Why can no one write a good PC RPG anymore?
I rarely play video games any more. And I'm starting to realize it has nothing to do with age or a change in tastes. I keep coming back for more, I'm just disappointed every time. And should I actually find a tantalizing game it is marred by an insurmountable volume of flaws. Honestly, I still haven't cancelled my WoW account, solely on the basis that I still haven't found anything better. I don't play anymore. I just keep it around as a placeholder. Diablo 2 and Total Annihilation, games from god only knows how long ago occupy the next 2 spots.
Anyway, one of my last bastions for a while was a game series that always held the #4 spot. The Gothic series. I had loved gothic 1 and 2 back in the day. Gotihc 3 came out and I got it as a gift. But at the time my computer was mediocre, it ran like crap and I expected it. The game looked amazing, just couldn't get anywhere with it with the performance I was getting out of it. A put it aside and a few months later built a better PC. Eventually got around to re-installing it and it STILL ran like crap. In fact it probably ran exactly as bad as it had originally. I uninstalled it and went on my merry way. A while after that I discovered a community patch had fixed a lot. I loaded it up and finally could get the game running at reasonable frame rates, but even then there was an ini that needed to be tweaked to get the most out of the game and I spent more time playing with that than the game itself and eventually removed it again.
Then came Dragon Age. Game was somewhat boring, but biggest issue was 2 things, without which I probably could played it to the end at least once. First was a memory leak. I have 8 gigs of RAM and after 20 minutes I would need to close the game and re-open it, clearly no one QA'd the PC version. They finally released a patch which is supposed to fix it, but it took so long for them to deliver I had already given up on the game, I may go back one day, but I may not. The game was months old when I bought it and it was months after that that the patch was released. BioWare clearly doesn't give a rats ass, so neither do I at the moment.
The other element was game difficulty which bounced between trivial and impossible. This wouldn't be so bad, except that you could experience both extremes in the same area. The point at which I had given up the game was a quest I had started where I run off into the woods, I kill a small army of trivially easy enemies, to end up in an underground system of some sort. There was an irritating dragon which represented the only challenge in the game which was neither trivial nor impossible, and then you waltz into a room where a fight erupts between several large trees, some wolves and the locals. I think the best I did in the 20 times I attempted it was to kill ONE of the probably 7-10 enemies I needed to take down. AND I HAD HELP!!!! One of the factions in the battle is on my side attacking the other, and the best I could muster was 1 dead guy. This wasn't like the dragon fight where I could try and learn and with a bit of luck get past. If I get incredibly lucky I may one day kill 2 of those buggers. And I thought I was being smart and saving the game often, but now all I have is a saved game where I load right into the beginning of this impossible battle. I might have saved further back if the somewhat trivial fights hadn't led me to believe I could actually finish the damn quest at my level. So I can load a game I don't care about and lose hours of progress, load a game and die in 2 minutes or start all over again.
So, recently they came out with Gothic 4. I thought I would give it another shot. The reviews were terrible, the game has no plot and is too easy were the complaints so I thought would at least give it a chance. The game has difficulty settings and I've never cared too much about plot in a video game. I use them to kill time. I download it, and similar problems to the above 2 in terms of performance, it isn't a memory leak and the game isn't just working its hardest to rape my system... this is a fun new kind of fun... it only uses 1 core of my CPU and the memory usage never exceeds about 900MB. My shiny new GTX460 which isn't even top of the line isn't even humming. I hit terrible performance without ever hitting the limits of my hardware. As the reviews suggest, the game isn't a gem to begin with. Again there is a config file I can muck about with, but most changes don't actually appear to have any impact at all. The few settings that appear to affect performance, make it a little better, but they have their limits. For the most they involve cranking allocated memory for different processes in the application, but since the game never takes more than 900 megs, there is a limit and I have probably already hit it.
I've got the game to a point where most times it is playable, but there are still regular slow downs and they usually happen when you need to do something, like kill someone. This is hardly problematic however, the game is just way too easy. Typically I start a game on easy to see if I would even like it. After the reviews I decided to start this one on normal... if the baddies were even 4 times harder I would still be able to plow through most of what I've seen so far the first time around. I've only died because I simply don't even bother to avoid the "powerful" attacks anymore. The autosave kicks in often enough that I don't typically have to run far to attempt to overpower a group without any tact a second time, and even without really adjusting my strategy I still haven't hit a battle I had to fight more than one extra time (that said I think I've only died twice in about 6 hours of recklessly running into every fight possible).
