Impressions of Chronicles of Myrtana: Archolos - So Far So Good? 

a comment from a month ago on a video from few days a bit sus

@@zerro3172 This video was uploaded a month ago as an exclusive for my Patreon subscribers, and only went public a few days ago.

@@TheNocturnalRambler oh ok good video by the way I'm waiting for your review after finishing the game if you plan to make one 1

You asked people not to spoil things without warning in the comments, yet seemingly spoil the death of a character in this video without warning.

​@@noneofyourbusiness4616 As I recall, the only characters' deaths I mentioned in this video happen during the tutorial, literally minutes into the game and before you even get to the island to start playing the game in proper. That's hardly a significant spoiler as it is effectively part of the game's exposition to set up the main narrative, and they were minor characters to begin with who seemingly served no greater purpose in the main quest or plotline beyond the opening cutscenes. My whole point about spoiler warnings was to please avoid discussing major details that happen in later chapters beyond the introduction, which is effectively the portion of the game that I played (and discussed in this video) in only playing the first chapter of a six chapter game. I don't believe anything I said or showed in this video should constitute any kind of major (or even minor) spoiler to anyone unless you're the type of person who wants to know literally NOTHING about a game before experiencing it for yourself, in which case, you probably shouldn't be watching 47-minute critique videos in the first place.

That doesn't sound very good. If you have to travel to one specific place to get the good stuff it's a bad omen that the devs had their priorities somewhere else and were not able or interested to give an overall pleasant experience. Ofc a village has less to offer than a big city but that doesn't mean a big part of the budget has to stay in one location.

@@FallenxMalo Lol what are you talking about the content is already good in the starting villiage and it just gets denser in the city because there are more people living there kiddo.

@@user-vw8cw2sb6i I can understand if you had a trauma in the past and now everyone looks like your child or a little kid but you can perform your kiddo roleplay somewhere else, yes? The way you explained that it gets better inside the city gives the impression that it wasn't that good before. Not my problem if you can't use words in a decent way.

@@FallenxMalo Maybe watch his video first kiddo before responding like a brainlet? He already likes what he sees in the starting area Im just telling him that it only gets better nobody cares about your opinion.

@@user-vw8cw2sb6i words like "lol" and "kiddo" make you look more like a kid than a guy you're talking to

Now, that's some meta-allegory for the plot.

Chlope.

I wish it were English.

It is indeed privilege, i just bought a game, installed and got into it, and realised i can't play the game, because i have very bad laptop so it goes in around 10 fps i gues 😂

@@user-wz8gn6jo8i brooo i feel you i waited months not playing the retunring mod so i can upgrade my pc and get the juicy frames best thing ever

@@user-wz8gn6jo8i I play it without problems on my 12 years old laptop

@@user-wz8gn6jo8i try lower the draw distance to 40 or 20 when you are in town/village

Thanks for the clarification, that helps a lot to understand the original intentions.

@@TheNocturnalRambler About the barber thing. Leaving Polish aside, I believe that in medieval times barbers often served as surgeons.

@@Nicolas-lm6ic It's not just medieval, try googling up the reason behind the barber shop pole, those places were hosting unbelievable types of professions not connected to cutting hair or getting a shave up to the end of "wild west" in beginning of 19th century. So, being surprised that barber being a surgeon shouldn't be present.

@Mrtyugata to complicate things even more, "barber" in polish means specifically "balwierz" which is a hair and beard cutting version of "cyrulik" and i am not sure if there is a english version for this specific role of "cyrulik". We do have specific name for a english "barber" depending on what role that person had like with balwierz - cutting hair and beard specifically or "felczer" which is also a different version of our barber that works like a surgeon... Languages are complicated....

@@Nicolas-lm6ic I would like to draw your attention to a certain aspect, or rather a mistake repeated by habit. When we say medieval fantasy, we say it out of habit, but it is a mistake. Looking at the technology in the game, we can safely assume that most of the "medieval fantasy" games take place in the Early Modern Era (A.D. 1450-A.D. 1750). A very common mistake. In Poland, we say that the sun rises and sets. Another lie. There is a saying related to Nicolaus Copernicus: He stopped the Sun, he moved the Earth, he was born in a Polish tribe. This saying also rhymes in Polish. Despite the fact that thanks to this well-known astronomer we keep repeating this nonsense. After all, it is the earth that goes around the sun, so the sun cannot rise and set. So, before we start to wonder what is correct and what is not, we should check if there is any error at the very beginning.

