Empire of the Iguanadons

Thirty years have passed since the Nameless One liberated the land of Myrtana and drove the orcs into submission. King Rhobar has solidified his hold on the continent and has begun waging war to reconquer the Southern Isles. One morning, you waken from a strange dream, where once again you saw yourself as the king, fighting the demons in his own mind. As the day starts and you go about your business, folks begin to take notice of a Myrtanan warship on the horizon. However, your fellow villagers have other plans, for you are soon to marry your life long love, Ivy. While performing the tasks her father wants completed before giving his approval, you emerge from a cave to find your entire village has been burned to the ground. Ivy and everyone else lie dead at your feet. Vengeance shall be yours upon Rhobar for this treachery!

(Look Dwip, I used a jump!)

While still tied in to the basic lore of the Gothic universe, Arcania is a self contained story with no ties in to the previous games. You still have the basic deity system with Innos, Beliar, and Adanos, however they do not play any significant role here. You play the game through as another nameless hero, but are not tied to the original from Gothic 1-3. Old friends from the previous games will make appearances as you progress, but your character only knows one of them: Diego, the thief/brigand/mercenary you first meet in the opening portion of Gothic 1 and who you encounter on a regular basis in every game since then.

Arcania takes place initially in the fishing village of Feshyr, which is your home. After it's destruction by the Myrtanan armies, the action shifts to the nearby larger island of Argaan. Argaan is part of the even larger island chain known as the Southern Isles, last hinted at during the events of Gothic 2. Upon your arrival on Argaan, your main goal is to locate an ancient temple where a powerful weapon can be forged which will then enable you to take your revenge for the slaughter of your people. Along the way you will undertake a number of important quests, and plenty of not so important quests. Not all of the side quests have importance to your progress in the main story, and several have more than one solution. Most of them are at least interesting, though there are also quite a few that barely qualify as FedEx quests.

Locations throughout the game vary widely and are all well thought out and detailed. Everything from the small inn pictured with this post, The Cleaved Maiden, to the large outcropping where the ancient monastery is located. There are lush farmlands, forests, swamps, jungles, gorges made from black obsidian, and even grand cities built overlooking the sea. There are plenty of mines, caves, lairs, and other underground wonders to see as well, though the underground is far more limited in scope than the surface. For good measure, there are also lots of ancient ruins from a mysterious and long dead society to plunder.

Someone learned their lessons well from my previous experiences with the combat system. Engaging your foes is a much smoother and far less irritating thing to do now. Melee attacks are well executed, and even archery is easy to get the hang of. However, as with other games in the series, action inevitably boils down to how good you are with magic, and one big flaw I see with Arcania is that somewhere around the halfway point you'll find yourself using magic almost exclusively. Perhaps they went a bit too far and made things too easy? Who knows, but at least you won't be spending time cursing the game at every turn with as much stuff as there is to fight. And there's plenty.

All of the same basic creatures are back. Scavengers, lurkers, swamp sharks, those annoying fly things, wolves, boars, goblins (so many goblins), orcs, and of course hostile humanoids too. Some new ones make an appearance as well, mostly in the form of demons and golems. Though in the end there's not going to be much you haven't seen before if you've played other games. Do mind the trolls and shadowbeasts though, they pack a serious punch.

Inventory management is easy to get the hang of. You have several categories of "stuff" - melee weapons, ranged weapons, armor, quest items, ingredients, and scrolls. There's no end to the variety of things you can find, but there are some things you will only find once. The main reason for the unique items is because you can use them in the crafting system. Along the way, you'll find scrolls which teach crafting. With these crafting plans, and enough ingredients to assemble them, you can create everything from simple potions to elaborate weapons requiring multiple parts. It's a pretty nifty thing, but in the end serves as little more than a way to drain off item slots. Gold will be of limited value past the first 1/3 of the game since you'll end up spending more and more time underground with no opportunity to actually spend it. You'll make so much selling your looted goods by that point that it ends up being a status symbol and nothing more. Which I suppose is typical of most RPGs.

Skill management is relatively simple. You have basic melee, archery, stealth, and magic skills to assign points to. As you progress in experience points, you get to assign 3 points at each level up to whichever skills you want. You would do well to note that trying to become a jack-of-all-trades does not work. You must specialize in something. For me, my play style started off melee heavy, but as explained above, I quickly realized magic was the way to go. With three different types, a quick bit of experimentation showed fire magic to be the most effective so I poured most of my advancement points into that. Perhaps those who prefer archery could do something with that. One thing you should not bother with though is stealth. You'll see why when it comes to AI.