Then there is the game economy, the 2 black smithing scrolls I've seen so far cost 2500 and 5000 gold. I have bought NOTHING so far, played for 6 hours and have a whopping 300 gold, I don't expect to be rich, but after saving up all of my money through 3 zones, I would expect to be able to afford more than 3 healing potions (really!!! they cost 100 each). Know why it is so bad? Because the weapons that drop off enemies are worth between 1-20 gold with most tending toward the 1. That means that the blacksmith values that scroll at the cost of well over a thousand blades. That profiteering jerk could supply an army based on the number of weapons I would need to trade in just to buy the cheap one. I need to kill probably 50 enemies and steal all of their gear to afford 1 healing potion. I suppose that should be an indicator of the games level of challenge. If potions are so damn expensive I should expect not to need them... and I don't really.
Also, I can't seem to buy armor, I appear to get it at predetermined points in the game, I started off in one set of armor, then when my village was burned I pop into the next scene with new armor, then I'm handed armor when I kill the rebel leader, at which point I've already done everything in this zone and am forced to move onto the next zone, (which by the way I wasn't even able to gain access to until I completed that quest). Why bother giving me new armor at all? Why not just make the monsters do the same amount of damage in every zone? Or simply have their damage scale with their level? There were 3 options this last time, but based on what you are doing melee, ranged or magic EVERYONE at EVERY point in the game will be wearing the EXACT SAME ARMOR. Maybe this changes as the game progresses but at present I find this ridiculous. In the other Gothic games, yes there was armor that could only be acquired by working your way up inside a given faction, but the world was more open and I could venture, if I chose into uncharted territory without ever having the chance to acquire fancy paladin gear, or while I couldn't get the good stuff without completing quests I could still scrounge around for enough money to buy some intermediate quality gear off vendors.
I may go back to Gothic 3 in the meantime. I found a preconfigured INI file for ludicrous settings which are too high for my PC, but not by much. Thinking if I can scale a few settings back, 5 years after the game was released it might actually be playable. Also, there is a project in the works to "make the story better". So I can play it twice :)
But all in all. I'm just frustrated. Games shouldn't come out this broken to begin with, and should something slip through the cracks it shouldn't take this long to fix. It was months (perhaps over a year) before Bioware fixed their horrible memory leak, Gothic 3 took years and it was actually fixed by the community and not the company that released it. How long until Gothic 4 is playable? And then how long until someone fixes the game?
RARG!
Anyway, one of my last bastions for a while was a game series that always held the #4 spot. The Gothic series. I had loved gothic 1 and 2 back in the day. Gotihc 3 came out and I got it as a gift. But at the time my computer was mediocre, it ran like crap and I expected it. The game looked amazing, just couldn't get anywhere with it with the performance I was getting out of it. A put it aside and a few months later built a better PC. Eventually got around to re-installing it and it STILL ran like crap. In fact it probably ran exactly as bad as it had originally. I uninstalled it and went on my merry way. A while after that I discovered a community patch had fixed a lot. I loaded it up and finally could get the game running at reasonable frame rates, but even then there was an ini that needed to be tweaked to get the most out of the game and I spent more time playing with that than the game itself and eventually removed it again.
Then came Dragon Age. Game was somewhat boring, but biggest issue was 2 things, without which I probably could played it to the end at least once. First was a memory leak. I have 8 gigs of RAM and after 20 minutes I would need to close the game and re-open it, clearly no one QA'd the PC version. They finally released a patch which is supposed to fix it, but it took so long for them to deliver I had already given up on the game, I may go back one day, but I may not. The game was months old when I bought it and it was months after that that the patch was released. BioWare clearly doesn't give a rats ass, so neither do I at the moment.
The other element was game difficulty which bounced between trivial and impossible. This wouldn't be so bad, except that you could experience both extremes in the same area. The point at which I had given up the game was a quest I had started where I run off into the woods, I kill a small army of trivially easy enemies, to end up in an underground system of some sort. There was an irritating dragon which represented the only challenge in the game which was neither trivial nor impossible, and then you waltz into a room where a fight erupts between several large trees, some wolves and the locals. I think the best I did in the 20 times I attempted it was to kill ONE of the probably 7-10 enemies I needed to take down. AND I HAD HELP!!!! One of the factions in the battle is on my side attacking the other, and the best I could muster was 1 dead guy. This wasn't like the dragon fight where I could try and learn and with a bit of luck get past. If I get incredibly lucky I may one day kill 2 of those buggers. And I thought I was being smart and saving the game often, but now all I have is a saved game where I load right into the beginning of this impossible battle. I might have saved further back if the somewhat trivial fights hadn't led me to believe I could actually finish the damn quest at my level. So I can load a game I don't care about and lose hours of progress, load a game and die in 2 minutes or start all over again.
