Why You Should NOT Play "Gothic 4" Arcania in 2022 | 12 Years Later Retrospective

hello there my RPG lovers and welcome to another video arquenia is an action RPG that came out in 2010 previously known as Gothic for Arcania but not long after the game released the publisher lost the license for the gothic IPS so they had to rename the game to just Arcania the gothic IP went back to its original Creator the studio behind the gothic Trilogy piranabites nowadays Arcania sits in this weird limbo of existence and most people want to completely forget about it especially the gothic fans but unfortunately no matter how hard we try to ignore the pitiful existence of this game it eventually come backs to haunt us whenever someone mentions it yo yo yo yo yo I got some new games today man what we got who goes to sushima that's an awesome game we got Skyrim wait Skyrim I don't remember buying Skyrim again I'll figure it out demon souls awesome remake and we got um so the question you may ask was it really that bad yes yes it was now look I think I can be pretty objective about basically every game that I review on the channel even when it comes to my most favorite titles that's exactly the approach I had before I started playing Arcania again after about 11 years and it seems like my memory about this game was terrible because you might remember me saying on a couple of occasions that tarkania wasn't that bad sure and my sheep can dance don't get me wrong I never thought Arcania was a good Gotti game but I thought before that if you try to ignore the fact that he pretends to be a Gothic game you could potentially have some fun while playing it well I was completely wrong about that probably because I forgot 99 of the game I guess my brain wanted so hard to like this game so I started playing tricks on me or something I don't know I almost never have a problem with finishing a game I want to review but I was really struggling with Arcania I wanted to quit on multiple occasions because I got really frustrated oh my god really okay whatever just go back up wait what however I somehow managed to finish the game and kill the end boss and I just didn't have the strength to play and review the DLC followed the set riff you'll probably understand why after you watch the whole video Arcania feels like it was developed by someone who has no experience in making these kinds of games up to the point where the whole game feels like a parody of open world RPGs than anything else yes and yes it gets even worse if you try to compare it to previous Gotti games unfortunately Spellbound Studio had no respect to the original material and it doesn't take long to realize that while playing the game apart from all the major characters from previous Gothic games Arcania literally has no resemblance to Gothic Trilogy that wouldn't be a crucial problem if Arcania was a good game in general but it was far from that the world is extremely basic lifeless and exploring the map feels like a chore the story and dialogue are ridiculously bad you want to marry me don't you sure it it just comes so quickly comes so quickly she's pregnant she won't say no what come so quickly the gameplay had some potential but it's really mindless and it's almost completely broken this review is a bit late because I was sick as a dog for about five days and I stayed in bed and played video games all day big surprise still Rising got a new game plus so I started playing that game again I also started playing AC Origins and AC volcala as well but anyway I played this game on my PS5 but I also played it on the PC for a while just for comparison's sake it's actually a PS4 game but it runs a lot better on PS5 with lock 60fps on 4K resolution if you try to run the game on 4k on PC you'll have problems with the UI because it won't scale properly that's pretty much the biggest reason why I decided to play the rest of the game on my PS5 but anyway let's go back to the beginning and start talking about this God forsaking game all right even though Arcania is not officially a gotti game anymore the story involves all the major characters from previous Gotti games the premise of the story had some potential I guess but the horrible writing and ridiculously bad Quest design overshadows that glimmer of potential once again you place a nameless hero but it's not the same person from the original Gothic Trilogy the protagonist from previous games has become a king and just like all previous Kings in this universe he's now called robar or Robert III to be more specific his mind got corrupted in the meantime and he's not exactly himself anymore interestingly enough you play the tutorial with him and it's a pretty bad and needlessly long tutorial when I check the recording it's actually only around 8 minutes but it felt a lot longer than that I made a crucial mistake and selected the hardest difficulty which apparently inflates the help pool of all NPCs so he took some serious button mashing to go through this section foreign for some reason the hardest difficulty is called Gothic LOL for comparison's sake only Gothic 3 had the option to choose the difficulty previous Gotti games had a fixed difficulty level anyway playing with the original nameless hero in the tutorial is a cool idea because he's trying to fight his inner demons that corrupted his mind and it's a bit nostalgic because you get to control a well-known character from previous Gotti games but all you're doing is killing a lot of NPCs while being completely immune to all of their attacks the funniest thing about this tutorial are the combat features which the game is trying to teach you and it's funny because this is pretty much it for the rest of the game the whole progression