Some important info here.
The Plot. The story is about an unnamed hero who grows up on an island called Feshyr while there is a great war going on in Myrtana. One day, while the hero is on an adventure, the island is attacked and everyone in his home village is killed, including his soon-to-be wife, Ivy. With the help of an old friend, Diego, he travels to the island Argaan, to find king Rhobar III and avenge his fiancée's murder. He then proceeds to make his way through the huge island only to slowly realize that there is more to the whole situation than just revenge.
General thoughts. I am a big fan of the Gothic series, so this was something I was really looking forward to. Sadly, it was very disappointing. While the stories are connected, where king Rhobar III was the hero from the three previous episodes of the Gothic series, he was but a footnote in the whole story. In the very beginning, as a tutorial part, you get to run around in king Rhobar's body and kill a bunch of dudes, but that's it. Every now and then you run into some people anybody familiar with the series knows very well, like Diego with his peaceful philosophy, Gorn with his humongous axe, Lester with his swampweed and facial tattoos, Milten the fire mage and a few more. Yes, Xardas will make an appearance. Every Gothic game has this weird dark magician called Xardas, who always ends up quite important to the plot at the end. He always lives in a very specific looking tower and always has a skeleton servant, who cleans the place. I'm glad Arcania didn't disappoint on that.
The story somewhat resembles the old series, but otherwise it's pretty much stand-alone. I get it, they had to make it in a way so it'd appeal to console-americans, since the previous episodes were never released on the american market. That's too bad. Arcania was developed by a new company, Spellbound, instead of the usual Piranha Bytes, so there were less bugs in the game, but the whole game is actually different. The whole game has been dumbed down a lot.
First of all, the skills. The thing I loved the most about the old Gothic series were the skills. It was very realistic to expect to learn a skill only by finding someone who is a master of the skill and Willing to even teach you. In all previous Gothic series, if you pissed off a master of a craft you really needed, you just ended up not getting it. If you survived. Some of them were real assholes about it and preferred to kill you instead of just knocking your teeth out and taking all your money. So, masters. You had to look for them and you had to have skill points available and also money to pay for the lessons. Some lessons even included a commentary, like how to skin a wild animal or how to take out their teeth. In Arcania, the skill tree was just a menu you opened by pushing 'K' and selecting where you wanted to put the three points you just gained by reaching another level.
It's the same with crafting, cooking and mining or digging. In the old series you needed to find a bench to do alchemy, a set of three things to craft a sword (the fire, the anvil and a barrel of water and preferably a whetstone to sharpen the thing for +10 extra damage) and even a fire to cook a piece of meat. This gave the game a whole new realistic aspect that most games don't have. I mean, you had to strike the ore deposit at least three times before you got a few pieces of ore. In Arcania, you pushed 'C' for the crafting menu and you could craft anything you've learned from a scroll.
In the old series, just like any other average RPG, you needed to have a necessary amount of strength, dexterity, magic or whatever else to wield a weapon. They actually lost All the stats and just have skills and not a lot of them. You have three melee skills, a bow skill, a stealth skill and three types of magic skills. They're all the spells you get to use against your enemies. Fire, Frost and Lightning. That's it. There are a few levels to it, but that's about it. So in Arcania, if you would get your hands on a 65 damage two-handed sword, "Wrath of Innos" (the highest damage weapon in the game), you could just wield it in the beginning and get to the end of the game using just that. This was actually meant as a special weapon which was to be forged in the ancient temple. The old Gothic would've required you to get a stick of metal, stick it in the heat, hit it with a special magical smith hammer (yes, there was one) and then quench it in the magical spring. It was all there, you just didn't need it. Just pick up a bunch of scrolls that teach you to do this, get your ingredients, press 'C' and press 'Craft'. So in a way, you could've done that on your way to the boss fight.
I think they actually planned to make it like the old Gothic, with the Roleplay crafting, but at one point just decided that it was too difficult for console-americans and dropped it. There is an option in the menu, where you can turn on and off all the roleplay elements of the game. You could sit by the fire, move the ladle around a big bowl of.. some food, you could pray to a god at an altar, you could go through all the crafting steps and you could even use the saw on a huge log (this didn't actually do anything in any other Gothic games, just a thing you could do). They also lost the sleeping part, which was really necessary in the old games, where at night you really couldn't see much and it was a good idea to sleep until morning before moving on. You can still lie down on a bed if you want to, but that's just as pointless as sitting on a throne or sharpening your sword on a whetstone. Instead of sleeping, the nights are brighter with the American lighting option. Spellbound decided that it europeans and americans like their games in different color and made two different lighting options. I played the American version, since you couldn't sleep during the night and just sitting in the darkness waiting to get light is just stupid. Wielding a magical weapon to light up the place was a nice touch, though. You could light up a cave by drawing your flaming sword. That was nice.