Thanks to Archolos I'm not gonna play Elden Ring anymore until they release the dlc

This has been pointed out to me numerous times in the comments. I still consider it an odd choice because it's such an archaic term that doesn't translate very well in modern English, whether we're talking Polish-to-English or medieval English-to-modern English. Other commenters have said that Polish uses different words for the barber profession depending on the context (historical period, specific types of work performed), wherein the term used in Archolos has a more obviously archaic meaning, and thus the meaning of the word is seemingly more clear to Polish speakers who're hearing a word that has a stronger historical connotation than an English speaker hearing a term that means something slightly different now than it did hundreds of years ago. So yes, I was unaware of (or else forgot) the fact that historically, barbers often performed more medical duties in addition to cutting and styling your hair, but I'm not certain that's universally common knowledge and thus maintain that a different choice of word would have sufficed better in this situation, especially since the original Polish seems to make more of a distinction. It seems to me that another term like "Doctor" or "Leech Doctor" or "Surgeon" or "Healer" or "Medicine Man" or "Apothecarist" or "Physician" would convey a similar type of role/profession as what they're trying to convey without the potentially confusing double-meaning of how "barber" by itself sounds in modern English. Apparently the official term is actually "Barber Surgeon" so why not just use that for the extra clarity?

It's true, but he won't be able to pick that up until he passes through the later arcs of the story. If Archolos has one thing that drags it down, is that it takes you a dozen hours to get into the meat of the story. This is a problem because the main weapon of this game is its story, and it's not obvious early on. For the first ten hours this game feels like an expanded zone of gothic2 with a million small quests. The fact that a mod makes me this passionate proves how good of a game Archolos is. Triple A Game Studios should take note. This is how you make a game that focuses on the player experience and not tailored to milk him dry of cash.

That's good to know! Thanks for sharing those thoughts and observations.

I generally agree, but I think as for the story he will keep a lot of the disappointment. The other positive aspects however will remain as good as they are or even get better. Some things I would like to add: Inventory chaos: Painful, getting more painful as the game progresses, esp. the miscellaneous section. Cooking: Well you could say the same thing, but I actually liked the sophisticated cooking system. It rewards you for comparing recipes because you can get the most out of your meals when you combine in a way that gives you good value for common food items and save rarer meats and veggies for more sophisticated meals that give you better regen. It also rewards you for collecting a lot of recipes, allowing you to get the most out of the variety of food items you have because you will be able to use pretty much every item for cooking and get a lot of cross variation. If you feel like that's too much mental work put into something as unspectacular as cooking, you can still just stick to a few simple yet high-value recipes, which works perfectly fine. I think however that it is a good thing to get rewarded for putting in more effort. Uncertain#5 Lockpicking: I think this is a definite improvement because you now can't load-savefile-abuse anymore in order to pick locks without losing lockpicks. Ofc you can always try again for better luck, but that's the same with fighting or any success or failure related gameplay, so this rly isn't a problem specific for lockpicking. The lockpicking stat doesn't cost LP but only money so it may still be worth getting it even though it isn't needed to pick certain locks.

Hard agree with your first point. Part of the reason why Gothic 1's story is much stronger than 2's is that you're not a chosen one or a hero - just a no name convict that happens to be extremely motivated to break out of the barrier. As the story unfolds in Archolos, you begin to see that part of Marvin's motivation to take care of his brother and later look for him comes from a feeling of guilt over his relationship with his father, and him being always ready to help people with all their odd tasks they ask him to do stems from the desperation all his searching in vain has brought him. As far as magic is concerned, Imo, all magic should be scroll based, and most projectile/zappy magic removed. The games are far more interesting when you use spells for traversal/crowd control/utility than when you have an unlimited use blaster in your hand, which is already covered by archery anyway. It's already a bane of the industry where almost in every RPG that's come out over the past decade or longer, every spell is the fireball spell with variations. Since the first game, Gothic was very unique in its spells being creative ways to solve problems, not just fantasy handguns and grenades.

My one gripe with cooking is that it is essentially slightly worse alchemy without requiring LP. In chapter 3 you even unlock permanent stat potions. Given that you need 50 or 60lp to master alchemy, it just makes it a redundant skill. You can even make food that makes you run faster. The only thing you can make is food with regenerative properties but the potions that do that can be bought readily and tbh it's not necessary to win fights even late game.

@@Amun590 ğl5l you yuuuuuuuuuuyyy9oyo7oyo7y7yoyyu you

I thought about using DX11 for Archolos, but remembered running into crashing issues with G2 and occasionally corrupted save files, so was worried that might happen again with Archolos. Seemed like some people were reporting similar issues and I couldn't tell if there was a consensus on how stable the game is with DX11, and since I seemed to have the game running reasonably well without it I just figured I'd play without. I may look into it again when I get back to finishing it, however.

@@TheNocturnalRambler DX11 may cause memory problems, I think a RAM compatibility file is needed. Otherwise it didn't cause issues for me, but it makes it hard to see the items underwater. Might be a minor issue, but you definetly can not see lootable items from far away or at all rly.