system is almost completely relevant but we'll get to that soon enough you're just spamming the attack button because you can't die and it's way too long for no apparent reason when that's done the game begins in a small village where you take the control of a new protagonist the new protagonist is just known as the Shepherds and apparently the tutorial section was just Shepard's nightmare right off the bat you're introduced to some very bad dialogue and a couple of uninteresting characters you told Ulrich about us no he saw us and we quarreled about it at first your main quest is related to Ivy ivy is a girl you like and you're trying to get approval from her father speaking of her father I want you to take a closer look at this face because this guy is literally everywhere trust me I'm not over exaggerating if I say that every third character you're going to talk with looks like this [ __ ] I'm not even talking about some side characters and unimportant NPCs you're going to see in populated places who also have this face eighty percent of important story NPCs look like this at first it was kind of funny but as you progress further it gets frustrating and sad there is no way in hell that you can even begin to take the story seriously when almost all important NPCs have this stupid face but let's leave this discussion for the visual section you have to do a couple of very simple fetch quests so you can get the approval from and if you hope that Quest will get more interesting than this you'll be very disappointed the game Falls flat to its face even when he tries to give you a bit more context behind the quest because the writing is just awful Does anything go right anyway you can meet a couple of more characters in The Village one of them is the orc called orac and I was immediately disappointed with spellbound's idea of Orcs the Orcs in this game are just dumb as a bag of rocks to put it lightly Aura told nothing orok likes the young lady now you might make an argument that this is similar to Gothic 1 and 2 because Orcs in those games were pretty bad at communicating as well but trust me Orcs in this game are completely mindless open the gate gate stays closed inside you outside I am in the middle it makes you wonder how the hell they managed to conquer the Midlands in Gothic 3 and speaking of Gothic 3 Orcs were simply amazing in that game they were easily one of the best things about the whole game their dialogue and visuals were top-notched and surprisingly they had some amazing voice acting as well what goods are you waiting for three large packages with my name on them big sturdy wooden crates I'll make the necessary arrangements to put a stop to good work carry on then how the hell we went from this to this all rock likes the young lady there were some lazy attempts to make the Orcs in Arcania kinda similar to Gothic 3 but it's not very good to put it lightly foreign ly the Orcs are just Side characters in this game because the main quest is almost completely unrelated to them and speaking of the main quest you get to meet Diego quite early in the game this is one of the quests you have to do for grommar because he thinks the ego is a bandit so you have to get rid of him however you learned that Diego is actually your friend just like in previous Gotti games yeah just like that the new protagonist is a good friend not only with Diego but pretty much with all major characters from previous Gotti games well not exactly but you're going to meet all of them at one point but we'll get to that in order to complete the grommar's quest You'll have to take Diego's weapon but Diego won't just give it to you of course you'll have to beat him in a duel this is like another tutorial but even more pointless because the game tries to teach you how to block by being completely stationary and holding a button trust me there is not a single reason you want to use this mechanic in the game but we'll talk about that in the gameplay section Diego then gives you a quest to kill some goblins and after that is done he finally gives you the weapon oh and by the way check out this amazing dialogue with Diego by the waterfall with some amazing audio mixing once you return to grommar he of course gives you another pointless quest to kill some deer outside of the village I guess this is just another tutorial where you get to learn how to use a bow after that's done grammar finally gives you his Blessing for marrying Ivy but now you have to get the bangle for the wedding but even though Arcania has mindless killed this collected quests the game just can't give you a straightforward Quest because on top of those mindless quests the game has to attach a couple of more identical quests where you have to collect something for another NPC before you can get the thing for the original Quest giver and this can be an extremely frustrating process even when the game is trying to be slick and funny about it in this specific case the previously mentioned orc won some mushrooms before he agrees to sell you the material you need for the bangle after all of that nonsense is done Ivy tells you she wants to leave the village and explore the world before she gives birth to your child oh yeah I was pregnant by the way come so quickly then you have to talk with Diego because he's an expert in traveling I guess and he gives you yet another test you have to visit a certain witch called Lyrica on the other side of the island which is apparently really dangerous surprise surprise the witch also gives you a test of skill but this time around it's related to magic you have to use these Scrolls on the bugs when you get defensive in order to kill them that's pretty much it if you don't do this they regenerate