After the massively insane patch the community put together for Gothic 3, and waiting 3 years to play it... honestly its not bad... But compared to Risen its crap on top of vomit, mixed with emulsified opossums...

Risen is amazing, it captivated me from the first moment i loaded it up to the 3rd and 4th play though. I love the world, and its a lot of fun.

Gothic 4 has alot to live up to, im grabbing the demo now but have little faith, there melee combat system better not the the shit they out out in Gothic 3...

Yeah, I have no idea why three massive open-world RPG games are coming out three weeks in a row. If I was the "save my money and buy it when I wan to play it" type I wouldn't even consider getting Two Worlds 2 or Gothic 4 with Fallout New Vegas coming out the week after them... it makes no sense. I bet most people are that type of person too, so I don't expect either to sell a ton.

That said Risen sold very well, and shows the market for these games is there if they can tap into it.

I never really got in Gothic or Risen. Mainly because of things like
"Quick. We need you to kill the wolves back in the forest"
50m walk later... Wolves!
Or from Risen when the rebel base is about 300metres from the Templey place.

Karl

@StingingVelevet. Many people think Fallout: New Vegas is more or less a Fallout 3 expansion, given it uses the same engine. Obsidian are known for taking existing franchises and releasing them buggy or with bad endings too, so I think a lot people will wait.

If people are into D&D they will be more interested in Gothic 4 and Two Worlds II from the get-go too.

So I think it's far from as straightforward as you say as to who will buy what when. I for one would perhaps only buy Two Worlds II as I have been getting monthly newsletters on the game listing the features in it, and I loved the original Two Worlds, where a lot of hate was put on the console version and that got people thinking the PC version was bad too when it wasn't.

Two Worlds got treated badly. The healing stations were seen as a 'game breaker', and yet the same thing in Bioshock 'helped the story keep moving'! The vocie actor for the main character was dissed and yet it was the same guy that did the voice for Sacred 2 where people said it was great! The horse AI and riding skills were dissed and yet Oblivion horse riding was ridiculous with no horse AI or horse riding skills at all!

We might be getting 3 RPG's all at the same time, but on average we are lucky to get 2 cRPG's a year - this means we need to respect ANY company that tries to do a cRPG, as they are 1000 times more complicated to make than a 12 hour gameplay corridor shooter!

Overall then I think the cRPG genre is not given enough respect and not every game can be a Planescape Torment or a Morrowind!

It was against the base of a cliff hiding in a swamp... the Temple guards did have an outpost at the summit to the south east but the worms were keeping them at bay and gave them no bother to go deeper...

the temple guards weren't going for extermination they had one focus and one alone. Its all about story...

play the other campaigns in the game and really get the whole story... i felt it very rewarding... and a lot of fun! it was MUCH smaller then Gothic 3 in the end unfortunately :(

I always knew you Europeans saw the world as bleak and dreary!

OK wow, just played the demo a little bit, over all as a "game" they have there shit together.... The melee combat is tight and "FUN" really its fun! Dodging works, blocks work as intended, and fighting even 2-3 mobs feels exciting instead of wanting to cut your face off with a rusty razor (See Gothic 3)

Have yet to see magic though and the island feels small but i have a feeling it gets bigger.. all in all im an RPG nut and i love the look and feel of the game, maxing out all settings and barely hitting mt FPS barrier makes it nice too...

here are only a few graphical anomalies that got me to cringe but i can easily forgive that as i moved from judging the engine and game to judging the story and the world. It did pull me in after awhile, you just need to let the game be what it is. not judge it for bad animations for speech and a missed polygon here or there, or clothes clipping into the body mesh. invisible walls still piss me off though

I'll be buying this, regardless of the DRM, I feel its a game I cannot pass up. it is a cRPG and just because of that alone need to try it...

This bugs me too sometimes, like in Oblivion when the Imperial City had like 100 citizens. For other games though they do a good job of making things feel right. Morrowind for instance was supposed to be a wild border province so it made sense that the cities were so small and the imperial camps so tiny. In Risen too, it's a small island recently taken over by the empire to study the volcano, so it makes sense things are small.

