Comments on André Jacobs - Blog: Gothic 3 sucks ass big time!

Also, lots of folks compare Gothic 3 to Oblivion, ...

2008-02-24T11:06:00.000Z

Also, lots of folks compare Gothic 3 to Oblivion, since they're both open-ended games that take way too much time to play. However, both have their weak points. Here's the ball-dropping points I feel Oblivion made....

* It's a vast game world, but there's not much wild life. While Gothic had tons (a bit too much), Oblivion seems a bit sparse. However, both games seem to have a huge Rabies problem, because all animals want to gut your liver. Doesn't matter if you're a level 1 puss-bag, or a level 200 bad-a**, anything and everything under the sun will attack you (poor mud-crabs). I would think after killing X amount of a certain creature, future populations would start to run from me. But, no such realism. Oblivion could use a tad more wild life. However, I do like that not every darn critter under the sun will insta-poison or disease you the way they do in Gothic.

* Oblivion cities are sparse, too. In fact, battles, etc are all sparse. There's just not many folks around. The "huge" battle in the main plot line is just about 6-8 people standing around killing stuff. No such luck in sporting 100+ NPC combats. While the game world is expansive and seems "epic" and beautiful, everything else about Oblivion seems blaise and "not so epic".

* Not-so-epic quests. Same as Gothic...fetch me a rock, deliver this toothpick, kill these foozles for me. There's a few interesting twists, but for the most part, you're just going through the motions after a while. In Gothic, some quests would just hint at something, then thing would surprisingly turn out different, giving you a challenge. In Oblivion, everything is spelled out for you from the start. You know exactly what to expect. Even the quests that try to be subtle and only "hint" at what challenge you might face...the hint is always reality. The quests lead you around by the nose, without much opportunity to feel like you've uncovered some great mystery or solved things on your own. I guess that's the "console-itis" showing through. Now, granted, there's only so many ways you can re-package the same "go do this, kill this, deliver this" quest. But, like in Gothic, you raise up in ranks at the guilds/factions, and yet you're still the errand/whipping boy. It would be entertaining if, for once, an RPG that let you rise in ranks at some guild would progress from you being the lowly errand boy to working your way up the ranks in more of a managerial position that provided more of a strategy aspect. IE: you started by running errands, but now that you're a higher rank, you're organizing a group of underlings to go do something, or to manage the resources of the guild to accomplish some greater task.

* Character design, as originally implemented by Bethesda, sucks. You'll get so wrapped up in leveling up the right skill at the right time to maximize your attribute gains, that the focus moves from gameplay to stat-building...it's quite tedious and ruins the fun some folks might have. Again, gameplay should take the front-seat, and game-mechanics and micro-management should take the back-seat, not vice-versa. And leveling skills takes so long, it's tedious, boring, and turns into a chore. (Granted, some folks feel the opposite way about it. But I personally enjoy a more adventure-oriented game, where the stat-building doesn't get in the way of the fun.)

* On a positive note, the game was solid, ran well, didn't really crash on me. Even without .ini tweaks, the game was pretty smooth (then again, I'm using a pretty high-end system). But, that's like saying "my car started this morning". I mean, poor software has gotten us all to expect bugs and crashes as the norm rather than the exception these days. The fact that a lot of reviewers have to explicitly state "the game didn't crash" as a positive aspect of a game...is a very sad commentary on gaming & software creation in general these days. While it all ran nice, the most annoying "flaw" was not being able to permanantly set the FOV in-game via the options menu. You could do it in the console, but it would reset when you spoke with someone...annoying. You could hard-set it in the .ini file, but then it'd hose up the menu button hot-spots for the mouse...annoying. So, it was a constant: console, fov, console, fov, etc, etc, to try to maintain the fov I wanted. Very annoying.