health and they are completely immune to any attacks once in the States you would think the game is trying to teach you how to fight similar enemies in the game which will be perfectly fine if it was actually true but in reality this is the first and the last time you have to use tactic to defeat an enemy in this game every single enemy you fight after this can be killed by just using a single button oh yeah by the way Lyrica has some amazing voice acting might not be my nose is telling me might be she claims to see something very powerful in you so that's the reason for testing you I guess here comes the party that got me laughing out loud once you kill The Last Enemy in the cave the game just cuts to the next scene with Diego there was supposed to be a cutscene in between where you get to see your village getting destroyed by King's robber Army but the cutscenes are completely broken in this game at least on the PS4 version you just have to pretend that this [ __ ] happened I guess at first I wanted to check if my PC version had the same problem but to be completely honest with you I just couldn't play through the beginning section of the game again even in the very end of the game the cutscene is completely missing and I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be there the DLC fall of saturif automatically starts after you defeat the end boss and that's it it's really really bad and careless anyway this is where the game opens up well kinda the exploration in Arcania is very systematic you have to do some specific story quests in order to unlock different chunks of the map you could make an argument that this is not exactly an open world game because of this come to think of it this design choice is not fundamentally bad the biggest reason why it feels bad in Arcania is because the world is mind-numbingly boring but more about that in the gameplay section so the whole main story turns into a Revenge Quest from this point on Diego tells you about this magical Forge of the mountains that the paladins of King robar are trying to find supposedly this fort can make you some crazy strong weapons and your quest is to gain the access to the forge before them because that makes a lot of sense right the shepherd is obviously way more capable than the full-blown Paladin Army of the king I don't see a problem here thanks Diego look I'm not trying to say that previous Gotti games had an amazing main story because they didn't let's face it and you know I say that as a huge fan of Gothic series the main story was never the strongest aspect of those games some people might disagree and that's completely fine but the main story in Arcania is just ridiculously bad there are some games which are bad but fun and unintentionally hilarious like two worlds one and why should I not go back there prey and I'm sure you can think of at least a couple of more similar games but unfortunately Arcania is just a bad game with almost no fun Factor at all but we need to continue whoopty [ __ ] will do you ha you ain't got the muscle the game always has a couple of side quests that you can find in each area so you don't exactly only have to follow the main quest I really tried to give a fair chance to Side Quests like I always do in every RPG that I review but after a while I just gave up I mean what you can expect from side quests when the main story is a collection of mindless kill this and collect that quests so yeah I decided to focus on the main story quests I will try my best to sum it up for you because 99 of the main story progression is locked behind a couple of local area quests you have to do in order to unlock the next area you have to visit technically there are only a couple of sections in the game we will get the actual information about the main quest just remember your main goal is to find the magical Forge so you go around various places on the map to try and get some info about it this is probably one of the cheapest ways you can write the main story for your game you're basically doing a bunch of Side Quests for the Zone you're currently in until you can unlock the next Zone when that happens you usually get to ask a couple of questions about your main objective and then you get some totally unrelated side quests you have to do before you can unlock the next area so even though I said I try to focus on the main story quest in particular it's technically not possible to do so the only slightly redeeming Factor when it comes to the main story and even that's just a Nostalgia bait is meeting your friends from previous Gotti games just by pure coincidence Shepard meets all Robert's friends and they kinda become his friends as well because of course they do that's not really bad per se but besides the unique character models of these NPCs they have nothing interesting to say or any character developments they just pop out of nowhere every now and then and they give you some stupid Quest you have to do to be fair these characters look pretty good and it seems like they tried really hard to keep the original visual style from previous Gotti games unfortunately that's where all the positive stuff ends these familiar faces are not an exception when it comes to some horrific dialogue lines what's this mystery ah a mysterious mystery my friend friend we met before all people are my friends my friend until today right I think I got it on more than a couple of occasions I completely forgot the reason for doing some of these quests which were related to the main story like I said these quests usually don't have anything to do with your main goal their objectives are all over the place long story short you eventually get your Revenge by killing the dude who was responsible