Gothic, Risen... ELEX

I only played a couple hours, taking it slow as usual, up to where Duras lead me to the Berserker camp entrance. We went by way of the old ruins, my bravery impressed him mightily.

It’s good, exactly what I was expecting. Graphics, animation, dialogue, voicework, is all serviceable. Not great, but small-German-studio fine, expectations sufficiently tempered. Runs really well on my setup, playing with controller (which also nicely supports dynamic switching to mouse/keys, changing the UI whenever you use one or the other).

Pretty much everything @ImaTarget said here is spot on for me, for the PC version at least.

I find it kind of endearing. There’s so much good voice acting these days that something like Elex really stands out. It just feels so retro to have such godawful line readings. Even just the main dude’s stilted Vin Diesel growl is absurd.

Alternatively, maybe the meteor apocalypse wiped out people’s capacity to speak naturally. Like high technology, it was lost in the ruins.

-Tom

The EG review is pretty balanced (PC version)

The game seems low budget. There is certainly charm and soul there, but you have to dig through the dirt to get to it.

I say this as a huge fan of gothic 2 and a mild fan of Risen.

Also, i am 99% sure they wrote the lore that the main character’s people have no emotion because the voice actor was so lifeless, NOT the other way around. The voice acting is just another area where the game feel low budget.

I don’t regret buying it for $45, but I really wish they had just a bit more budget to really polish this game and make it a truly great, AAA game.

It’s certainly low budget b-grade non-SAG-AFTRA stuff here… but compared to the dialogue and acting work done by fellow German studio Egosoft on X Rebirth, it’s almost Oscar-worthy. ;)

“Show me your wares, pleeeease”

I wish there was a lot more UI polish. For example, someone wanted me to buy them a beer. It started at 65 beers to buy in the vendor UI. I could not type in a value, nor did it wrap from 65 to 1. I had to hit the back button 64 times. I would also like to be able to skip dialog, esp when I have heard it before. I also am annoyed by the berserkers yelling at me every time I pull my map out.

I am playing with keyboard and mouse. I can’t imagine playing it with a controller, because I can’t aim with controllers very well. I still have my starting bow/axe and can’t afford to buy anything other than some more arrows. I find myself avoiding monsters mostly because all these quests will just kick my ass. I am still trying to join the berzerker faction and I hope to god that I will get an offensive magic spell once I do. I have not seen any vendors selling spells which I worrisome. Maybe I should join the clerics so I can get a plasma rifle. I can’t deal with melee in this game.

Right click skips dialog doesn’t it?

I dunno. I know I tried left click, space bar, and ESC. Maybe I didn’t try right click. It would be nice if this game gave you tutorial prompts for this kind of thing.

Right click also gets you back from menus, while escape goes all the way back into the game, which would be ok if I could remember it.

About the game as a whole, too soon to say for me. I’m a little disappointed that the landscape though large, is not ultra interesting. Goliet seems about 10 times the size of the Gothic 3 towns, with the same amount of content.

In my memory G3 might actually have looked a little better, by being less ‘sparse’.

I like the main plot. I prefer it to any of the US RPG storylines. Early days. We’ll see :)

Edited with daytime G3 screenshot :)

You can hold left/right in trade interfaces rather than clicking arrows, it goes faster. You can skip dialogue, with controller it’s B (the standard ‘cancel’ button).


Whoever made those water splash effects on the waterfall needs to do another pass. Or maybe they're bugged and just too small? Either way...shudder. But I do really like the way they did water flow in this game, looks nice.

OMG, @rhamorim! I could have went without hearing that again; and yes now I keep hearing it in my head, over and over…

Honestly, the game is pretty neat thus far, even if much of it feels dated and wonky.

The world is big. Like, it feels really big. The RPG elements seem kind of neat, but I’ve only unlocked a tiny handful of stuff.

Combat is not terrible, but also not really good. In some ways it’s better than most of Bethesda’s offerings? But far worse than Witcher 3, or Dark Souls.