* Folks have mentioned the monsters & NPC's leveling as you do. I agree that it is a bit odd. This was one part Gothic does well...easy critters in early areas, harder in later areas. You could always tell where you were not supposed to go, because some big nasty would quickly eat you. In Oblivion, you face enemies that are all semi-challenging on normal mode, regardless of level. The easy enemies just seem to mysteriously disappear the higher your level goes, and suddenly bandits are running around in this supposedly ultra-rare uber-armor. The equipment leveling up on the enemies as you do I do find a bit odd. But, the enemies getting harder..well, I didn't find that to be too annoying.

* However, all loot leveling as you do IS annoying. After a while, there was just no point in sacking a dungeon or breaking into someone's house. You knew that any chest you come across, even if it's an uber-locked chest, is just going to contain like 10 gold and a pair of pants. How annoying. And, if you completed certain quests earlier (IE: at a lower level), then the item you get is a lower-levelled version than what you could have gotten if you waited until you were higher level. Again, it adds a layer of micro-management that detracts from the natural flow of game-play. You're no longer just wandering around doing your thing, you're busy micro-managing which quests you should do, and when, in addition to keeping an eye on your skill levels, lest you over or under shoot and not make your +5 attribute bonuses. Almost annoying enough to make a person stop playing.

* To sum up, Oblivion is a lot like Gothic...lots of style and little substance. If you're younger and it's all still new to you, then it'll be fun. But older gamers who like to watch Law & Order or CSI in between their nights of table-top role-playing with friends will find both games insipid and uninspired. Yes, there will be moments when you look out on the horizon and feel impressed at the graphical beauty. But then that feeling passes after a second, and you remember that even though you're the savior of the realm, you're currently stuck delivering 10 animal skins to some lazy sod who couldn't get off his duff and do it himself because you're trying to get on with the quests.

Well, I gave up on Gothic due to lag (on a high-end machine), crashes, and game-play that wasn't compelling enough to keep my interest going to put up with all that. And, while Oblivion worked well, I gave up on it, because it lacked depth, and was inspid after a while. In both games, it's as if the developers had spent copious amounts of time setting these stages of history, characters, monsters, lore, etc, just to open the curtain to find out the actual story/plot was not deserving of such scenic grandeur. It was a real let-down, which I expected from Bethesda with Oblivion (afterall, fan-boys aside, Morrowind was basically the same way...lots of eye-candy wrapped around stupid quests and empty, non-epic adventure). But Gothic 3 threw me for a loop, because, while I was expecting it to be buggy (Gothic 1 & 2 both were, but still fun and playable), it's like they decided to keep the same amount of story that 1 & 2 offered, but try to spread it over way too much game world, so it got watered down and disappointing; too little butter spread across too much bread.

I guess what I'm mostly frustrated about is that I spent about $100 total for the games just to come to the harsh realization that maybe I'm getting too old to play games. I'm no longer the target demographic, because I expect more depth, plot and intrigue (and even willing to sacrifice eye-candy to do so), where-as the target audience doesn't mind playing glorified errand-boy for 50 hours, but only as long as the game looks uber-sweet while doing so. I think the mods for Oblivion reinforce this fact, since about 90% of them are nothing but eye-candy enhancements (better bodies, sexy armor, exotic weapon meshes, etc) without adding any real, new plot or substance to the game. You add in all these mods to make the game look so much better, and for what? There's hardly any new worthwhile quests made by modders. Even Bethesda's new content is nothing more than eye-candy (horse armor), or over-priced, lame errand-boy quests (Knights of the Nine, which is boring quests for artifacts and killing some bad foozle at the end, and the Shivering Isles, which is more errand running, except in the Sheogorath realm, so Bethesda got a chance to show off how "insane" or "twisted" they could be...pfftt. Both were pretty boring when I played them, and, I feel, over-priced for what they offered. But, the same was true with Morrowind, with Blood Moon & the other expansion...a hefty price-tag for what little new content they provided).

I guess the cynicism means it's time to pass the gaming reigns on to the next generation.

Why it sucks..* combat is crap ... your uber-power...

2008-02-24T10:07:00.000Z

Why it sucks..