@@TheNocturnalRambler I get that. Personally I had no issues with DX11, actually installing it helped me with my frame rate. But well it's pretty much impossible to predict how Gothic will exactly behave from one PC to another. Great video by the way!

@@TheNocturnalRambler They optimized the engine in Archolos Vanilla Gothic 2 with dx11 crashes for me after about 40 mins of gameplay. I played 100h of Archolos sometimes in 5h long sessions without a single crash...

@@TheNocturnalRambler It depends, for me DX11 only crashed on loading if I played for like 5min or more, but it never crashed on first load and I could save normally, so to me the improvements were worth it. There's also a version specifically compatibale with Archolos.

You can drop them after you've read them

@@quinnpage7943 But that is forbidden... Even placing them inside a chest is... feels... odd...

That is part of his character after experiencing bad stuff he become numb But it doesn't mean that he is emotionless because in fact he does have emotion

I played only for around 10h, but I found cooking a great addition. Potions are rare in the beginning and expensive, and you need to replenish your health while on the go somehow. Cooking takes already existing healing items in the game and uses them in a creative and useful way, which makes sense in game.

Not sure if he mentioned it, but you can also sell your cooks at the personal cook in the mayor's house in Silbach. She gives you 10-30 gold per dish, works once per recipe. So for me it was a small task to "cook one of everything, sell it to the cook"

It's not that I forgot, I've just been incredibly busy over the last year-and-a-half with hardly any time to even play games at all, let alone write reviews and edit video. I still intend to get back to finishing COM but I've got a lot on my plate right now, with my Elex 2 review still a work in progress, so it's going to be a while before I can do a full playthrough and review of COM.

​​@@TheNocturnalRambler The Game of the Decade Edition is gonna come around by the time you get to finishing it.

And I and lots of other people out there still wouldn't play it for reasons... and for me personally, it's because the game isn't available in german. Without even a glimpse of a few reminders of the iconic voice acting, you players with english dub/sub never really get, why it would feel so much out of place, playing in this lukewarm world without the original character PB and their original VA's created. I somewhat appreciate the effort and talent people still invest in those projects and it is really impressive for me, a filthy consumer, a noncontent creator. IF they as a team get the quality and budget of a triple-A studio combined with the here shown mentality, motivation, decision making, and talent it could set a new or rather bring back the one true milestone the whole open-world RPG genre had since the old gothic days. There needs to be fresh air with a lot of the old gameplay mechanics and they managed to implement good ideas which would have been fantastic back in the days but seeing the resurrection of over 20 years old game content is nothing but a niche for the hardcore community or beginners who also like retro-ish games. You can "polish" haha... joke intended af... nvm. You can polish up old things and make them better, but you could rather make new games in the spirit of the Gothic franchise. And I mean in true spirit. Not like the amateur devs out there, riding on the name and thirst of the still-thriving community. And of course, they love the games and how much respect they had before they started going for their projects... It is still living from the name and if you can't LIVE UP to the expectations you will get crushed by your customer's opinions and shitstorms. It's sad but today's reality you have to face. As developers today, you can't bring back the good old times but you can make the new experiences in games a much better one. Getting stuck in time isn't the worst actually, it sharpens your view of the important aspects you like in games. I realized I want the genre to be reborn in spirit of the still working old PB formula but without the zombifying elements like modders do with outdated software...

@@ryunalunaris14 I am German and I honestly could feel the emotions in the Polish voice acting even though I didn't understand it. I agree that it is not the same as playing with the iconic German Ruhrpottcharme voice acting as a German, but I still think that G3 was so bad and also so much wrong with it in every way that the Polish team would do a ten times better job. G3 has worse problems than lack of German voice acting, much much worse, it is incoherent, has no story, disregards lore completely and has a bland, generic world building and quest design.

​@@kooroshrostami27And they would need 10 times the amount of time... The problem here is not, that they couldn't do a proper job in many design and gameplay ways, it's that they lack recourses for an up-to-date engine, they also lack good story writers.

@@ryunalunaris14 I mean you are right, but then G3 has no story. Literally. Doing whatever you please in order to influence a civil war for your own reasons and then killing some people or destroying some artifacts (which based on G1 and G2 mythology shouldn't even permanently change sth. in the world, I actually wrote a post that pointed out the inconsistencies) is not a story. That's a sandbox and a bad sandbox at that because it often limits your options in a way that makes no logical sense (Why do people know you stole something even though nobody saw you?)

gothic 3 was amazing. shut the fuck up. just cause it wasnt crappy graphics like the other 2 doesnt make it less. the community patch has already fixed gothic 3 and made it the perfect game

It is better because gothic 2 was better than 1, raven night was better than gothic 2 and chronicles of myrtana is obviously better.