One thing that is kind of rough, although perhaps this also fits into the category of endearingly old-school… Enemy difficulty is all over the place, and you are actually led into areas that seem like the fights are literally impossible. Meaning, there are quests you get within an hour of starting the game, which puts you in situations where you seemingly have to fight enemies who are impossible for you to even dent, while one-shotting you.

Likewise, you’ll be just walking through the wilderness, maybe a hundred yards from the city you start in, and get jumped by the same kind of one-shotting death monsters whose level is far enough over yours that they have little skulls (which apparently mean they are going to one-shot you).

The jet-pack is kind of cool though, albeit also wonky like everything else.

Honestly, the game feels EXTREMELY similar to Fallout III.

I’ve played all of the gothic and risen games, but for some reason I’m finding the combat especially difficult (playing on normal). Almost all of the quests I have take me into areas where things can 1 or 2 shot me. The only chance I have at winning fights is jetpack hover and use the bow, hoping it dies before I run out of charge (if you engage the jetpack then hold aim - rt click - you will jetpack hover like mass effect andromeda).

Also, there’s a very weird glitch when I talk to female characters… it always looks like there may be a pack of mice running around inside their bra. Boobs just constantly wiggling in every direction.

I apologize, but I felt like I had to share that pain. ;)

I would argue in the strongest possible terms that this is working as intended, and does not require a fix.

A lot of the bugs remind me of Elder Scrolls Oblivion… with stuff like, you’re talking to an NPC and then some other NPC just rams right up against you during the conversation.

Tell me about it. I am trying to do missions by avoiding monsters or by training monsters on other monsters. I do not know if this is what is intended or not. Like there is one area with a troll. Then there is a nearby area with a bunch of bandits, one of which will insta kill me. My strategy is to shoot a bandit, thus pulling the camp., Run to the troll, then jetpack out of range and get the bandit camp to engage the troll while I run away.

I get zero xp out of this, but at least my path is no longer blocked.

I still have very little money even though I am level 5 now. I could only afford to train 1 skill so far and absolutely can not afford any better gear, which I could not even equip if I could buy it due to stat requirements.

Does anyone know what this whole “cold” thing is? It seems to randomly say I am more cold or less cold. It has nothing to do with standing near fires or anything like that. I think its some kind of karma measurement, but so far I am not seeing a sensible pattern.

The thing that kills me is that mission where they’re like, “Go get some parts from the converter.” You get this mission from like, the 4th person you meet in the game.

You go there, and there’s some weak dude who cries about how the mutants are always showing up and he’s too weak. Ok, whatever. You’re tough and will deal with it.

You go there, and instead, there are two infinity level dudes in crazy power armor with laser rifles and some kind of turbo-death-hammers. Better yet? The encounter is started by a cutscene, where you cannot sneak up on them or around them, but instead has your dude walking right up to them. Cut scene ends and they are already on top of you. They one-shot you. Indeed, either ONE of them would be too tough for you to take on, but hey, here’s two of them.

It’s not some huge deal I guess, I just said, “F that S” and I’ll come back later at some point. But it’s kind of needlessly fucked up, since you are specifically directed to go there at a point where there is really no chance you could survive the encounter.

Oh, another great thing… periodically you get in duels with NPC’s. These are triggered by the end of a conversation.

How this goes down is that you are talking to them, and thus you are about 1 foot from them, with your hands empty. As soon as the conversation ends, the NPC’s always pull out a sword and immediately attack you. Like, IMMEDIATELY. You don’t have your weapons out, and you are right in their face… so this normally ends with you taking a large chunk of damage immediately.

Bear in mind, even with all this, I’m still digging the game. It’s still fun to run around and explore.

It’s just that the game is not super friendly to the player.

Yeah, it’s a karma system. “Cold” seems to be a measure of how evil/emotionless you are.

There are specific skills you can get, which give you bonuses if your cold level is in a certain range.

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