* combat is crap ... your uber-powerful guy can whack through a 500xp troll, but gets his butt handed to him by a 50xp wolf that stun-locks you

* Your character only attacks on a horizontal plane. So, he won't aim or hit enemies below him (on a slope). Meanwhile, they tear his legs off.

* Armor doesn't seem to do much in the game. Resist blade / blunt of "40". What exactly "40" is, who knows...but you still seem to take the same amount of damage from the enemies regardless.

* stalls, crashes, etc...blogger mentioned, and, yes, it's frustrating enough to make you want to give up.

* long load / save times. After your uber-god tank character gets his butt kicked by a lowly, pathetic wolf, it's insult to injury having to wait a minute or so for the game to reload your last save. If you're experimenting in a hostile area where you're dying / reloading a lot...it can be very annoying.

* Game world is almost TOO big. There's so much world, but it's still just the banal "fetch me a rock, deliver this toothpick, kill me some foozles" quests. Like all RPG's these days (Oblivion included), you're just a glorified errand boy. Even as you rise in faction/rank, you're still the lackey. You'd think you'd be the one eventually doling out insipid quests to underlings while you take care of the more important stuff, but alas, such is not the case.

* Caves, Temples, etc are short / small and boring. Trudging through the mine-crawler caves of G2 was long and entertaining. But, caves and other indoor things in G3 are very short and lacking in depth (both literally and plot-wise).

* There's a butt-load of hostiles. Every animal and it's uncle wants to eat you. You can't walk 5 feet without some creature trying to tear out your liver. It's nice to see some tame heards of animals roaming free, but for the most part, you are constantly being attacked, which can get tedious when you're just trying to explore or travel to a new location.

* Heavier focus on RPG & Stats means more min/max annoyance. G2 had moments where early choices in training could leave you weak and shafted later on. G3 expands on this, by giving you all kinds of crap to spend "Learning Points" on, some of which is extremely useful early on, some of which is useless early on, but useful later, and some of which is just plain useless. I started out dumping a lot of points in Alchemy since the game made me think potions were the only way to raise my stats. Turns out trainers can raise your stats, and I wasted 5 levels worth of training on Alchemy, which handicapped me in the combat department, making survival pretty tough. It's also annoying how you raise main stats (strength, hunting / dexterity, etc) which don't seem to have much impact on game play, but you have to do so to achieve certain threshholds to buy up perks. So, you waste tons of LP & gold boosting your main stats, so you can then spend more LP & gold to get a much-needed perk, like Picking difficult locks, or 2-handed weapon master, etc. Over-specialization can breed in weakness, but generalization will kill you just as fast. Once again, even non-bow users are forced to spend points on Hunting skill because that's the big money-maker in the game. There are other skills for the other stats that try to help make you some money, but the ingredients to make weapons and the blueprints to do so are so rare & expensive that it's difficult to get a return on investment that you do with hunting animals. Potions and alchemy are the same way, since recipies cost a lot, and takes a long time to create enough potions to return on investment.

* A typical Gothic game trait, which has always annoyed me (even though I like G1 & G2) is that every person you meet in the game is a jerk and speaks in a condescending fashion. Even the hero sounds berating to others when he delivers his lines (even to folks you're trying to be nice to and help). You bust your hump to run errands for these lazy people, and they still shrug you off. It really doesn't make a person inclined to really help out more. I'm not expecting these folks to get all sappy and praiseful the way Alex did to Gordon in Half Life 2, but it'd be nice to hear "hey, thanks for helping us" as the common phrase coming from the leader of the folks you just helped instead of "go away, I can't be bothered with you". Well, if that's the attitude you're gonna cop, then screw you guys, I'll go work for the orcs.

* Basically, they should have spent less time on eye-candy, and more time on play-balance and plot. Who cares if there's a teaming world of life that takes 100hrs to explore. If those 100hrs are uninspired and boring, and start to feel like torture after the first 20, then folks will give up shortly after. It's almost like a movie that goes on for way too long.