Well, I'm thirty hours in and basically agree with Dartagnan. If you play on 'Gothic' and turn off the minimap/exclamation marks/quest targets, the exploration and combat are pretty enjoyable. The only thing that makes this 'bad' IMO is the writing - how the player is asked to do things in this world - which is dire. Mod quality, and not a good mod. I think it's really bad in that respect.
As others have mentioned, the engine handles some things really well. On my 5850 everything is about 30 fps at 19x12, with lighting in particular looking superb at scales from the huge to the tiny. You can feel when the sun is setting as long shadows are thrown from everything around you, and the foliage dapples you and everything else in broken shadow. Areas in valleys darken while treetops stay lit. It's very impressive, and then you see that wet ground reflects this light when it rains, as it does lightning, and then you see that all magic effects emit light, which illuminate and reflect from everything they should. Mixed in with high res textures and high poly counts and long view distances, it's visually a very impressive game, not quite like anything else. Arguably areas this size could do with more variety, but what they do draw, they really nail. The identikit NPCs are a shame. Having all snappers look the same isn't so bad. Having all men in Silverlake look like my high school maths teacher is just creepy.
The lighting, animation, physics, sound and textures come together really well in combat. When you thunk a bloodfly out of the sky with a double handed axe, it really looks, sounds and acts like that. When something goes down to an arrow, it really goes down. When you've set some skeletons on fire and the flames cast the shadows of their ribs onto the cliff walls as they lurch toward you, with undead priests casting lightining that illuminates the scene while your fireballs streak in the opposite direction… it's not short of atmosphere
From reviews I get a feeling the easier difficulty levels simplify combat by making the roll-to-safety all you need. It's more enjoyable to do things like interrupt an enemy's 'wind-up' with a sword hilt to the face, or a frost bolt that puts them in slow motion. If you don't use those options from higher up the skill tree I suspect combat is a bit one dimensional, but it's fluid and good looking in all cases IMO.
The one other thing I think they should get credit for is including a lot of Gothic backstory. Diego and all his buddies get roles, which are probably fuller than they were in the other games. The NPCs have back stories about how they learned their skills 'from a smith in Khorinis' etc. And the beasts are all very nice updates of the Gothic menagerie. In the same way you went into G2 and G3 wondering if there would still be scavengers and how they would behave, G4 provides updated versions of all the old faithfuls - a lot of effort has been expended on reimagining the wildlife - in that particular respect it's very much a Gothic. And the one comedy beast they include is probably my favourite RPG beastie ever
So, avoid it if the painful quest design will put you off, but if that doesn't matter to you, the engine provides scope for some of the same kind of open-ended exploring and hunting action that the originals did, and looks and feels great while doing it.
It's missing the whole 'living world' framework of the Gothics but the thing that makes it 'bad' is the writing. If you can live with that, it's certainly worth a look.
I was thinking of picking this up. Between Vox's review and yours I know I'll pick this up this weekend.
