The best worldbuilding choice Gothic made was to "restrict" certain areas by placing stronger monsters and enemies there. When at first the forest is dangerous and you better walk the long way around it, you slowly conquer parts of it and find shorter ways and new places. Also true for areas other than the forest. All without any artificial barriers that are removed with game progress.
And yet the studio fell apart and is a husk of its former self, trying to jump on the AAA hype train with sub par open world games :/ Gothic 1,2 and Risen were just so good.
That's the best type of worldbuilding, when it's so engrained and interwoven in your story that you know those things instrinctivly you don't need any exposition
@@lordtea7688 I was stoned on swampweed and shaken by how believable the social order of the colony was. The camps are even named such banal names as the old camp and new camp not some fantanstical exciting name
shame that this video has not more viewers. You showed me, what made gothic in my adolescence so great. And despite the graphics being obviously outdated, the atmosphere seems to hold up even today.
If you dive Deep into it you notice many Things especially at the end of the Game that are rushed for Exemple There is even an hidden way to an orc City below the map that was intended to connect the actual orc village and the temple or xardas old Tower which was destroied by Earthquakes but the world doesn‘t Show any signs of Earthquakes and no one except xardas mention Them. But i‘m still a Huge Fan of the Series since 2001
Spot on analysis for a brilliant game that brought so much magic into my childhood and will forever have a place in my heart. Hope you make a video about the sequel as well.
I have yet to find a gam that immerses me as much as gothic. For me the dialogs also play an important role, just the right balance of funny, depressing, annoying and interesting, just like real life hehe. Great review dude!
Yeah, scale is meaningless unless it's filled with content or purpose. Most modern "open world RPG's" just make big worlds for the sake of marketing it as "the game that is huge".
1:01 What? Gothic was very advanced for its time. Especially in comparison to Morrowind. It nearly had no loading screens while traversing the game world while in Morrowind you couldn't enter any building or walk more than a few hundred meters without a loading screen popping up or the screen freezing for a second.
I am talking here about the gameplay elements. There is only so much you can do with your character in terms of fighting style with little combat and gameplay option that you have. No alchemy, magic barely available and only later in game, no persuasion options (morrowind personality gameplay is pretty bad but it's still there), no magic creation, stealth usefull only against sleeping enemies) very few combat options (one-hand, two-hand, bow, crossbow) the range combat is pretty underwhelming even more than morrowind. Sure the changing of combat animations with your character skill improvement is amazing i always loved that but that's basically it.
lol i wouldnt say its rushed in the late chapter, i think it went on for too long, also dont like the second game its map is more linear and generic medieval setting with pirates. They expanded on that further in risen and risen 2 and i did not like those games.
But it was rushed, we know that from interviews and piranhas documentaries, there are barely any new quests and you can find a lot of scrapped content. And there is no such thing as "too long" in terms of pure game structure. W3 is like 60~ hours for the main story, never saw anyone complaining about this game being too long.
Strange to see an englishman talking about gothic. Despite it being a german production, most of the community for this game comes from russia, poland and germany. Strange when you think about it.
This game just connects so many people :) people who like Gothic can't be bad. I once did an uni online assignment with someone and shared my screen and he just asked: "hold on.. Is that.. Is that Gothic 2? ", after he saw the shortcut.. Now we do a lot of uni stuff together and help each other.
I've been playing this for a week now and honestly don't get the hype about it. It's a decent RPG for its age but the world is just way too damn empty. I was excited after hearing all the praise everywhere so I've been running around, trying to explore as much as possible, but there isn't much really. No interesting or tougher enemies, not much to loot other than some herbs, no interesting places/dungeons, and not many quests only the ones you get from the camps. The world feels uninteresting and empty. A sense of danger isn't there either because at lvl 8 having my first rusty 2H sword I can kill everything with some patience.
youre right, gothic 1 was pretty easy for at least a normaly experienced gamer and map was pretty empty, however if youd like to replay it again, i suggest mod "othello" , it expands the original massively, like filling up empty places, upgrading certain locations or adding new ones, and also adding unused mechanics, gothic community is huge and many mods make the game truly a master piece, like bugfixes, texturepacks, new renders and other stuff..
I think that there is a referential perspective element when looking at gothic. Many of us played it when we it was released when we were children and teens, and our only comparison was with games of that era. And back then it felt like the most realistic world, because it was. A real world is not packed with things and items and loot, it's mostly empty, but the monsters made it interesting. Also the towns had NPCs who were going to sleep or to work, or hanging out eating and joking. The world was alive despite its glitches. I absolutely loved playing it back then, it has still remained in my memory as one of the best RPGs. Of course after 20 years, and having seen way more complex gameplay it might come up as dull to new players. But back then it was bringing new ideas to gamers.