So, recently they came out with Gothic 4. I thought I would give it another shot. The reviews were terrible, the game has no plot and is too easy were the complaints so I thought would at least give it a chance. The game has difficulty settings and I've never cared too much about plot in a video game. I use them to kill time. I download it, and similar problems to the above 2 in terms of performance, it isn't a memory leak and the game isn't just working its hardest to rape my system... this is a fun new kind of fun... it only uses 1 core of my CPU and the memory usage never exceeds about 900MB. My shiny new GTX460 which isn't even top of the line isn't even humming. I hit terrible performance without ever hitting the limits of my hardware. As the reviews suggest, the game isn't a gem to begin with. Again there is a config file I can muck about with, but most changes don't actually appear to have any impact at all. The few settings that appear to affect performance, make it a little better, but they have their limits. For the most they involve cranking allocated memory for different processes in the application, but since the game never takes more than 900 megs, there is a limit and I have probably already hit it.
I've got the game to a point where most times it is playable, but there are still regular slow downs and they usually happen when you need to do something, like kill someone. This is hardly problematic however, the game is just way too easy. Typically I start a game on easy to see if I would even like it. After the reviews I decided to start this one on normal... if the baddies were even 4 times harder I would still be able to plow through most of what I've seen so far the first time around. I've only died because I simply don't even bother to avoid the "powerful" attacks anymore. The autosave kicks in often enough that I don't typically have to run far to attempt to overpower a group without any tact a second time, and even without really adjusting my strategy I still haven't hit a battle I had to fight more than one extra time (that said I think I've only died twice in about 6 hours of recklessly running into every fight possible).
Then there is the game economy, the 2 black smithing scrolls I've seen so far cost 2500 and 5000 gold. I have bought NOTHING so far, played for 6 hours and have a whopping 300 gold, I don't expect to be rich, but after saving up all of my money through 3 zones, I would expect to be able to afford more than 3 healing potions (really!!! they cost 100 each). Know why it is so bad? Because the weapons that drop off enemies are worth between 1-20 gold with most tending toward the 1. That means that the blacksmith values that scroll at the cost of well over a thousand blades. That profiteering jerk could supply an army based on the number of weapons I would need to trade in just to buy the cheap one. I need to kill probably 50 enemies and steal all of their gear to afford 1 healing potion. I suppose that should be an indicator of the games level of challenge. If potions are so damn expensive I should expect not to need them... and I don't really.
Also, I can't seem to buy armor, I appear to get it at predetermined points in the game, I started off in one set of armor, then when my village was burned I pop into the next scene with new armor, then I'm handed armor when I kill the rebel leader, at which point I've already done everything in this zone and am forced to move onto the next zone, (which by the way I wasn't even able to gain access to until I completed that quest). Why bother giving me new armor at all? Why not just make the monsters do the same amount of damage in every zone? Or simply have their damage scale with their level? There were 3 options this last time, but based on what you are doing melee, ranged or magic EVERYONE at EVERY point in the game will be wearing the EXACT SAME ARMOR. Maybe this changes as the game progresses but at present I find this ridiculous. In the other Gothic games, yes there was armor that could only be acquired by working your way up inside a given faction, but the world was more open and I could venture, if I chose into uncharted territory without ever having the chance to acquire fancy paladin gear, or while I couldn't get the good stuff without completing quests I could still scrounge around for enough money to buy some intermediate quality gear off vendors.
I may go back to Gothic 3 in the meantime. I found a preconfigured INI file for ludicrous settings which are too high for my PC, but not by much. Thinking if I can scale a few settings back, 5 years after the game was released it might actually be playable. Also, there is a project in the works to "make the story better". So I can play it twice :)
But all in all. I'm just frustrated. Games shouldn't come out this broken to begin with, and should something slip through the cracks it shouldn't take this long to fix. It was months (perhaps over a year) before Bioware fixed their horrible memory leak, Gothic 3 took years and it was actually fixed by the community and not the company that released it. How long until Gothic 4 is playable? And then how long until someone fixes the game?
RARG!
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