joethekoeller said:
Gildan Bladeborn said:
Gothic 3 though... Gothic has pretty much always had horrible combat that I circumvented by finding the cheapest way to exploit it and win forever, but the whole "everything can knock you down, all the time, and you can't really block, whee!" angle was freaking annoying. I loved the music and the sense of exploration as I tooled around the fairly large world, but man was it a ***** getting to the point where I could just toss nearly infinite lightning bolts at entire camps of orcs and win forever (at which point the game became a power trip).
Perhaps in that regard what really fueled my hatred for the game was my perspective on the series and what I drew from the previous games. The combat in former games still used to be dodgy and clunky, but only initially. With more skill points spent on weapon slills, along with your actual mastery the game eased up a great deal about how precise you had to be about combos. Combat was still hit and miss (in the sense that enemies either fell within seconds or beat the crap out of you depending on your performance), but there was at least a clear hierarchy. Enemies from early on cease to be a threat by a certain point, new ones step forth. Those in turn cease to be a threat and so on. Gave this "underdog rising up" feeling. With Gothic 3 that system is completely blown over. Even more so it's actually inverted since the fights you're supposed to fear, like arena champions, are solved with ease just by hammering down the right mouse button, while puny critters will go into killing mood from time to time and floor you just because.
I guess it still isn't technically a bad game, but it takes a very unique perspective to actually derive fun from it.
Ah, well I tend to be a meta-gamer so I would set about the Gothic 2 universe doing things that were absolutely insane and clearly
not intended, because I realized that monsters only ever
respawned between chapters, but you got experience points for killing them each time. I would therefore kill everything I possibly could even while wielding toothpicks and wearing armor made of wet cardboard - surprisingly that's a lot of things. Trolls for example are completely non-threatening once you know that the trick is to get close enough that they go into the "threatening" pose... and then get behind them. Turns out their turning rate is such that you can circle around them constantly, stopping to whack them a few times, and they'll never actually make it around to hit you with their gigantic fists that can send you flying 20 feet or kill you outright depending on how leveled up you are. Take that, giant scary monster who makes the ground shake when he moves!
Ashbeasts? Sneak up on them and do the strafe attack over and over - preferably having saved prior to trying that; you're only dead if they actually get a chance to hit you! And Orcs? I would kill the entire besieging Orc army outside of Old Camp in the mines by "pulling" one of them away from the group and then stand in place while swinging left and right nonstop (otherwise known as "the strafe attack - until you've mastered weapons this is pretty much all you'll ever use") - most of the time they're out of range and you'll be standing there looking silly, but when they try to move forward to attack you'll hit them, almost always without them even scratching you; sure it's cheap but orcs are what, 200xp each, more for elites and shamans[footnote]The trick with THEM is to rush in at an angle and THEN strafe attack forever for the wins.[/footnote]? That adds up!
Of course when you get to the point where you're fighting dragons you have to actually battle, and probably don't even need to bother with the insanely cheap tactics of the meta-gaming bastard[sup]TM[/sup], but that was the experience I brought over from Gothic 2 to 3 and it was
immensely disappointing to find out that melee combat didn't work like that anymore, and pretty much everything could knock you down and then you wouldn't be able to get back up as they continued to wail on you while you sat helpless on the floor, weapon lying out of reach. Even when you got to be "sort of good at it" combat will still be a very risky prospect - it wasn't until I got the training that let me regenerate mana and "infinite lightning bolts" became a reality that I had to stop really worrying about the fights I picked and could start enjoying them.
The meteor spell
almost made all that earlier nonsense worth it - if the animation didn't effectively limit it to a one shot deal against groups of enemies that were out of reach or otherwise occupied with fighting people who were not you (getting interrupted while casting spells sucks so hard) before all the other nearby enemies got too nearby for you to cast it anymore, I would have used that and nothing else for the end-game assaults on cities; smiting things with fire from the heavens is freaking hilarious.