But there are not four but five masters who can take you as an apprentice. The Blacksmith, The locksmith Davis, the bowyer woman (forgot her name, it's been a while), the alchemist Hershlik and the butcher Slager.

So much for free content and resulting in minor but existing bad gameplay points. ;) Do you know why I'm not fond of free to play games and mods anymore? Because of a number of free-to-play elements like these adding up in those games. It's a really nitpicking one here but it's still there to annoy people who want to immerse themselves in the game. Also they made money out of an IP that doesn't belong to them and without any license rights which apparently didn't cause any troubles but could make people who doesn't know or care about moral pitfalls wonder about some of their intentions...

Its not "badly named" its just almost impossible to translate as its a direct reference to polish meme, and yes it makes sense in universe as well

@@ryunalunaris14 they sponsored fraction of production not "made money", for example, if you ask professional voice actors to take part in your production, you cant really put them in a basement and ask them to speak into headset, likewise with orchestral music. As for " apparently didn't cause any troubles" Piranha is very open about being ok with it.

@@Piokkoko Okay, fine. But in other languages this and several others seem really odd and out of place. So it no longer makes sense in universe. Perhaps it should have had a translation/revision, instead of a transliteration.

@@Jeff-cn9up unfortunately for non-polish players, this mod is a massive trip down memory lane, as its absolutely chokefull of references to things that were popular/relevant when gothic 2 was played by everyone (early 2000) as well as in community rolling jokes and easter eggs. Its a love letter not only to the game but a period as well so no matter what translation you might put in place many things will just mean nothing.

Right, common eastern European saying 😂

Thanks for the heads up!

That's good to know, but unfortunately that doesn't do much good for the early game. Would you recommend rushing through the main quests to get to that point before exploring the island and committing to a mage playthrough?

Completely agree. Ever since Notr, the only real "hit" was Risen 1, and it only worked because it was similar to Gothic 1. The story structure and mechanics were mostly the same at their core. Gothic 3 was an unfinished mess which felt more like a bare bones MMO than an actual RPG with real choices and consequences. Risen 2 was just a pirate game. And risen 3...meh at best. Elex 1 was a breath of fresh air but it had many issues, like lack of proper skill information, lack of a health bar and basically it needed to be heavily modded in order to get a decent experience. But it shined at exploration so it had that going for it. Elex 2 so far from watching rambler's playthrough is dissapointing to be honest. Needs a lot of patches but even so, can't say I am actually drawn into this story since there's a lot of unanswered questions. Archolos on the other hand is a jewel. It's the spiritual succesor to Notr. A better game than pyranha bytes (or THG nordic ) could ever release again. A game with actual consequences, believable characters, a nice difficulty curve where you actual feel a real sense of progress, exploration is rewarding, combat is challenging but fair and you have a lot of things you can do in game : cook, make weapons, make bows, harvest plants and seeds, chop wood and mine ores, etc. The only downside archolos has is a lack of English voice acting, but that is really for me the only negative thing I could say and I know it's pointless since the devs admitted they lacked the funding to do a proper English locatlization. I do hope one day they fund a kickstarter for English voice actors so we can get a beautiful experience. That being said, it saddens me to no end that a bunch of fans, with no studio backing made a mod that is a better and greater game than Gothic 3, risen series put together. It goes to show you that when the original team of the G1 + G2 series left, they also took the Gothic soul with them. If pyranha had any brains, they'd hire the devs to make a new game for them and just give them free rein to do their thing. The gothic spirit only lives on with the fans, the current company has no idea what made gothic great in the first place.

@@aft8862 Risen3 is far better than people write it off as. You may not like the island format, but it fixed so much wrong with 2 I feel its underrated

Mechanically it might be superior to Gothic, the world design might be just as good but more extensive, but the story is certainly not as immersive. It's just 1 premise dragged out, most of the game is a side quest. I'd say it falls a little short of Gothic 1, 2 for that reason, but it is still better than any other Piranha Bytes game since.

@@aft8862 "it shined at exploration"... If you mean the random stuff you find and don't need like repetitive monsters, landscaping, and items. Also, the textures, and animations are outdated and cruel to watch in E2 and don't even begin with cutscenes... wtf is this, even the C&C franchise feels like they did a better job with cutscenes than PB... The combat system is still messy and unsatisfying, so far from being interesting and the skill tree is the worst I've ever seen in a PB Game. Even Risen 3 was more fun combatwise! "That being said, it saddens me to no end that a bunch of fans, with no studio backing made a mod that is a better and greater game than Gothic 3, risen series put together. It goes to show you that when the original team of the G1 + G2 series left, they also took the Gothic soul with them. If pyranha had any brains, they'd hire the devs to make a new game for them and just give them free rein to do their thing. The gothic spirit only lives on with the fans, the current company has no idea what made gothic great in the first place." And here i agree with everything, but they shouldn't let them be hired by PB. PB doesn't want to be involved with Gothic anymore, their own words... But I have a last hope in Alcimia Interactive studio in Barcelona.

