Ludo Lense
Self-Ejected
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2014
- Messages
- 936
(Spoilers for about the first 5 hours of Witcher 3 and Gothic 2)
After recently finishing near 100% Witcher 3 I was thinking why I didn't find most of the quests gripping even though they were decently written and had plenty of dramatic weight to them. Most of the contracts had a really good setup and a few even better payoff. So I decided to boot up Gothic 2 since I remember always being drawn in by it and bam I played for 5 hours on a whim, I didn't even realize how quickly time passed.
But I did realize why, beyond some surface aspects that have more to do with the age difference between the two games, Gothic 2 had more draw, at least for me. I mean at first glance Witcher 3 is much more interesting. In White Orchard you fight a griffin, save a woman's life but destroy her mind, uncover viper witcher blades in wraith filled cemeteries etc. At the same time you also get background context about the world (the way the nilfgaard officer acts towards the temerian peasant). In Gothic 2 on the other hand, you try to sneak into a city by pretending you are a farmer or alchemist and then become a citizen by becoming an apprentice. You even pick up turnips. Very low key stuff.
But Gothic 2 has something very important, it relates to the player. I realized just how few fantasy names are pronounced in the beginning beyond what setup Xardas explains. Most people just call it harbor city instead of Khorinis, or just the city. Nobody says annoying forced religious shock statements like "By Innos!" or other stuff like that. The mercenaries protecting the landowners are call just that, mercenaries (if it was a Bioware game they would have been called something painfully stupid like "The Black Blades"). People talk like regular people without forced accents or ye olde english.
I think due to how the medium works most writers and designer are doing things backwards and imposing cinematic values forcefully. In movies and books you can regulate the flow of information that the audience gets to the second and how you draw them in but they have much more freedom in games (what if the player runs around in circles testing controls after the beginning info dump, forgetting half of it in 2 minutes). I think rather than trying to bring players inside of worlds games should strive to bring worlds to the player since he/she decides the rhythm at which they proceed.
Oh and it also doesn't help that Gothic 2's "Get inside the city" quest with its 5 solutions (Sneak,Bribe,Farmer,Alchemist,Letter) is more complex than any Witcher 3 quest which are glorified A to B kill tasks.
And I do realize that the polar opposite of what I am saying are games like the recent Final Fantasy games or, sadly, Pillars of Eternity which have like 30 fantasy proper nouns in the first hour.
After recently finishing near 100% Witcher 3 I was thinking why I didn't find most of the quests gripping even though they were decently written and had plenty of dramatic weight to them. Most of the contracts had a really good setup and a few even better payoff. So I decided to boot up Gothic 2 since I remember always being drawn in by it and bam I played for 5 hours on a whim, I didn't even realize how quickly time passed.
But I did realize why, beyond some surface aspects that have more to do with the age difference between the two games, Gothic 2 had more draw, at least for me. I mean at first glance Witcher 3 is much more interesting. In White Orchard you fight a griffin, save a woman's life but destroy her mind, uncover viper witcher blades in wraith filled cemeteries etc. At the same time you also get background context about the world (the way the nilfgaard officer acts towards the temerian peasant). In Gothic 2 on the other hand, you try to sneak into a city by pretending you are a farmer or alchemist and then become a citizen by becoming an apprentice. You even pick up turnips. Very low key stuff.
But Gothic 2 has something very important, it relates to the player. I realized just how few fantasy names are pronounced in the beginning beyond what setup Xardas explains. Most people just call it harbor city instead of Khorinis, or just the city. Nobody says annoying forced religious shock statements like "By Innos!" or other stuff like that. The mercenaries protecting the landowners are call just that, mercenaries (if it was a Bioware game they would have been called something painfully stupid like "The Black Blades"). People talk like regular people without forced accents or ye olde english.
I think due to how the medium works most writers and designer are doing things backwards and imposing cinematic values forcefully. In movies and books you can regulate the flow of information that the audience gets to the second and how you draw them in but they have much more freedom in games (what if the player runs around in circles testing controls after the beginning info dump, forgetting half of it in 2 minutes). I think rather than trying to bring players inside of worlds games should strive to bring worlds to the player since he/she decides the rhythm at which they proceed.
Oh and it also doesn't help that Gothic 2's "Get inside the city" quest with its 5 solutions (Sneak,Bribe,Farmer,Alchemist,Letter) is more complex than any Witcher 3 quest which are glorified A to B kill tasks.
And I do realize that the polar opposite of what I am saying are games like the recent Final Fantasy games or, sadly, Pillars of Eternity which have like 30 fantasy proper nouns in the first hour.