for slaughtering everyone in your village you also meet Robert and try to help him with the curse but when I got up to that point I stopped paying attention to the story almost completely because I just couldn't take it anymore you get to do some very obnoxious quests in the city near the end of the game and what makes them even worse compared to all the other quests in the game is the city itself this map is designed like a [ __ ] Maze and you have to run back and forth in order to complete a couple of quests you'll find a lot of blocked paths that just serve to annoy the [ __ ] out of you because they don't make a lot of sense they only exist to artificially extend the main quest line because you will be able to finish this Quest a lot faster if you didn't have to go around the whole [ __ ] map to reach a certain area anyway it turns out that some witch called zaisha is the main antagonist and you get to fight her at the ends but before that you get to meet a very familiar face zardus I'm sure you have some questions remember when I said how it feels pointless to meet all the major characters from previous Gotti games while the game gives you even less reasons to meet zardus especially so late in the game but you do as for the ending itself let's just put it this way if the game Studio doesn't care enough to fix the story cutscenes why should they care about the story in general the reason why I'm mentioning this again is the endicots scene which doesn't exist you kill the end boss after a very boring fight and you immediately start the DLC just like near the beginning of the game where you don't get to see a cutscene when your village gets destroyed even if you try to ignore the fact that cutscenes are completely broken the story itself is terribly written sloppy careless and almost no respect for the original material but hey maybe the gameplay is not so bad right yeah let's talk about it finally I briefly touched upon the world design before so let's start with that the world keeps opening up as you progress through the main story Quest so it's not exactly a traditional open world like I said before I'm not a big fan of this design but it's not fundamentally bad there are multiple reasons why it feels so bad in Arcania the world itself feels very basic lifeless and not to mention all the glitches no but seriously as soon as you even try to go off a beaten path a little bit or God forbid jump on something the game just doesn't know how to react you will either slide for a while and die at the end of the animation or the game just automatically turns your character back it feels extremely janky to make things even worse there are a bunch of areas that look explorable but they're actually not for reasons I mentioned above Arcania tries to mimic some features from previous Gotti games but with not much success NPCs will go to sleep at night but they don't do much in general during the day so it's not exactly a full-blown day night schedule not even and close actually the game just fails to create a good atmosphere which will potentially be very immersive that was one of the key aspects of all got the games and if they managed to do it properly I think I will be much more forgiving towards this game speaking of immersion or the lack of it you can just Rob everyone and it just won't care the game has a bunch of interactable objects but they don't serve any purpose the animation starts playing but that's it to be fair previous Gotti games had some similar ideas but the majority of interactable objects had an actual gameplay purpose but like I said Arcania only plays the animation and that's it on a more positive note the world map has a nice amount of verticality it's not flat by any means if you're watching my other reviews you know I love to explore vertical open worlds in RPGs it's a big Plus in my book but when a game has so many problems with the general design the verticality doesn't mean that much in the grand scheme of things Does anything go wrong the dungeons are a huge part of arcania's exploration for the most part all of them feel the same with identical visual design which is very Bland by the way these dungeons are very bright and the lack of Shadows is really off-putting some of them are designed with convenient shortcuts that take you to the beginning of the dungeon While others are just very linear to be fair the game has a couple of good looking dungeons but the way they are designed is still pretty bad you usually have to find a key somewhere in the dungeon so you can open a locked door and progress further why this demon has a key for the door you have to open your guess is good as mine theoretically if the world was actually fun to explore I would say Arcania has a good balance between exploring open areas and dungeons yeah I'm trying so hard to find something positive to say about this damn game speaking of that I must admit it was kind of fun to load stuff in the game even though arcania's itemization system has no similarities to Gothic games finding armor pieces and weapons was fun for a while the thing is most of the stats you see on these armor pieces don't really matter for example Stan is completely broken because it doesn't limit your movements attacks or anything significant at all so you'll be sitting there and wondering why does it even exist I guess you'll do less damage with attacks when it's completely depleted but it's not really a big deal when it comes to armor sets you can only get them by completing specific main quests you'll always have a choice between three different armors which are fit for three different play Styles I really don't like this way of obtaining new armors in the game even though it does have some