@@ryunalunaris14 I meant Elex shined at exploration when it came with the vertical mechanic offered by the jetpack. I don't know how other people experienced Elex 1 but I absolutely loved just jet packing around every mountain and tower looking for hidden items. The combat was 50/50 for me. On one hand, you were kinda forced to cheese a lot of enemies and I had an issue with the lack of "predicting mob attacks", something which were possible in G 2 Gold. Lots of attack animations happened at random times and combat tended to be chaotic at times. I wasn't super hyped about the companions either but I do have to give praise to PB that they tried something new with the game. Honestly have no idea how Alcimia will handle the G1 remake, but I am not holding on hope. If they don't talk to the G1 + G2 community to understand what drew us to these games in the first place, then G1 remake has no chance of success . G1 + G2 is an interesting beast of game design philosophy. It has the same combat difficulty as dark souls (predating them obviously) in the sense that you had to learn enemy attacks, know when to block, dodge, sidestep and generally bothering with understanding what enemies you could handle and what you needed to run from. It also helped that the OG PB team understood the importance of immersive UI design. Even to this day, G1 + G2 has the most immersive design I've seen in RPG's. Most RPG's offer you a complicated UI thrown in with 50 different stats / skills/ debuffs/ inventory / lore / spells/ etc / health bar/ mana bar/ stamina bar/ spell cooldown list/ quest tracker / reminders / compass/ waypoint tracker , etc. Gothis 1 + 2 on the other hand had only two active things on the UI. Your health bar when out of combat and when in combat your health + mana bar. That's it. It was such a beautiful simplistic design that made the world feel more real. In contrast, from what I've seen of the G1 remake demo so far, it has a "modern, mmo" approach to its design. Needlessly complicated UI, pausing the game while you access inventory or crafting, too many things happening on screen at the same time, it feels more like a character sim game than a story / exploration driven RPG. Unless Alcimia goes back to simple G1 old school design, the gothic remake will just be another in the long lines of remakes / remasters that are made by people who don't understand why the fans fell in love with the original games in the first place.

Yes, I'm still playing through Elex 2 right now with the intention of reviewing it. This video was something I put together shortly before Elex 2 released, since I knew I wouldn't be able to finish in time I decided to just pause my playthrough and do an Impressions video on chapter one. So I'm planning to finish Elex 2 and review it, then get back to finishing Archolos and doing a follow-up "Final Thoughts" video or a full review.

@@TheNocturnalRambler Nice, i'm interested to hear your thoughts on it since reviews are mixed so far

"Don't drink it all" isn't necessarily a translation error, but it seems like a missed opportunity for better English localization. The fact that it's said multiple times in the mod makes it sound like a somewhat popular idiomatic expression in Poland, but I've never heard that exact figure of speech as a native English speaker. So even though it's pretty easy to infer its intended meaning, it doesn't come across very naturally in an English translation because people don't say things like that in English, at least as far as I've experienced. I understood what it meant, but because it's such an unusual way to phrase that sentiment, it caused my brain to stumble for a brief moment processing it. I'm not saying it's some kind of huge mistake or anything, but it's an example of one of those minor details that occasionally reminds you you're playing a game that was originally written in a different language. As for the music, it's technically brilliant and I find it to be very good overall, however I don't agree with every single creative/stylistic choice that was made in its production, and thus I find certain specific things somewhat questionable. I already mentioned that rapid crescendo that completely pulled me out of the immersion, but there's another moment, maybe in that same track, where it's going along with Gothic 2-style atmospheric phrasing and then it shifts almost instantly over into a Gothic 3-style melodic phrasing, even going so far as to suddenly add a choral part into the mix that wasn't there previously. The composer/editor make the transition work reasonably well, but I still find it to be an odd shift in style and tone, and so it doesn't feel quite right to me. Likewise, I find the choice to use parts from the Old Camp music in Silbach a little weird, because I personally have very strong associations between that music and the specific tone and atmosphere of the Old Camp, and so it feels out of place and a little distracting hearing that music in a quaint farming village. That's just my opinion though. The actual track sounds great; I'm just not terribly fond of how it's used in the actual game space. These are all incredibly minor nitpicks, however. Like I said, the music is extremely enjoyable overall, and I have to commend the amount of effort that the composer, editor, and musicians put in to so perfectly emulate the specific sounds and styles of the original music. If you watch that "Behind the Music" video I have linked in the side bar during that section, you can learn about some of the subtle techniques they used to emulate Rosenkranz's sound from the original games, from compositional aspects that specifically avoid certain frequency ranges to actually adding a slight synthetic timbre to the live instrumentation to make it sound slightly more "video game-y" and thus more like how the artificial instruments sounded that Rosenkranz originally used. Your comments on the story seem to be somewhat confirming my fears in terms of "blue-balling," since that's what I'm cynically expecting to happen once I get into the city. This whole situation of "find Jorn" seems rife with potential to just string the player along through endless roadblocks and hurdles, where I just have a feeling it's going to take forever to make any actual progress towards finding Jorn, which might get to feel kind of tedious if the twists and developments aren't sufficiently interesting along the way. After all, it might be doing a similar thing as TW3's main quest to find Ciri -- that was fun while dealing with the quests in Velen, but then I lost a lot of interest once I got into Novigrad feeling like I was just on a wild goose chase the whole time, where the characters and sub-quests didn't interest me nearly as much as the ones in Velen. I'll be happy if my suspicions are proven wrong, of course, but so far the game hasn't inspired too much of my confidence in this department, despite the promising start when you first arrive on the island.

