>fuck up Gothic >be given a second chance with Risen >fuck up Risen >be given a third chance with Elex >fuck up Elex Is there any other company that deserved its downfall as hard as Piranha Bytes?
>>3874229Probably, but still a damn shame. I loved the shit out of G1-2, R1 and E1.
>>3874229Much of the company has changed over time, I doubt that anybody from the original team was still there by the time risenslop rolled around.
>>3874229Problem was they kept making the same game over and over again, but budgets, technology involved and fads kept changing. ELEX, for example, has comically bad animations considering the year it came out.
>>3874409>same gameWorse they made the same game but worse and they didn't even understand why G2 was popular in th first place.
ELEX 2 shouldnt have ended on a cliffhanger.ELEX 1 ended with Jax convincing everyone the alien threat was real and they needed to prepare.ELEX 2 was... for some reason... everyone stopped believing him and he had to convince them a second timeand it ended with the alien threat about to come.ELEX 2 was the Mass Effect 2 of ELEX but there won't be a 3
>>3874229Both Risen and Elex were fine games, not as good as Gothic 2, but they were good.PB just always fumbled the sequels. That being said, PB created games that no one else has managed to recreate, and on that basis alone they didn't deserve to go under.The Gothic formula is that good, and I would have happily continued to buy their first entries.
>>3874642>and I would have happily continued to buy their first entries.That's because you're a brainless brezelgolem who absorbs every slop coming his way and thinks it's good as long as it can be completed.
>>3874229They made Nasty dirty, no pun intended. She's a completely different character in ELEX 2, voiced by a granny and the game forced a romance and a fucking kid with Caja because hey, it's not like Mass Effect and Witcher figured out save importing a decade earlier.
>>3874704+1 voice actor change was jarring enough, but her whole personality changing was sadElex 2 was a letdown in general, cba listing everything. Still fun tho
>>3874704>voiced by a grannyDoesn't matter since you're playing in English, so the voice acting is expected to be shit.
>>3874704To be fair Gothics never did save import even when they could have. Making ELEX 2 so related to the original was a mistake.
risen 1 is a good game. everything after is shit.
why did they do it
I think Risen 3 was an okay game.
>>3877069
Rise was goodGothic 3 was goodElex was just mid, I don't lik3 sci-fi
>>3874619ELEX 2's plot was a fucking mess, but I think the twist that the Skyand invasion is in some ways related to but not the alien invasion that was teased isn't necessarily a bad idea. But by the time the twist is explained the story already devolved into incomprehensible nonsense with about two dozen other twists and revelations that get dropped completely out of the blue with no further elaboration along with a whole bunch of pointless retcons that make little to no sense. If's not like in G3 which is just barebones, ELEX2 is just incomprehensible, inconsistent garbage. If someone told me an AI spat that script out I would believe him.
>>3877366its about Chronicles of Myrtana a guy Dark tried to stole the rights and forced mod developer team to cut relations to gothic.
>>3874642But Gothic 2 was a sequel
>>3874619.....So the plot is LITERALLY just sci-fi Gothic....Can't this studio make another kind of game?
>>3877496And gothic2 did some things drastically worse than gothic1, it just found its own strengths to make up for it.
eurocucks being forced to imprint onto gothic is the saddest shit
>>3877618https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PcUQQOODv0
>>3877620lol "rpg" bumfight
>>3877595Yes for the most part but there's a big difference. Jax is a set protagonist and his past actions and relationships is what drives the main quest forward. That's a first for PB.
>>3877620Morrowind was easily the worst popular videogame of its generation, its not fair to make a comparison like that
>>3874229I never got the appeal of Gothic. It just looks so bland and German.
>>3877847turns out that people like reactive rpgsincredible, isn't it?
>>3877847Aside from Dark Souls it is the best action RPG series, Dark Souls might have better gameplay but Gothic has better exploration, music, actual quests and a much better modding community
>>3877860>Aside from Dark Souls it is the best action RPG seriesSure, if you ignore Fable, Dragon's Dogma, Diablo, Monhun, Nier
>>3877862You just named shitty grindy games where everything is solved with grinding, aside from Fable, that series is just casual shit.
>>3877865>You just named shitty grindy games where everything is solved with grindingSo just like in every PB game where most of your XP comes from killing mobs?
>>3877868You can't grind Gothic, nothing respawns.