The game breaks down badly when it comes to NPCs. Most of them adhere to very loose AI schedules. Nearly all of the non-plot related ones won't even speak to you if you try. Some barely even manage generic one-offs. They perform only the most basic routines. During the day, they hang around inns and taverns, at night they sleep. That's about the extent of it. To be fair, this is really no different than past Gothic games, but given that this is now 2010 and we judge NPCs by a higher standard, these guys could do much MUCH better. Even the plot related NPCs do nothing more than a minimalistic routine and once any quests they have are over, you can't tell them apart from the average bozos.

Things break down even further on the AI front when you consider that every container is lootable and there are no penalties for openly stealing from them. Considering all past games in this series imposed harsh penalties if caught, this is a real disappointment. It effectively hands you tons and tons of stuff, most of which you won't really end up using, and treats the entire world as though it doesn't matter. Once more, this is 2010, we expect better. Of particular note, you can't even attack an NPC that isn't already hostile to you.

Graphics are somewhat dated, as you can probably see in the accompanying image. NPCs don't look especially great, though they do have a much wider variety than expected. Landscape and terrain is definitely showing its age though. Almost as though the company took a step backward in terms of quality. However, on balance, the game does look quite good over all. They have LOD handling down cold. No bright line between "this is far away" and "this is up close", rather they have a progressive level of detail that gets better the closer you are to something. All locations in the game are visible from extreme distance, when the opportunity arises it's quite a sight. They could have done better on plants and trees, a lot of them look worse off than games made in 2005. Most of them will fade from view entirely if you get too close. Lighting is top notch, you don't get bleeding through walls or have shadows that fall on the underside of the floor. The sun fades from sight when you're indoors, and when there's bad weather about, it stays outside where it belongs too. The best part of the system is, there are no loading screens during normal wandering, ever. Not even when going underground. Everything is seamless. Bethesda, are you paying attention?

There's a pretty nasty collision detection system in use. One that's bad enough you can get stuck on it easily if you're climbing around. Be careful near cliffs as a result. I had one rather frustrating incident where I got stuck, the game started moving me along automatically, only to realize it bugged. I popped off the side of the cliff, over the ocean, and fell to my untimely death - before I even hit the water. It wouldn't have mattered anyway, you can't swim in the water at all.

Sound and music quality are nothing short of excellent. The game's soundtrack blends in nicely and helps with the atmosphere of every location you're in. Audio effects fit well, and there were no noticeable issues. Everything sounded nice and crips and clean. Speech volume seemed a bit low at times, but over all was loud enough and clear enough to be able to sideline the subtitles. There were some repetative voiceovers, but nowhere near the ridiculousness of some other games. You can go quite some time before wondering if you've heard the same guy speak before.

There's been some talk around in various places about how there's been a butcher job done on previous lore. I may not be as familiar with it as a lot of people, but in playing the game I didn't notice anything glaringly out of place. All of the fundamentals were sound. I dno't expect there to be a clear association with the events on the mainland since this is an isolated area of the game world which is expected to have its own culture. It doesn't bother me in the least that you're not the same guy from the previous set of games. If you were, there'd be some HUGE explaining to be done to justify that. I don't think there's any real issue here. Unless of course folks were referring to the ending - I'll say only that it left me scratching my head wondering what it was all about.

Over all, I think most people who are into RPGs will enjoy Arcania. It has a lot to offer, and although it is somewhat shorter than other games, it was very enjoyable. I also smell a sequel, or at least some DLC, in the future.
.........................
RIP United States of America

July 1776 - November 2012.

Well, of course, and likewise when one first visits a site like TES Nexus, one certainly expects that the site really has just shy of 2 million members, and even initially looking at their stats one is left to just assume that only ~20k of those are actually active on a daily basis, not that only about 25-30k of them are even non-banned accounts.

Lately, on my family site I've grown to 61 members but the 16 most recent sign-ups were all unapproved for membership because their accounts appear to be spammers. I haven't actually banned any of them, but I also haven't given them actual access to most of the site either. Should QSFP not count them in the member count?

It should count them in the raw count as long as the accounts are still there, but when you take those numbers and try to use them to inflate the userbase of your site beyond what it really is in an effort to get advertisers to pay you that's quite another thing entirely.

Do you think tesnexus is actually doing that though?

Well when Darkone goes around trumpeting that he's got 2 million members without qualifying that a large percentage are inactive, banned, or bots, I'd say they are. Their software is certainly reporting the raw numbers. See "Our Board Statistics" at the bottom of the forum homepage.

Well, yeah, I can see where that'd certainly be a question of integrity, but you'd think potential advertisers considering paying him would review his membership roster better than just a quick glance at the board overall statistics page. Maybe not.