@@TheNocturnalRambler Perhaps it's because I'm from Eastern Europe too and it's just how we use language, it's definitely not uncommon to hear about somebody "drinking and/or smoking their entire pay away", so even if some polish translator knows English well, they wouldn't detect anything wrong with it since they're still not an actual native speaker. I'm assuming you're a musician, to my untrained ear the music blended well mostly, to the point I couldn't point out any specific instance where it bothered me or threw me out of immersion, despite recognizing some familiar melodies (the Old Camp one). You could criticize them for mostly using already existing Gothic music, but they did at least remix it and there's some new tunes as well. It's better to reuse existing music than to force using new music when it doesn't fit. Not exactly what I meant by blueballing but I'm not sure how much more I can say without spoiling so I'll just stop here until the full review.

At some point, sure, but I'm not in any rush to get to it, as I have other games I'd like to play first.

@@TheNocturnalRambler very well. would be interesting for sure. Props for the vids. found your channel recently, been watching all of them.

I agree with you completely, but please note that I was never advocating for "chosen hero saving the world" as a desirable plot for COM; I just wanted it to give the player a more concrete objective to start the game, and get to the real point of the story a little faster than it does.

There's still a set of possible combinations (eg. , or >>>>), so you can somewhat guess them.

some are better some are worse

This has been pointed out to me numerous times in the comments. I still consider it an odd choice because it's such an archaic term that doesn't translate very well in modern English, whether we're talking Polish-to-English or medieval English-to-modern English. Other commenters have said that Polish uses different words for the barber profession depending on the context (historical period, specific types of work performed), wherein the term used in Archolos has a more obviously archaic meaning, and thus the meaning of the word is seemingly more clear to Polish speakers who're hearing a word that has a stronger historical connotation than an English speaker hearing a term that means something slightly different now than it did hundreds of years ago. So yes, I was unaware of (or else forgot) the fact that historically, barbers often performed more medical duties in addition to cutting and styling your hair, but I'm not certain that's universally common knowledge and thus maintain that a different choice of word would have sufficed better in this situation, especially since the original Polish seems to make more of a distinction. It seems to me that another term like "Doctor" or "Leech Doctor" or "Surgeon" or "Healer" or "Medicine Man" or "Apothecarist" or "Physician" would convey a similar type of role/profession as what they're trying to convey without the potentially confusing double-meaning of how "barber" by itself sounds in modern English. Apparently the official term is actually "Barber Surgeon" so why not just use that for the extra clarity?

the main reason for only decorative stuff is simple, as in all mods, putting too much interactive object will slow the game tremendously, it is a choice between non interactive stuff along some being interacive or between having just less stuff around

Whilst your point is valid, I think there is more elegant ways to solve this issue. Make everything lootable, but have items respawn in a dynamic way after a certain hours of in-game time. That way it's not exploitable by sleep abuse. For the most part, the non-lootable stuff is cheap junk anyways. It wouldn't break the economics of the game if you could loot all of those. The problem here is that some items are not lootable even though they look exactly the same as lootable items, food for instance. That's kind of immersion breaking, the non-lootable stuff should at least be consistent. That being said, it's a minor issue and the amount of hand-placed lootable stuff in this game is still amazing.

I still have not played beyond chapter one. I paused the playthrough to switch over to Elex 2, so I was planning to finish my Elex 2 review before going back to Archolos.

@@TheNocturnalRambler I see... I can't wait to see your review.

Well... if you haven't even completed G2 yet, i assume you're relatively new to the series, so it's no surprise you haven't heard of Archolos. And it's not a "version", not even an official release. It's a fan made game.