resemblance to got the games it makes obtaining new armor pieces more meaningful because you can only get them after a certain point I don't have much to say about crafting it's not really that bad you can find different recipes throughout the game and only the materials in order to craft the item you just open up your menu and you can start crafting I mean the game already has crafting animations when you're at the forge so they could easily connect those two things but they didn't it just goes to show you how the studio didn't understand some of the key aspects of got the game design design but what about the combats well I'm glad you asked if you like spamming one button and killing everything you're going to love the melee combat in Arcania if it's not obvious already I went for a melee build in this playthrough although calling it a build is a huge exaggeration that's because the progression system in Arcania is almost completely broken but we'll talk about that soon enough when you start the game you only get a quick attack Dodge and the blocking ability which is completely useless the controls are not terrible but some things just don't make a lot of sense like to mentioned blocking ability check this out you can only block while holding a button and being completely stationary as soon as you move from the blocking stance Shepard will do a Dodge Roll But even if the controls for blocking were better there is absolutely no reason to try and use this ability ever most enemy types in the game overuse the power attack and it's a bad idea to try and block it stronger enemies will usually knock you out with this move if you're close to them even if you try to block so the best tactic is to spam the quick attack and use the Dodge button to move out of the way when needed it seems like every single attack has a very high chance to stagger the enemy so that's why it only makes sense to spend the button like I said some enemies especially in the early game will overuse the Power Attack you can only interrupt this attack by using your power attack when you learn the Power Attack you can basically Kill All Enemies by using it over and over again and just moving a bit to avoid attacks that looks something like this this seems to be the meta for melee combat because there wasn't a single enemy in the game that I couldn't easily kill like this and that pretty much describes 99 of melee combat in the game the enemy ai's brain dead so they will only use these two melee attacks throughout the whole freaking game Mage and Ranger NPCs will try to poke you from a distance with the most basic spells and attacks all of your melee attacks have a huge AOE hitbox so you're able to hit almost everything in front of you now look I know that got the games never had an amazing combat system especially when it comes to Gothic 3 but compared to Arcania they have a much deeper and meaningful combat with way Superior RPG progression system granted the combat mechanics and got the games were always dranky and pretty rough but if you're willing to learn how they actually work it was more than functional but looks can be deceiving Arcania has some decent animations which might lead you to believe that combat is way better than it actually is the combat in Arcania had the potential to be really decent not only because of the solid animations there is a combo system that allows you to perform a couple of hits in a row if your timing is right you might think this is reminiscent of Gothic 1 and 2 but compared to those games the combo system in Arcania is almost completely relevant you need to watch out for the glowing effect and then press the button again for the successful combo you can extend the length of the combo by investing points into corresponding skill for 90 of the game you're going to fight multiple enemies at once and trying to focus on your combo just doesn't make a lot of sense in these situations because you're much more likely to get hit you'll get much better results by just pamming the button or using a Power Attack over and over again what would make this combat system a lot better are different enemy types that require you to think a bit about your attacks if the stamina was actually a functional limiting factor that would also make it a little bit better I guess but all of that is just what if in reality there are only two different enemies in the entire game which have some unique abilities and stamina doesn't matter at all not two different enemy types I'm talking about two different NPCs the bugs in the cave from the beginning that require you to use the spell and the end boss all other enemies are going to fight can be easily beaten by spamming the attack button the end boss and these bugs are the only enemy where you have to take a slightly different approach when fighting them in male range since the stamina doesn't matter a lot you can abuse the Power Attack as much as you want it seems like you're doing less damage if your stamina is low but you still have a 100 chance to stagger the enemy the animation for fully charging this attack is pretty long but the thing is you don't even have to wait for the animation to end you can release the button as soon as you start holding it and the Damage you deal will be very similar to the fully charged Power Attack it's almost like nothing truly matters when it comes to 80 percent of combat mechanics in this game the hitboxes can be really wonky as well the sense of impact is actually quite decent it's not Amazing by any means but the weapons feel like they have some actual weight behind them and sound effects are good enough when it comes to other play Styles we have a ranged attacks with the Boeing crossbow and some magic spells