio tower.

mbuddha said:

Where's the sci fi part? It's a fantasy world with fantasy weapons and tons of fantasy monsters.

And a radio tower.

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The berserkers are the classic fantasy part. The factions responsible for the scifi elements are the clerics and the Albs (the latter not being a joinable faction but the player character -Jax- is an infamous Alb general, the so called Beast of Xacor, who crashes with his glider and is then expelled from the Albs faction for his failure, even though the crash wasn't his fault but the Albs got principles so you're out).

Anyway, the bad guys, i.e. the Albs, are actually a faction that split off from the clerics. The main difference is that, contrary to the Albs, the clerics do not consume Elex but only use it to power machinery like battle mechs.

The world of Magalan is split up into several distinct lands. The berserkers reside in Edan which we've seen in the this video and also in the recent German let's play videos.
The clerics are in Ignadon, close to the meteor's impact site, the Outlaws are in the desert of Tavar (think Mad Max) and the Albs are all the way up north in icy, snowy Xacor (Elex is a freezing cold substance and the Albs are the prime Elex consumers).

So, most of the scifi elements will be found in Ignadon and Xacor as well as the capital city of Abessa.
The berserker territory of Edan is a mix between classic medieval fantasy and traces of the old pre-impact world (which was similar to our real world in terms of technology) but the berserkers are kinda like tree hugging hippies and do not strive for technological advancement. They just extract the Elex from stuff they find on their travels and turn it into mana to have a way to defend themselves but that's about as far as they will go.
So that radio tower you saw must have been a leftover from the pre-impact civilization (about 160 years old). The real scifi stuff is in clerics and Albs territory.

Moriendor said:

Anyway, the bad guys, i.e. the Albs, are actually a faction that split off from the clerics.

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I think PB sort of dropped the ball on not making the Albs a joinable faction. It would have been interesting if one of your options was to try to redeem yourself and join back up with them, perhaps leading up to a more "evil" ending. I'm assuming 4 joinable factions was just too much for the schedule they're on.

It still looks a bit too rough for an actual release. Troubling. I'm currently replaying Gothic 1 (yet again), and will be playing Gothic 2 afterwards. They're still fantastic. I'm not getting any similar vibes here, though I hope I'm mistaken.

PB games are still a day one purchase for me but the combat doesn't seem to have changed much unfortunately. The weakest part of Risen 3 was the combat imo. You could dodge roll to victory against almost anything. I really hate rolling in combat. Still I know I will love exploring yet another of their crafted worlds.

mercy said:

Gothic 1 remade for the Xth time..

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What? Where? Instabuy!

BoboTheMighty said:

I wonder why they went with these fantasy thropes here.

Setting would be more convincing if factions were more related to it's history/background

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Ofcourse it would, however believability is secondary to profit. Clearly they went for a Skyrim/For Honor aesthetic to attract more low-standard console casuals.

It's called false marketing Bobo.

JDR13 said:

I think PB sort of dropped the ball on not making the Albs a joinable faction. It would have been interesting if one of your options was to try to redeem yourself and join back up with them, perhaps leading up to a more "evil" ending. I'm assuming 4 joinable factions was just too much for the schedule they're on.

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I think you might still be able to get an evil ending even without (re-)joining the Albs. As we could see in the LP videos, similar to Risen 3 with its soul system, you now either gain or lose 'coldness' depending on your actions and dialogue choices.

Being an Alb = maximum coldness. The system is not as straightforward as it may seem because even evil actions can drop your 'coldness' level if they are an emotional response. Everything that is emotional (vs. machine-like coldness) drops your cold level and makes you 'warmer', i.e. less of an Alb and more of a human.
Killing someone in revenge, for example, would be an emotional reaction and drop your 'coldness' level towards being more human.

So if you act like an emotionless machine throughout the game and max out your 'coldness' level then I'm guessing you might still be able to get an evil ending even if you technically never (re-)joined the Albs.

We also know from a social media post by Bodo Henkel (the well known charismatic German voice of Xardas) that…

One of the enjoyable things about all PB games was seeing how far you could go with no level increase. Killing shadowbeasts level 1. Wiping out pirate faction. Wiping out orcs. The dodgr/roll makes you nigh invincible.

And abuse of environment. Gothic 1, black troll (IIRC) - stuck yourself between some cave boulders then waste 10 minutes on hitting it with low level bow, 7634528356342657 XP, level up a dozwn of levels plus nifty loot.

Any enemy that does not have a ranged attack will be very easy prey for Jax thanks to the jetpack + dodge/roll combo. However, as we could see in the LP video (the last one IIRC), Gronkh used the jetpack to escape on top of a building where he got one-shot by a guy who was chasing him.
I hope that PB will use the remaining time until the release to give some of the monsters an additional ranged attack so it won't become too easy. They also need to work on the pathfinding and collision systems. It was pretty sad how those wolves in the first video were struggling to ascend a simple staircase.
By the way, there will be four difficulty levels to choose from.

Moriendor said:

By the way, there will be four difficulty levels to choose from.

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Interesting. That's a big departure from their previous titles. They've never offered more than two difficulty levels before.

I hope it's not as easy to exploit companions in the early stages as it was in Risen 2&3.

JDR13 said:

Interesting. That's a big departure from their previous titles. They've never offered more than two difficulty levels before.

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Did you mean three maybe? Risen 1 and 2 had three difficulty levels easy/medium/hard and Risen 3 actually had three at launch and now has four because they added 'ultimate' difficulty in patch 1.20.

Moriendor said:

Did you mean three maybe? Risen 1 and 2 had three difficulty levels easy/medium/hard and Risen 3 actually had three at launch and now has four because they added 'ultimate' difficulty in patch 1.20.

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Risen 1 definitely only had two settings when I played it. I guess I never noticed the third in the latter two games.

*Edit* Now that I think about it, I do remember Risen 3 having the easy setting as well. For some reason I don't remember that in the first two games though.