Gothic, Risen... ELEX

Just started playing this over the long weekend and I’m loving it (long time PB fan, Risen 1 being my favorite). It looks great for a Gothic/Risen game, but man, that voice “acting”. Thankfully there’s a slider to kill the voice volume. Enable subtitles and you are good to go.

It’s not all terrible, unless you hate the main guy. Some of it’s fine!

Who is more boringly manly? Jax or Commander Shepard?

Weapon upgrades will go a very long way. Armor is flat damage reduction. I think this, more than hp pools, is what makes the early game so tough. I really wish they would have given the first level of the melee/ranged attack skills a flat damage bonus. Like +5-10. It would have really helped people.

I’d like to give a shout out to the developers for keeping the tradition of stun lock alive in their games. Grenade launches? Flame throwers? Shooting both through walls while you can’t shoot back, and you get stun locked on the floor until you die? Standard quality gaming.

Just finished this game. An enjoyable game, but the main quest toward the end was kind of dumb, and involved a lot of shooting.

I enjoyed ELEX more than any other recent open world game such as Fallout 4, Shadow of War or AC Origins.

I liked that the world is large but dangerous, that the map isn’t littered with ‘activities’, question marks, special events and whatnot. I liked that you can sneak and steal. I disliked the melee combat at first but I found it passable by the end of the game. The quests were ok, some companions were interesting (particularly the robot).

I didn’t like the ranged combat which is totally unbalanced towards the end. I didn’t like that the game felt clunky sometimes. The heavy sci fi bit, particularly towards the end, was not interesting. They should’ve made ‘futuristic’ technology more mysterious and much harder to acquire/use/understand. In example, the approach of Mark Lawrence in his Broken Empire/Red Queen War books.

Overall, the game is a rough gem but a gem nonetheless of a higher quality than some of the trashy open wolrd RPG’s the industry has been churning out lately.

First big patch - Some sliders to control stamina cost, flamethrower toned down, chasing monsters give up sooner…

Some graphical improvements scattered through there too:

  • Added FXAA T2x and SMAA T2x anti-aliasing techniques
  • Weather and lighting improvements
  • Many mesh and texture reworks and improvements
    and…
  • Female body parts now behave correctly during dialogs

Nooooooooooooooooooooo!

Looks like they also added a cooldown on the flamethrower single shot, and nerfed the blast damage from it too. Probably sensible since it was one of the most effective weapons in the game once you got it, and you could stunlock really big, powerful enemies to death with it. If you were travelling with the Cleric companion it was even more cheesy since he carries a flamethrower too.

Oh, and the sunglasses no longer give a massive armour bonus.

Also, it should perhaps be noted that this is currently 33% off on Origin (through January 5).

Perhaps incoming Steam sale at similar rates?

And if someone wants to give money to friendly swedes over corporate overlords at EA, gamersgate are also having a sale:

https://www.gamersgate.com/DD-ELEX/elex

edit - fanatical.com have it even cheaper for 30 euros (with WINTER10 code)

Which means that I am finally going to buy it. The patch sounds great!

Having three ambitious european open world RPGs so close together (Elex, Kingdom Come, Vampyr) is a treat!

Also $33.49 in the Steam sale.

I’m playing this! I’m liking it (I’m 15 hours in), and I have to clarify it’s my first PB game. Yeah, I always wanted to play Gothic 2 but I’ve never done it.

Obviously it’s a game full of jank and some low-ish production values. In some regards it’s like a game from 8-10 years ago or so. I didn’t have any broken quest nor any CTD, but I had people and enemies stuck in the terrain and I have problems with the HDR (some dialogue moments were impossible to see lol) in the interior areas.
And that’s not entering in discussing the animations, the combat, the facial expressions, etc. Clunkiness everywhere.

Graphically the game is acceptable, some times it’s even pretty!, and it performs well, but artistically the game is very bad/mediocre. There is no unified art direction, lots of times it feels like you are in a random outdoors zone with some trees and some rocks, and an abandoned house or a rusty car to remind you it’s post-apocaliptic, but it doesn’t really transmit the impression of being a post-apocaliptic setting like Fallout or Mad Max. Things are… just there, it’s all very generic and non-descript. You can be in a forest but you don’t feel being in a forest with personality, or of a specific type, it’s just a bunch of trees and shrub thrown together. This philosophy extends to the enemies. There are some reavers, some humanoid mutants, ok… some mutated spiders, ok… and then there are raptors? and demons with wings? And more weird stuff? It feels slapdash.

