• 9Sep 08

  Gothic vs The Elder Scrolls

  Seeing as how there are three major Gothic games (along with some expansions) and The Elder Scrolls seems to have taken the pie when it comes to PC RPG's, I think it's high time a comparison be made between the two. I've played both series extensively so I'll do my best to give my take on the two games. To save you time, here's where I'm headed:

  Gothic > The Elder Scrolls

  I've played The Elder Scrolls since Daggerfall, I played Battlespire or whatever it was called which was awful, and then Morrowind and Oblivion, including most expansions. I've played the Gothic series since the first Gothic.

  My major problem with the Elder Scrolls games, is that Bethesda has always touted themselves as we big really big, massive games, as if to assume, that's a good thing all by itself. It's not. Daggerfall was huge, Morrowind was just massive and Oblivion is very large as well (I don't believe as big as Morrowind, regardless it doesn't matter), they all contain incredibly large worlds. On the surface, this sounds great, but in reality, I don't think it really is. The biggest error Bethesda makes about these huge worlds of theirs is that they don't fill them with very interesting things. Morrowind, has long been noted as like playing in a big museum. Nothing moves, there are very few wandering critters out in the world, people don't really seem to move from place to place much and the cities themselves are very, vacant feeling, large but vacant. Oblivion attempted to fix this issue with some great AI system, but either it wasn't used properly or the passage of time was so close to reality that it really didn't do much to make the game feel any more alive that Morrowind. Furthermore, most of Oblivion was filled with forests for which there was absolutely no point to be trapsing through. Lastly, since walking around in Morrowind was always such a time consuming process with nothing exciting happening when you travelled from place to place, they added an insta-warp feature to Oblivion, to save gamers the trouble.

  The glaring flaw with the design choice of Bethesda, the Elder Scrolls games and many other 'huge' but light games, is that they rely WAY too heavily on procedurally generated content or randomness. Making a 'HUGE' game isn't difficult at all when you create tools to create all the content for you. I'm a professional programmer so I can attest to the fact that this isn't difficult at all, you make the computer work for you, it's smart if your trying to save time. The problem is that you lose out in quality and as much as you might try, there's still going to be a vein of similarity through everything. Daggerfall, Morrowind and Oblivion ALL relied havily on computer generated content to generate the world, the landscape, the loot systems, the creatures, the caves etc.

  My point here is that a huge game sounds cool, but as I age, I'm not so keen on spending dozens and dozens of hours of my life, essentially visiting the same cave, city, dungeon, 'quest' that I just did, 40hrs before, when I started the game for the first time. Sure the loot might get better, but most of it is useless junk more randomly generated abilities and modifiers, but that doesn't make for a very engaging game, it's great if your playing the game to consume and collect 'stuff' but it's piss-poor when it comes to a story, character development, anything remotely considered atmosphere, etc.

  If you look at the Gothic games, while generally more error prone and buggy (personally I've never had that many problems, and what I have had, I've casually chaulked up to the fact that the game is better and hell, it's called Gothic, I'm not suprised if the game is a little rough around the edges It's annoying when the game crashes or when perhaps the voice acting isn't the greatest but it's by no means a deal breaker.

  The Gothic games do not appear to rely on randomely generated stuff at all. The world itself feels more hand-crafted, every little cave feels completely different from the others, like it exists for a purpose beyond being there for the player to simply loot, there's usually a little backstory. The characters while generally light in substance are memorable and the storyline is at least interesting and keeps you focused on the game. Furthermore, there are many decisions to be made playing the game, you can side with one faction or another, or a few at once, these actually have REAL repurcusions as well.

  The other defining thing about Gothic, something for which it is known in a negative light, is it can be quite difficult, in part due due to the poorly implemented combat systems but largely because the world is quite a bit more realistic than elder scrolls worlds. The Gothic worlds actually have creatures wandering the wilderness, whereas Morrowind and Oblivion really rarely had much of anything going on, unless it was scripted. So in Gothic, you might head off in one direction at the start of the game and encounter a hulking Ogre and promply get yourself killed. In Morrowind this wasn't so likely cause, well, unless it was a cave, you probably weren't going to run into much of anything. In Oblivion the took a different route, now the world levelled around you, so while you might be low level, you would generally only find things in your level no matter where you went, and as you grew in power, so did the rest of the world, making where you decided to go, a rather mute point, because it was vanilla across the land (again another procedural design choice). Morrowind and Oblivion, are quite 'easy' games, again, lessening the fun factor the longer you played, there was never much of a sense of accomplishment when everything could be had pretty easily. Oblivion had it's frustrating moments, but they really were frustrating, suddenly some creatures were just ridiculously hard the more you levelled.

  Yes, while Gothic is a harder game, it is more realistic and gritty, you have to plan your adventures, think of where your going, question whether you have the supplies to engange that Ogre, or if it was worth attacking him. Even at a high level, that Ogre is still a challange, you just have more tricks and supplies up your sleeve. When you take down an Ogre in Gothic, your quite proud of it, it's an accomplishment that you had to fight to overcome.