you can learn you can also find a couple of different magic runes which have some unique abilities the speed Rune is the only thing I used because it's great for the movement obviously using the bow and Magic feels a lot better compared to the melee play Styles but this is not fixing all the issues we mentioned before far from it actually the bow has three dots which will indicate the amount of damage you can do there are also headshots which deal more damage but I didn't really use this mechanic a lot I was using the ball quite a bit in the early game and I just used the lock on Mechanic every time aiming the ball manually is possible but it's just a huge waste of time in this game it can be a pain in the ass to keep your distance with a bow especially because the enemies can teleport all over the place so playing as a pure archery is not exactly a good option remember when I mentioned that Terrain in the game can be extremely glitchy well that's not only the case for your character the enemy will have some issues in fights as well if they they come across even the smallest obstacle on the ground there is a high possibility they will get stuck so they start teleporting back and forth it's really bad anyway I played the game as a mage when it first came out and it was a lot better experience compared to my recent mail at playthrough but all of these play Styles suffer from the extremely basic and almost completely broken progression system this quote-unquote system has a very linear progression each time you level up you get three points to invest no matter where you decide to invest your points you will get some basic stat increases like health and stamina the big notes you see are supposed to be some special abilities you get to learn but as you might imagine they're not very useful especially when it comes to male skills apart from unlocking the Power Attack I never got the feeling like my character is actually progressing I don't even have to explain why that's really bad especially in an RPG only time when I felt my character is actually getting a bit stronger is when I get a new weapon that does more damage so the game is not exactly devoid of any program impression but it's something very close to that most melee abilities you can get are related to the combo and we already talked about that to put it this way if you're crazy enough to play this game I highly advise you to go for a mage play style and you might even have some fun every now and then yeah fun Imagine That to make things a lot worse the balancing of the game is all over the place like I said before the game has a couple of different difficulty settings I'm the type of a person who likes to play all games on the highest difficulty just because I really enjoyed the challenge and I have some weird gamer ego which I'm not afraid to admit so I started Arcania on the highest difficulty setting called Gothic for some reason the game was not actually hard at all on this difficulty in the early and the mid game I assume the NPCs only have inflated Health ports and that's pretty much it don't expect extra mechanics and moves from NPCs or more aggressive behavior or anything similar to that the reason why I decided to bring the difficulty down all the way to easy is the p-sport damage I started doing in these kinds of situations in other RPGs you would think you need to upgrade your weapon somehow or level up and get stronger you ain't got the muscle but I just got a brand new sword that boosted my damage quite a bit and I only invested points into male abilities that was still not enough to start doing some decent damage it's ridiculous then I tried to fight like Spellbound intended I guess by paying attention to the combo system to no one's surprise that turned out to be even worse even though I started doing a bit more damage to be honest but like I said before you're just opening yourself for potential damage by trying to execute combos in most situations the animation lock is just way too long and what do you know the game actually has another enemy type with the same ability like those bugs we mentioned before the reason why I didn't mention this enemy type before is because you can skip most of these fights by just running I skipped a lot of fights like this especially near the end of the game you would have to be insane to fight everything that you you come across in this game Arcania uses this as a trip tactic to prolong the game especially in the last City where you're constantly running back and forth if I didn't drop the difficulty too easy I think I would quit the game a lot sooner and this review wouldn't be possible the damage you deal is just ridiculously low even on easy difficulty against some enemies it's like Spellbound knew that the best way to beat this enemies is by spamming the button so they made sure to inflate their helpers it's sad because the combat had the potential to be really fun but unfortunately it's very mindless and it lacks the meaningful RPG progression system foreign the game looks pretty decent in general for this day and age even though it does have some annoying problems first of all the game has something I never seen before if you play the game on PC you'll have the option to select different visual Styles European or American what it turns out that this option changes the color palette of the game so if you select European the color palette is more grayish with noticeably desaturated colors in general but if you select American you'll get more vibrant colors I have no idea why this is even a thing but there you go I mean I'm not complaining about extra visual options but naming them as American and European is just weird the console version has vibrant