>>3877868Those games have infinite respawns, Gothic just like most of the best RPGs has no or very few respawns
>>3877872>>3877874Not the point. The point is, once again, that most of your XP comes from mindlessly killing enemy hordes.
>>3877876Welcome to RPGs.
>>3877860never in my life have I ever enjoyed doing "quests" in a video game. I don't play games to do chores. I have enough to do in real life. >>3877854people also like bland derivative shit like mass effect and dragon age and Ultima
>>3877088Nobody remembers it even exists. Risen 1's the good one, Risen 2 is the "for some reason they soft retconned the setting into a pirate story with simplified mechanics" one. Risen 3 just sorta exists as a footnote between Risen 2 and ELEX.
>>3877460Björn Pankratz was never good at writing stories but he somehow got worse the more games he worked on.
Will I like Elex 2 if I like 1
>>3877917Elex 2 is worse the more you liked 1. It screws up both the returning setting, plot points and characters. Mechanically, combat and jetpack movement is better but everything else like world exploration is worse.
>>3877876The point is that Gothic isn't a grinding game while the ones that you listed mostly are
>>3877069the cdaction guy! man, it's a small world
>>3874615why was it popular?
>>3874704Nigga that's NASTY.
Dude
>>3874642This. Just give me "three camps on small map you cannot leave" and I will play it over and over. Nobody really cares about Gothic universe.
>>3874229Whenever /v/ talks about cool secrets, my mind always goes back to something that happened to me in Gothic 2 that I’ve never been able to reproduce.Years ago I’d lost my original discs and grabbed some cracked version just to replay it. Game is normal for like a dozen hours, I’m doing the monastery stuff, kill a slightly off-looking skeleton that drops a generic “Key”. Later on, inside the monastery, I pull a wall torch and instead of the usual “can’t pick that up” message, the game hitches and fades to black like it’s loading a new area.I’m suddenly in this basement/prison under the monastery: long corridor, cells on both sides, no music, just ambient echo. Some cells have bones and junk, one has a little wooden toy, and at the far end there’s a lit cell with what looks like a small NPC model crouched in the corner, quietly sobbing. No name, no dialogue, no reaction.The normal exit is locked, the weird key “works” but just teleports me into a different cell. Every time I use console commands to warp around, I always end up with that thing in the next cell over, never gone, never closer. After one warp the game freezes, resumes, and there’s a bloody handprint on the wall that wasn’t there before. I quit out; that save’s thumbnail was just a black rectangle, and trying to load it later crashed the game.Bought the GOG version years later and I’ve never found that area again.
>>38805726/10 not enough realistic blood and creepy old dudes selling you the game in a flea market
I finally played Gothic 1 for a few hours today - the world is truly amazing, one of the best-looking low-poly games I've ever played and while the characters are not interesting, there is a lot of them and you can easily remember what each one wants. The size of the world just feels right, better than in most Zelda games, if not all of them. I won't continue playing because I'm an oldfag who isn't interested in gameplay that is this simplistic or the quirks such as having to sheathe weapon before looting corpse etc. If I played it when it came out, I would've probably finish it. I did play Riven a lot back in the day. The main thing that felt dated is how difficulty, mainly getting one-shotted by much of wildlife, kinda negated the exploration bit. I know you're going to get much stronger later, but it's a glitchy type of difficulty spike, flies nuking you and whatnot. As a template for how you're supposed to scale and organize a RPG setting, Gothic is 10/10, comparable to Bloodlines and Fallout 1. It's weird, I kept thinking about Breath of the Wild while playing, since it's an inverse game - it does not have any interesting characters, but the protag is much more nuanced, and the overworld gives you much more to do with its nature and wildlife, regardless of being more forgiving. The perfect game would likely be a blend of Gothic 1 and Zelda.
>>3880500>Nobody really cares about Gothic universe.wrong
>>3881222Nah he's right. G1 has barebones worldbuilding because the world outside the prison doesn't really matter outside the basic set dressing of "king's at war with orcs". Then G2 retcons the Valley into being on an island, Beliar going from sort of a neutral God to le evil one because the story demands it, and the plot goes full retard with dragons and the nameless shitter suddenly being the chosen hero and avatar of the Gods. Then G3 further retcons the mainland with an empty map, no Navy, the retarded way Lee's story ends, etc.The setting doesn't have interesting lore the way worlds like Fallout or TES do. It's just generic plate armor medieval Germanic Land feat. weed. It's telling that Archolos includes lore references to all previous games like some items calling back in their nomenclature to places like Normal from G3 but it really doesn't add any context because Nordmar is... the most generic snow viking-ish area in the history of generic snow viking-ish areas in RPGs.People endure jank in some RPGs' gameplay for the sake of their rich, interesting setting. Gothic's the exact opposite, where you play it for the gameplay mechanics and the immersion they provide while the world at large is boring no matter what 40yo krauts and slavs might try to convince you of back on worldofgothic.