This has been pointed out to me numerous times in the comments. I still consider it an odd choice because it's such an archaic term that doesn't translate very well in modern English, whether we're talking Polish-to-English or medieval English-to-modern English. Other commenters have said that Polish uses different words for the barber profession depending on the context (historical period, specific types of work performed), wherein the term used in Archolos has a more obviously archaic meaning, and thus the meaning of the word is seemingly more clear to Polish speakers who're hearing a word that has a stronger historical connotation than an English speaker hearing a term that means something slightly different now than it did hundreds of years ago. So yes, I was unaware of (or else forgot) the fact that historically, barbers often performed more medical duties in addition to cutting and styling your hair, but I'm not certain that's universally common knowledge and thus maintain that a different choice of word would have sufficed better in this situation, especially since the original Polish seems to make more of a distinction. It seems to me that another term like "Doctor" or "Leech Doctor" or "Surgeon" or "Healer" or "Medicine Man" or "Apothecarist" or "Physician" would convey a similar type of role/profession as what they're trying to convey without the potentially confusing double-meaning of how "barber" by itself sounds in modern English. Apparently the official term is actually "Barber Surgeon" so why not just use that for the extra clarity?

My issue with the story hook is less about the vague, undirected goal of just starting a new life on a strange new island, as that's essentially the same concept as Gothic 1 and Risen 1 and it never really bothered me with those games, but more so with the fact that that vague premise also combined with me being actively disinterested by the story hooks they were trying to establish with Jorn, and there being seemingly no establishing of any main plot beyond that point several hours into the start of chapter two. Starting life in a new world can work as a compelling hook if the setting and characters are interesting enough, and indeed that's arguably the case with Gothic 1 and Risen 1, as the colony in G1 was just so uniquely rich and interesting that it made me want to just immerse myself in that setting, and Risen 1's world likewise felt uniquely captivating and alluring enough as well. It was the same with Elex for me -- that game gives you even LESS of a main quest hook as its first quest is literally just "survive," but I was absolutely enamored with that unique blend of fantasy, sci-fi-, and post-apocalypse themes combined with the deeper lore it was establishing up front. I didn't find Archolos's world all that interesting at first, however, because like I said in the video the starting areas around Silbach kind of felt like just a remixed rehash of playing Gothic 2 all over again, and so the setting wasn't as uniquely compelling, but despite that I was fully on board with the whole "survive and start a new life" premise based on the introduction with how you and the rest of the castaways arrive on the island and have to integrate yourselves with the locals in Silbach. I was fully engaged with the story from the moment we washed up on shore and had to figure out what to do and how to survive, but once all that was done and the quests turned into an endless series of trying to find cures for Jorn who's constantly making it worse, and then having to find Jorn, that was when I lost interest, because I didn't find that stuff all that compelling in general, and because by that point the whole "start a new life" prospect had faded and I was left thinking "now what?" with no clear answer to that question, other than "find Jorn" which again I didn't find very compelling. To put things in perspective more, Risen 1 is ostensibly the same story setup as Archolos, in the sense that you don't really start the game with any concrete goal you're striving towards besides finding a way to survive on a new island, but Risen 1 at least makes it implicitly clear from the beginning of the game that there's a war against the titans going on and that something strange is going on with this particular island, and that you're eventually going to play some kind of role in whatever's happening on Faranga, and then it gets right into that exact premise at the start of Chapter 2 when you meet with Mendoza and he lays out the plan of what he's trying to accomplish on the island, with getting into the sealed fortress in the volcano which seems to house some kind of mysterious magical force that will play some vastly important role in your battle with the titans. So even though it has that same vague notion of "starting a new life on a new island" it establishes more of the central premise earlier on, in terms of what the story is actually going to be about, and then it gets right into the main quest line right at the start of chapter two. Tracking down fragments of the golden disc is kind of tedious busy work, but at least you have that framework of "I'm doing this so we can get into the temple, so we can stop the titans," which is more than be said of finding the various cures for Jorn's illness. Gothic 1 is likewise just "Hey you're a prisoner in this brutal dog-eat-dog colony now, just wander around and try to find a way to survive, and oh by the way deliver this letter to the mages in the castle," but at least that letter ties directly into the threat that the game is eventually building towards, and if you read it there's direct foreshadowing for the main plot going on, and then chapter two immediately gets things rolling when you're sent to investigate the ritual that the sect camp is planning, which starts informing you about the Sleeper and what the sect camp is hoping to accomplish by awakening him, which then of course segues into the revelation about the Sleeper actually being an orcish deity and now you have to work to stop it from destroying the colony. So again, despite having a similar premise as Archolos at the very beginning, it feels like it gets to the point a lot faster than Archolos, and there's nothing with the early main quests that makes me actively disinterested in trying to complete them, as the quests with Jorn tend to do by virtue of his nonsensical behavior and having to constantly babysit him and feeling like I'm just being strung-along on an endless series of trivial sub-level objectives that don't seem to be in service of any greater goal or purpose. As I've said in my "Gothic 1 vs Gothic 2" video, I ultimately prefer the way the story presentation works in G1 versus G2, and how G1 naturally builds up the threat of the Sleeper as some kind of mystery, as compared to G2 where the plot feels somewhat contrived and arbitrarily forced to set up gameplay scenarios and chapter sequences, but at least Gothic 2 gives you some kind of context up front about what you're trying to accomplish in the world and why you're doing everything you're doing, so I have more of a reason to care about dealing with tedious roadblocks and being strung-along on a bunch of sub-level objectives, as compared to what's going in Archolos, where I have no idea what's going on in the world or why I'm supposed to care about anything. At this point in Archolos, as I'm gaining entry into the city several hours into chapter two, I have no clue what the actual story is supposed to be about -- I don't know if the orc war is coming to Archolos and if our "cowardice" in fleeing our homeland is going to come into play with us now being backed into a corner and having to defend ourselves in our new home anyway, or if there's some kind of conflict or conspiracy going on on the island between the different factions that I'm going to have to resolve, or if all this foreshadowing about "the Beast" is some kind of active threat's going to come into play and threaten the peaceful life on this island, or if it's all just an elaborate character study about Marvin and Jorn where Jorn has some kind of menacing secret about him to be revealed later on or if there's some kind of dramatic irony about them that's yet to be revealed to the player. I imagine the whole relationship between Marvin and Jorn is SUPPOSED to be the compelling hook that pushes the story forward, like you're supposed to care about Jorn's safety and well-being and you're meant to be interested to learn more about their backstory, especially with regards to their parents and what led them to this point in their lives, but like I said in the video already, that stuff isn't really doing it for me, personally. Maybe I just haven't gotten far enough into the game for the main plot to present itself fully, or maybe everything I've been seeing up until now IS the main plot and I just don't realize it yet, but based on the other early PB games which this one is clearly taking direct inspiration from, it really feels like there should be some greater plot revealing itself by this point, which just hasn't come into play yet. The gameplay mechanics and atmosphere are all engaging enough for me to want to continue forward just to continue experiencing all of that, but at this point, the story hasn't done anything to catch my interest beyond the initial jumping-off point, and thus following up with the main quest line feels like more of a compulsory chore that I'm doing simply to advance through the game, instead of something I'm doing because I'm genuinely interested in what's happening.