Colors by default and you won't find this option in the menu when it comes to some specific visual details the distant terrain is the first thing that comes to my mind it's pretty damn good for a 2010 game even though the PS4 version has some visual artifacts on top of the screen and speaking of that the PS4 version also has has some very aggressive pop pin but maybe not in a traditional manner check out the length of those trees they get bigger when you come closer it's really off-putting I'm going to assume that PC version doesn't have these issues but I can't actually confirm that the world looks decent for the most part and some of the locations look pretty interesting I think tushu is the most interesting location you're going to visit well at least visually navigating through these populated places feels pretty bad in general my biggest problem with the visual design in general is the open areas all of them look extremely generic and lifeless most of these open areas are designed around the quest you have to solve and other than that there is literally nothing interesting to see while exploring them we already touched upon the character models but let's talk a little bit more about it if we try to ignore the fact that you're going to meet the same guy over and over again the character models are not that bad for a 2010 game the faces have a decent amount of detail and the lip syncing is not terrible there is this very annoying visual glitch I guess when it comes to some character models the hair has a very noticeable outline effect that will looks really bad but yeah man I just have to mention this guy again because he ruined the whole game for me he's [ __ ] everywhere most armor pieces in the game have a pretty cool and unique visual design if I had to try really hard to find my most favorite thing about the game I guess that would be it the game does have a day and night cycle which changes the mood a little bit but it's not a huge difference because the lighting in the game is not all the greats every once in a while it's going to start raining and that's pretty much the biggest atmosphere shift which the game can create overall the graphics are not Amazing by any means but it's not the worst thing about the game I will be ready to forgive all the issues with the visuals if the game was actually good the sound design in Arcania is a mixed bag first of all there are sections in the game where music doesn't even play at all for some reason and this happens right from the beginning I had to check the music options in the menu but it was fine the music just didn't play even when it does you're not going to remember any of these tracks because they're really generic foreign this is really disappointing because got the games always had an amazing soundtrack to be fair the main team of the game is pretty decent but that's pretty much it on the other side sound effects are quite decent not Amazing by any means but they're more than serviceable although I do feel like something is missing here Shepard doesn't have any reaction when he gets hit or when he dies in combat it's kind of weird I really like the sound effect when Shepard is moving around there is something satisfying about it it makes you feel like your character has some actual weights foreign goes for most of the sound effects in combats this is another reason why I said that combat had the potential to be really decent the voice acting ranges from decent to pretty bad isn't there any other way to get you out of this cell except for goran's way I can't think of one but if you can why not I'll get you your limbic oh really that's that's wonderful well I can put my pickaxe down and wait till you get back every now and then you're going to hear some solid voice acting but for the most part it's average at best it didn't really bother me a lot to be honest although the better dialogue made it a lot worse yes and yes Arcania will always be a black ship in the gothic series even though it's technically not a got the game anymore sir the studio that developed the game deserves some blame but if you ask me the main culprit was definitely the publisher Joe Woods this was their second chance to make something good out of gothic's Ip and they completely failed their first attempt was with Gothic 3 forsaken God's expansion which was arguably a lot worse than Arcania but that's a topic for another video to put it this way at its best Arcania is a mediocre action adventure and at its worst it's a bad RPG that has very little to do with the original Gothic series if you're not a die-hard fan of Gothic games you might even have some fun with this game but I'm not really sure about that either and if it's not obvious already I wouldn't recommend playing this game at all all but if you're really bored and you want to try it out for some reason you can get it on Gog with my link and support the channel and if you like these kinds of videos pressing the thumbs up button and subscribing to the channel would be wonderful and if you want to go a step further you can become a patreon or a YouTube member get your name immortalized on the end credits and be the first one who finds out about my future projects that will be all and I'll see in the next one thank you foreign

Channel: Click4Gameplay

Views: 77,258

Keywords: why you should not play gothic 4 arcania in 2022 retrospective, gothic 4 arcania review, gothic 4 review, arcania review 2022, gothic 4 in 2022, arcania in 2022, gothic remake, gothic remake review, gothic 3 review 2022, risen review 2022, elex review, elex 2 review 2022, c4g, click4gameplay, c4g review

Id: GdJjv_t80Es

Length: 39min 59sec (2399 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 10 2022