Hall of Classics: Gothic

The history of video games is littered with great but flawed projects. Perhaps no time embodied this fact more than the recent turn of the century. Between 1998 and 2003, new technology and a lot of good ideas got lost in hardware limitations and bad engineering decisions. The finest example of this exciting but troubled time is an action RPG called Gothic.

Developed over a ridiculously long period of time by a German company called Piranha Bytes, Gothic sought to completely reinvent role playing games as we know them. To that effect, it pretty much did. Aside from a few glaring technical issues, the game is one of the most immersive, impressive products in the industry. Players take one of those typical nameless heroes on a series of quests in a gigantic, fully-explorable world. The entire map has all of two loading screens, meaning that players can hike around the lush landscape for hours without ever having to pause.

The environments are really what make Gothic and its sequels so amazing. Even if a player pursues every little available quest (and there are a huge number of those), there are still some areas that would remain untouched. There are certainly rewards for going off the path, along with some pretty nasty monsters. There's just something great about a game that allows you to climb a mountain just because it's there.

Another high point and innovative development in Gothic is your character's ability to solve the same problem in many different ways. It's often more rewarding to use a combination of diplomacy, stealth and bargaining to navigate a touchy situation than it is to use violence.

Of course, that leads us to the main problem with every game in the Gothic series. The combat system is hopelessly broken. It basically applies the Resident Evil model to melee combat, forcing your character to slowly swing a sword through some really awful hit detection. Animals and monsters, which make up the majority of the game's battles, can't be blocked or parried, so fighting with them amounts to a lot of running around and wild flailing. The only enemy that can take damage is the one the player is currently targeting, so facing multiple enemies is pretty hopeless. Gothic offsets this problem by creating armor that essentially eliminates any damage taken from certain kinds of enemies, but that removes the player from an otherwise immersive environment.

Gothic II was made not even a year after the original's release, so it used the same engine and thus the same horrible combat system. What's utterly confounding is why Piranha Bytes decided to carry it over to Gothic 3 nearly six years later. This is why the series has been overshadowed by similar products like Oblivion or just about any MMO on the market. Gothic and its sequels are nothing short of revolutionary in every way except the hack-and-slash element; from the giant, detailed game world, to the useful and organic job/skill system, to the complex dialog trees.

Since 2007 there has been talk of a fourth game in the Gothic series, but publisher JoWood Studios isn't using Piranha Bytes as the developer. Instead, Spellbound Entertainment has been commissioned with creating Arcania: A Gothic Tale. It looks like a gorgeous game so far and hopefully the bugs and mechanical issues will finally be worked out, though without dumbing-down the rest of the game. Still, for all their problems the games in the Gothic series are well worth checking out. Few RPGs are as engrossing.