With all the bad and non-Gothic parts of the game, Arcania has some nice things, too. For example the graphics are really nice. The weather changes from bright and sunny to dark and rainy and the winds can even get quite strong and throw the trees around a bit. I wish it had some sort of an effect on the gameplay, like the possibility of slipping and falling down when it's wet or not being able to shoot an arrow straight during a strong wind. Or maybe, I don't know, fire not working with rain? Come on!
The rain effect was really nice. Probably the coolest thing in the whole game. When it rains, the ground gets gradually wet (maybe a bit too quickly) and dries up when the sun comes out (again, a little bit too quickly). The part with the dripping water that I saw in the dev demo, I didn't see in the game, but that's ok. Still, when it rained, some places with a lower ground filled up with water and formed puddles. That was really cool. When the ground is wet, the hero is also wet and it all looks really wet. The light reflecting off wet surfaces makes it look really nice. I just wish they put this much effort in the rest of the game as they did in the rain.
The NPC reacts to the environment, like the weather and all, but is usually useless and stupid. I didn't see one fighting NPC (other than with the hero) during the whole game. In the old Gothic series, every time a fight broke out or the village or town was attacked, people rushed in to assist either you or whoever you were fighting against, depending on the situation. I didn't try, but I hear that you couldn't even attack any NPC character who wasn't supposed to be fighting with you.
The next thing I want to bitch about is the sandbox-ness of Arcania. The game's dev, during the first look presentation, spoke about a vast world to explore and run around in, but in reality, the game turned out to be Very linear. It's ok for the story to be linear, but the rest of the world should be accessible while the main story goes toward a certain direction. Arcania is the same type of linear, as for example Mafia 2, where you had an open world, but all you could do was still related to the main storyline. Maybe that's not the best example, but in Arcania, you found yourself in an area with not much of a size. You had a few quests to do in that area, most of them get-me-this and kill-those type and the combination of the two and then you do the main storyline quests and move on without the chance of turning back. There were a few points in the game where you could go back to the previous areas, but there was nothing to do there.
The dev presentation also spoke about being able to join different factions, just like the old Gothic games. I was able to join just one faction, just because that was necessary to move on in the main storyline and not because I made a choice to join that particular one. Let me give you an example. The first Gothic game had three big faction, each faction had a separate city, each city had a separate storyline which ended up in the same place. You could chill with the hippies in the swamp, join the rebels in a remote cave or go the most obvious way and join the lawful group in a big fortress and try to get close to the ruler. In all the previous Gothic games you had a lot of choices, whereas in Arcania, you just had a direction to follow. Also, the dev promised 30 to 50 hours of gameplay, but since the game was really linear, I finished it in about 15-20 hours, which is pathetic for any RPG, but a total failure for a Gothic game.
The bugs. All the old Gothic games had a lot of problems with players complaining about the big amount of bugs in the games, the worst of them being Gothic 3. I think this was one of the reasons why JoWood decided to use Spellbound instead. Sure, there were a lot of smaller bugs, but nothing that would affect the gameplay as greatly as the bug I ran into in Arcania. This problem presented itself about halfway through the game. I didn't notice it right away, so I can't tell what caused it, but restarting the game didn't have an effect. The bug itself was that I could walk through all my opponents during a fight. This was really annoying since the fights have a Lot of movement and that meant that I would end up being on the same spot with my opponent, when, let's say, the opponent backs into a wall. While being inside of an opponent, I couldn't land a strike. Luckily the same goes for the opponent, so sometimes it was a good idea to hide in a bad guy for a little bit. I'm glad Arcania had a tumble system, where by pressing a direction button and the right mouse button, the hero would roll himself in the direction. This meant that when I found myself "in" an opponent, I would just roll back and attack again.
Even with that issue, I still finished the game. I'm satisfied with the story in general. There were some interesting parts and even though with lots things to whine about, the world was quite nicely done.
As an RPG, this game is average at best. It had the story, but the RPG elements were weak and boring. This game would have scored a lot more in my book, had it not been a Gothic series game, but a separate game.
If you are a fan of the Gothic series, you can take a look at this, but expect to be disappointed. If you are new to the Gothic series, who knows, maybe you'll like it. If you do, you won't like the previous games.
Gothic has always been a love-hate kind of series. Many people hate it, especially the third one, but I loved the third. I loved it a whole damn lot. With Arcania, I think people will be indifferent towards it and I consider it a lot worse than love-hate.
I'd recommend Arcania: Gothic 4 to everyone who don't know much about the series and as an experience, for die-hard Gothic fans like myself.
Otherwise, if you like Gothic, play Risen instead of this. Risen was developed by Piranha Bytes and they did exactly what we love about Gothic only to a different story. I can't say the story is better than Gothic, but Risen is Most Definitely better than Arcania: Gothic 4.
4/10 Flogs
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