This afternoon I installed and played the Gothic 4 demo. It took 2 hours and 5 mins to finish.
Here's my review:
First off the character modelling looks console'ish with not very hi-res graphics to say the least. then when the talking started you knew straight away a small budget had been given for the voice overs and the talking was somewhat average, but not bad because they didn't drone on.
Next was the so obvious 'this has to be seen on a 42" TV screen using a console, so lets make the font huge and have a box around it 1/3 the screen size! In short then, it took about 30 seconds to see this was a console game with a console viewpoint that had been converted to PC with only the control system changed.
I had to go to see the father of my bride-to-be and on the way to the village noticed I couldn;t walk as that was considered 'sneaking' and I didn't have the skill for that, although noticed the excellent landscape graphics with an excellent DOF and lovely water that was not over the top as in many games.
In the village had lots of people to talk to who just had comments to make. Many different voices here, which was nice. All the NPC's had different faces, so that was good too.
The conversation options in the demo were not multi-choice, as in Neverwinter Nights or Mass Effect. you just went through each one until there's nothing more to say. As you get sent off to fight goblins and wolves you discover that the combat is a lot of fun, with the ability to hold the right mouse button and then roll right with D and left with A etc. What I liked about this was it took the enemies a couple of seconds to work out where you were allowing an occasional attack from the rear!
Pretty quickly weapons were upgraded and armour parts (bracers) started appearing.
These weapons all looked the business and by the end of the demo was already getting some interesting magical weapons, spell scrolls and armour.
In the demo you get to level 4.and there are typical choices for skills, with 3 points everytime you level up, in lunge, sneak, precision, etc.
The demo got interesting after you meet the Witch. After she gives you the ability to use magic (only through scrolls at the moment) you find straight away in the dungeon crawl she sends you on that tactics seem to be employed in a very interesting way.You get to fight a beetle type character that once wounded about 50% goes back into his shell and heals. You cannot hurt it while it's in it's shell,. and this is where the Witches lightning spells come into effect. they don't do much damage, but they shock the beetle out of his shell,. with the lightning scroll in quickslot 3 and your main melee weapon in slot 1, you hit the beetle a couple time with the weapon, the beetle goes into shell, you hit '3' an zap the creature with the lightning bolt, it leaves the shell, you switch to '1' and hit again, repeat until dead. Now this was neat combat!
Alongside these beetles you got one hit to kill dirt spider type creatures that jumped at your face. These came in 2-3's
Then came the Queen beetle, the came some Worker beetles, then some failed paladins, then some more failed paladins and failed spellcasters, then some skeltons. These were all animated excellently, and the beetles and wolves had excellent physics, really flopping around and moving realisitcally. the Worker beetles were a bit like spiders, and they were quite scary for it. The also 'catapulted' over your head then attacked from the back! The wolves 'slinked' through the woods like panthers and were jet black - very impressive!
The dungeon/cave itself was lit by blue quartz and had the typical mushrooms, etc. the lighting and mist was just right and conveyed a lot of atmosphere. Also human enemies come at you in numbers, so you need slots for your healing potions too as you'll be going through 2-3 in the bigger fights!
By the end you have gone from clothing through leather and then plate armour. You have gone from a shepherd's hook to a hammer that takes 10% of the enemies lifeforce and gives it to you! You also get a short bow, a crossbow and regular, fire and dragonslayer arrows and bolts.
As you teleport out of the dungeon you seem in a dream and at the end of a hall you see the King slumped on his throne and his entourage standing around him. It seems a dream due to mistiness around the edges of the screen.
And that's it. More or less. I have left some details out in case you want to play the demo.
I would say the combat seems fun and the gameworld looks fantastic. The creatures are animated wonderfully and look great with great physics.
On the downside, speech seems average at best with no conversation choices but rather choose them all. The village is quite large and well laid out and day/night cycles are nice.
If the story turns out interesting, voice work can be overlooked to some degree (I feel), but overall I feel this will be seen as another Two Worlds with scores in the 70;s and 80's rather than 80's and 90's
Hope this helps people....! :)

I think that's fair... good combat, possible good exploration, good graphics in general and bad voice acting and dialogue so far.

The console stuff doesn't really bother me and I didn't think it was as bad as you did, but otherwise a good summary.

You can only walk if you're using a controller. A few other recent games have had this limitation (Alpha Protocol was one I think). Sneaking is something different again and of course is available to both control schemes.

The inability to walk with the keyboard becomes starkly obvious at certain points. There's a staircase in one of the buildings in town, and at the full movement speed the hero will actually fly right off the top of the staircase, taking fall damage.

It could be good if JoWood go bust. Piranha Bytes could get the Gothic licence back.

I'd rather they just keep going with Risen honestly. I like the idea of a world on the brink of complete destruction.

Plus it doesn't really matter what the game is called, as long as it has the overall feel of a Gothic game.

Just tired the german demo - the voices are good, even that of the witch. Can't say much about dialogues being (or not being) stupid - I can only undestand about 10% of dialogues and text this way.

Looks like I'll have to play ArcaniA with german voices and english subs.