In a season of big releases, this is a thoroughly run of the mill game with some truly disappointing lowlights.
Sometimes a merely adequate game gets released, but you’re still able to draw some fun from it. Maybe it delivers just enough cool stuff to see you through the bad, maybe it’s got a reasonably addictive risk/reward curve going on. At other times, though, that same merely-adequate game will come out in the company of the true gaming elite, and look like a tonne of steaming shit by comparison.
Sadly, Arcania: Gothic 4 has truly drawn the short straw this month. It’s got to try and stand up to the likes of other, better games, but it’s also been released in the company of a truly stellar piece of storytelling and RPG mechanics – Fallout: New Vegas.
It’s a challenge that poor little Arcania is just not up for.
Wait, where’s my RPG?One of the great joys of any competent roleplaying game is creating and defining your character. When someone gets it right, like Bioware or Bethesda, or any of the top-rating MMO studios, character creation becomes an integral part of the pleasure of the game. Watching that newly-forged character grow and then emerge as a hero (or scoundrel) is the main joy in playing this type of game – listen to many gamers talk about their iteration of Commander Shepard, or the way they’ve built their Wasteland Wanderer, and you’ll see what we mean.
And that makes us truly scratch our heads when it comes to the opening codas of Arcania. You see, the game begins with the usual CGI guff about a world in crisis, a new King fighting to reclaims his lands and so on… then you get to play that King in what may or may not be a dream, or an attack on his oddly cavernous throne room by skeletons – it’s kind of hard to tell. As an intro, it’s not bad, and harks back to the opening Vader level of The Force Unleashed – it introduces the game’s mechanics and gives you a taste of the larger plot with a larger-than-life character. Once that sequence is over, it’s straight to the game’s main character: you.
Except, as we quickly found out, you’re bit of a dweeb, and you’ve got very little say in your level of dweebness. There is zero actual character creation, and you only get to start shaping your character as you level up and start spending skill points.
You start out as a shepherd, you see, and the first few quests are all about proving to the father of your girlfriend that you’re a worthy candidate to be her husband and his future son-in-law. You gather a knife from a hidden crypt mysteriously close to the village, scare off a smuggler, and kill a few deer. You do get the odd-sidequest, but to be honest it’s all fiendishly linear and highly boring. Curiously, your village is surrounded by locked gates that consume keys hungrily when you open them, only making the sense of a closed world even more acute.
Now we get that every game needs a highly forgiving starting area where you can learn the ropes, especially in RPGs. But Arcania’s starting area makes a couple of glaring mistakes.
First, you quickly get really tired of the half-arsed voice-work in the game. It’s full of lame British accents and even worse line-readings, and don’t get us started on the execrable screeching pain that comes from the witch who hassles you to kill beetles in her vast underground lair… *shudder*.
Her voice, literally, is like having red hot needles poked in your ears while listening to half-witted cats try to procreate.
Even more infuriating is the growing realisation that you – or, more accurately, your character – is a whining git who’s managed to get his girlfriend pregnant… and even she isn’t particularly likeable!
Sure, the game’s going to take you on some kind of epic story arc, but we have to care enough to keep playing – and Arcania really makes that tough.
Bring me six deer antlers…Screeching witches and unwanted pregnancies aside, the game’s certainly competent enough. The combat is more action than RPG inspired; every swing is capable of hitting any target in range, and the game’s physics engine delivers some very inspiring kills as bodies are flung away from you. Inventory management is kept pretty simple: there’s the option to craft many useful items by discovering the right blue-prints, and a simple skill system to help you advance your character in his chosen fields.
But none of it really stands out – there’s a distinct lack of flavour, and certainly little in the way of real stand-out mechanics or game systems.
Similarly the game engine can best be described as workmanlike. Sure, there are neat options that allow you to change the colour palette to match what kind of mood you want, but outside of that, you can’t even fiddle with anti-aliasing, let alone anisotropic filtering. That’s a particular shame given how much plant detail there is in Arcania’s world – what should be a lush and very immersive environment simply comes out looking like jaggy-world on the jaggiest day of the year.
In the year of the jag!
Arcania would likely be a good game if it were released a four or five years ago, but looked at in the spring of 2010, it seems oddly dated and narrow in focus. It’s an RPG where you have no impact on your character, and it’s a character that’s not particularly likable. We get that the rise to power is even more epic the humbler the beginnings, but this is taking things too far – sure, Luke Skywalker used to hunt womp rats, but we didn’t have to watch him do it!
And we sure don’t want to have to watch too much more of Whiny McShepherd and his annoying girlfriend.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012