The problem here imo is that you just haven't enough connection established with Jorn. They tried creating some history, but it's too short and the avatar's own back story is random dialogue with Jorn which feels like amnesia to the player, at that point Jorn still feels to the player like a random person he just met, so you just don't care. If this happened to someone like Lester, Gorn, Milten or Diego in Gothic 2 or even at the start of Gothic 3, you would care because you have a deep history with them and went through thick and thin. In Witcher 3 it works a bit better, it works if you read the novel at least. In Archolos it doesn't work imo, it just comes too soon, I didn't even remember Jorn's name by then as a player. I encountered the same problem of simply not caring.

Still bad story writing and i'm very sensitive to that because lately i got my childhood crushed by some analyzing videos about Rowlings writing issues in her books... and don't even begin with her movie scripts... Very very fucked up woman. But it helps seeing signs of bad writing at least i suppose... meh

@@TheNocturnalRambler I would say this is another parallel between Archolos and TW3: you are not the main hero of this world, shaping the events of the grand conflict - in contrast to Gothic and Risen. Marvin's perspective is that of an ordinary person trying to survive through and among the consequences of ongoing events. Why would a regular Joe be familiar with military reports on the movement of orcs? Why would a freshly minted refugee be informed of the internal politics and scheming of Archolos' important factions? As you develop your standing in the world, important people share more information with you, you become more involved in the events around you, and are given opportunities to contribute to their outcomes, but you're never handed out the hero status on a silver platter. You are shown what's going on in the world, and sometimes you get a chance to react - isn't that refreshing after all the 'hero shaping the world' RPG plotlines? A lot of the storytelling is done through the evolving landscape of Archolos' political, social, and other spheres. You get to witness the changes from chapter to chapter, so it does take a while to develop. As for the main quest (no spoilers) - in PB fashion, it's main function is to give you a reason to travel all over the place, and perform favors for various people. As you noted, it has the same problem as TW3's main quest, which is the contradiction between the urgency of finding Ciri and the freedom of exploration, side-quests, etc. Nevertheless, it maintains a whodunnit vibe with a number of investigations you get to carry out, which was enough of a hook for me. .

Aside of these scavengers I don't remember things like this happen to me after 170hours in game and finishing it twice, maybe it happen couple times trough whole game at best