Just tried open gothic vanilla 2.7 for gothic 2runs like complete shit, game cratered as soon as i left the tower
>>3881278People only care about something called 'atmosphere'. Both Morrowind and Gothic 1 have it, but Oblivion doesn't for example. It seems like Hoge was mostly responsible for the initial success of PB, since he wrote the setting and first chapter of G1. He was less and less involved with the studio after that for some reason.
Been playing Gothic 2 for a while. I really think that there has to be a better way of picking up all the quest and information other than going from person to person and exhausting dialogue prompts. Even if the story's good - and in Gothic it's serviceable at best - you just hit a wall and endure massive amounts of exposition and/or really simplistic quests that have you fetching stuff and engaging in inane dialogue.
>>3881278Ironically G1 was Gothic at its most interesting because of how much it left unexplained, but also because it had weird shit like Chromanin.
>>3874229>Be me, love Risen 1, first RPG I ever played>Risen 2 gets announced>Ohsitforreal.wav>Pirate stuff is cool>get Game in launch Week>start game>playes completely different to Risen1>No shields because Pirates>Keep looking for a Shield for like 1/3 of my Playthrough>Also Shooting Minigame sucks AssI liked Risen 2, but it had its Problems For Risen 3 they dropped the fucking Storyline + Protagonist for no reason at all and started something new, despite the Titan Lords, you know the BBEGs from Risen 1 and Risen 2 being in the fucking Title, also they reused Islands
>>3874229Gothic 1 was considered a good game?
I hate POOlaks so much it's unreal
>>3883609
>>3883611
>>3880500*nobody in the ANGLOSPHERE cares about the Gothic universe. I'm sorry but guys just aren't the main audience!
>>3883640>but guys just aren't the main audienceok trans presenting individual. guess it makes sense you really like prison settings.
>>3874229Elex 2 showed my why PB deserved to dieIt was the game with the longest development time and highest budget, yet it somehow turned out worse in almost every aspect than Elex 1Their focus on the godawful story with laughably bad cutscenes is just bizarre. I still remember laughing my ass of at a scene where a berserker gets ambushed by an alien and it looks like lits giving him backrubs until he dies while two other aliens sperg out in the backgroundAnd Dex. Everything about Dex. Just why.
>>3883963>Just why.Why does he exist?Why does he die so unceremoniously and why does no one care?Why did PB think it was good storytelling to have Jax impregnate Caja with the Hybrid's sperm?
beat gothic 1 it was pretty good besides running back and forth thankyou cheatengine speedhack and the combat lockon, will play 2 as a magical man after a little break and the maybe that chronicles mod
>>3884161gothic 2 vanilla or with the night of the raven?
>>3884161the entire point of gothic is to endure the tedium. what the fuck. it's like playing breath of the wild and having the horse run 10x fasterwhat's next, modding it so that everyone in the camp stands next to each other so you don't have to run around?>>3884307he should definitely play vanilla, notr was never needed
>>3884307>>3884415should the expansion be avoided?>>3884415i endured the tedium for a while and had myself enough thanks
>>3884425The expansion is fine and adds extra content. People just hate it because it's slightly harder than the base game (which doesn't matter because it's easy enough either way) and because of rune tablets.
>>3884425Expansion itself is fine, but it tunes up the difficulty significantly. Sure, its perfectly beatable if you know how the game works. But it might rape a newcomer like you a bit too much.
>>3884425>should the expansion be avoided?It filters some newbies because it was designed for people who played vanilla back to back.
>>3884425The expansion dilutes the game, so if you aren't into Gothic that much it's a big minus. The centerpiece of G2 is still the mine valley.
Golden Gate 2 release date has been announcedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_udEj1BK7M
>>3884497I hate it because it made the dragons a bigger pain in the ass then they needed to be.
>>3882525Every game has an atmosphere just in a different sense
>>3874642>PB created games that no one else has managed to recreateArcholos
>>3885979Imagine the atmosphere.