Of course, the whole setting is kind of generic and nondescript, with the mishmash of medieval fantasy + post apoc scifi they’ve done.

The difficulty feels like they went too hard in making a ‘harsh world’. I’m advancing, I think I’m level 11 right now so I’m not getting stuck, in normal difficulty. But after all this time I still can’t advance in 50% of the initial green area, as it’s full of skull enemies. In the end more than harsh, it feels just restrictive in how to play and the order of the quests to do, and the only thing it makes you do is save-scumming more, and cheesing some encounters. It makes for a slow first 12 hours of the game.

Voice acting isn’t as bad as I feared. I’m speaking of course of the voice of npcs, the MC is horrible. What a bad idea for the protagonist, it really gives a bad first impression to the players when they start the game. Yeah, I know it’s explained by the backstory, but still a choice so bad they should have modified the backstory to not have that voice.

The UI has some problems (why backspace and no esc to go back, backspace isn’t close to the fingers!), and I don’t like how you have to change amulets depending of what you gonna do (I have a combat amulet, a xp one when I’m going to complete a quest, a thief one, etc).

You may be wandering why the hell I said I liked the game, if most I’ve written are the flaws. Well, I am liking what is the core of the game: exploring, questing, progressing my character.

The progression is slow but rewarding, bit a bit you are able to deal with enemies that before would kill you in one hit with some problems, and eventually they won’t suppose a real problem.

The world is big (but not pointlessly huge), varied, and even if I criticized the art aspect, from a gameplay perspective is good, for example in the how it uses the verticality, how the the exploration feels rewarding in this harsh world, how the quests are distributed over it, and how it feels integrated with the setting.

The quests are good, nothing spectacular after having F:NV or TW3, but they have a fair amount of greyness in their stories, sometimes with a twist, or with a pair of alternative solutions. They have a bit of sense of realism in them, people can lie to you, or there could be unintended consequences for some of your actions, or your reputation could spread in some things you thought they didn’t have any effect.

The setting is… interesting. It has some parts that are generic, but overall I like how the factions are portrayed, where most of them are varying degrees of asshole-ism and self-interest. They are just groups with distinct ideologies and of course every faction believes is better than the rest and it’s interested in their own betterment. I like how the narrative about every faction changes depending who you talk to, making you doubt and reorient your perspective on what you know of each faction.

This was my favorite part of Elex. Yup, blocked off ever joining the berserkers…

Yay. I felt the mishmash feeling went away after a while, as I got my head more around how the areas fit together. Don’t feel you have to ‘clear’ the forest area before moving on! I found easier quests everywhere and let that motivate my explorations.

(Not sure if you noticed RMB brings you back one step in the UI. You shouldn’t have to use Backspace.)

I cannot wrap my head around you never playing a PB game. That just does not compute.

Heh heh, yeah, it’s the kind of thing that sometimes happens. You heard of the games, everyone says they were good, but I missed the release window at the time, and in the later years I delayed and delayed the time to play them. I don’t know if at this point it’s too late.


Returning to Elex. I like that despite their hardcoreness in several areas, they have kept the inventory management nonsense at a minimum: there are no inventory limits, be space or weight, and weapons doesn’t have durability stat or any other similar mechanic.

And I was playing more today, purely exploring, I was thinking what it is, perhaps, the biggest flaw of the game: the unresponsive, slow, sucky movement with locked animations and bad physics . The environment of the game is pretty rugged, lots of rocks, uneven terrain, debris, small cliffs, etc, so it’s a fucking pain in the ass to move from A to B lots of times, you get stuck in places, in others the climbing animation fails, your movement gets stopped in weird ways, and you are slow in getting speed again by running, the sprint sometimes doesn’t work, you can use the jetpack but it’s perhaps too vertical to use it as true traversal methd. In other words, it sucks.

I don’t know why after all these RPGs with clunky controls/movement/combat (because I know all of them have this flaw), they haven’t said to themselves “ok, this time let’s start doing player movement and combat, and when it feels good, then we start the real development of the game”.

You should still go back to Gothic 1 and 2 with expansion. They are so good atmosphere-wise…unforgettable. I know, backlogs are infinite :(