  Another important aspect of Gothic is that it is not normally very easy to make lots of money, this is because, A, gold is hard to come by, to the point where hunting for firs and teeth etc, is actually worthwhile (any bit helps) and B, because there is a valid reason to have gold, you need it to train in various skills and develop your character, and for items that aren't easily procurred or obtained. In the Elder Scrolls games, gold isn't very hard to come by at all, in fact, normally you have more junk you need to sell than there is money available, but over time you can amass obscene amounts of wealth, but to what purpose? You can have just about anything you want when you walk into a store or explore a cave, even magical items are a plenty as it seems the world effectively spawns 'stuff' all over the place. I think there is a better balance of magical items and wealth in Gothic than Elder Scrolls games. It is probably just personal taste, but I like the reward of finding the rare magical item after reading maps or messages talking about them, then taking down the 300th skeleton and finding the 300th magical paralyzing dagger. While amassing wealth can be fun in it's own right (Diablo was an outstanding game in that respect), it doesn't work so well with real RPG's I don't think.

  Spells, magic and abilities really shine in Gothic, as well as many classic PC RPG's. They are unique, interesting and have their place in the game (usually). Elder Scrolls games, were always neat on the surface cause you could design your own spells and potions, which SOUNDS cool, but again isn't. All it is is a system of numbers when you boil it down and mixing stuff together tweaks those numbers in various ways. While you can create some 4 billion+ types of potions and spells, only about 20 are really that useful, so what's the point? I'd rather have 50 completely unique potions and spells to find, discover and learn, than 4 billion incredibly similar spells and potions. Again, it does sound cool, but in reality, it's mostly a waste of our time.

  Gothic takes the tried and true method of having a few dozen spells and potions, but they aren't all readily available and when you find a potion, scroll or spell, you hold onto it because it is rare, useful and powerful.

  Another point, physics systems and procedurally generated terrain and trees are all very cool, they make beautiful screen renders and can make a world seem more alive, but if they don't have any substantive effect in the game world, they really aren't that worthwhile to implement. I was very excited when Oblivion was to have physics but when I got the game and found it was basically only used in a few dungeon traps (sparingly at that), it was a total let down. The fact that you could bump a cup off a table, was 'cool' but had no redeeming gameplay quality, except everything you bumped into would fly all over the place. I'd have rather seen some neet puzzles involving physics, or for leverage and fulcrums to have some effect in combat, or have the ability to actually knock a market stall over (causing chaos). The generated forests look really cool, but if there's nothing special in them and it's the same forest everywhere you go... it really tends to break the illusion bigtime and pretty quickly, the player realizes there's nothing in the forest and it's just there to fill the void between the cities in between, that's lame, and the developers admitted it when they added 'insta-warp', you knew it was boring and pointless, and that insta-warp thing, cheapens the gameplay experience, what's the point of this huge world they tout, if you can now just warp between the interesting points? It's just an admission that the world isn't worth exploring but at least it's huge, or something.

  Gothic doesn't suffer from these issues, there's always a little something to find or discover, even if it's little and the fact that NOT everything looks the same is awesome in it's own right. After travelling through an area a few times you start to recognize landmarks and the landscape, you feel like your beginning to learn the world around you JUST like in the real world. That is very rewarding and has an incredible impact on being enganged in the game.

  To conclude, personally speaking, after playing all the Gothic games and all of the major Elder Scrolls games... I can confidentally say that the Gothic games are just better games. The world's are smaller, but then again I don't have 200hrs to devote to walking across the same dead, uninspired world. The combat system isn't that great (Gothic 1 & 2 wasn't bad once you learned it, maybe I still need to learn Gothic 3's), but neither are the Elder Scrolls systems. Sure, the Gothic games are more glitchy and error prone that ES games, but most of that is fixed with patches. The voice acting in Gothic games might not be that good, or the graphics might not be nearly as good as ES games, but they aren't horrible either.

  I'm always on the lookout for that great underdog of a game and I just wanted to write this comparison to give the Gothic series some due respect and to encourage others to give them a shot, I think they are far superior games and in the end, they are just more rewarding and more fun than the ES games. While I'm attacking the ES games pretty hard, they are great games in their own right and I've had a lot of fun with them myself, but for me, it waned about 20hrs in and just became a chore. I just think they aren't that interesting and hype generally has inflated them to be something they aren't. Give the Gothic's a try.

  Lastly, this speaks to a trend in gaming. While I'm all for reducing development time of a game using tools and computing to generate as much content as possible however developers sometimes seem to rely on too much. The latest GTA 4 wasn't as hot as it should have been because they focused way too much on graphics and the 'world' rather than actual gameplay, hence past GTA's are funner. Oblivion hasn't done much to make the world interesting, generated forests look cool, but they don't play well at all. Levelling the world around the player, is just dumb, WoW and LOTRO and most MMORPG's suffer from this (in order to make money though) and it was the stupidest design decision with Oblivion, it leads to no sense of accomplishment. Loot systems need to stop being called loot systems, if anyone can say 'that system in that game is pretty neat', it's NOT neat. The fact that someone identified it as a 'system' means it wasn't properly covered with enough gameplay elements to make it feel like part of the world, making it feel shallow and cheap (hence the spell 'system' and potion 'system' in ES games, are just not fun). Lastly, just because a game covers 15 million square miles of in-game terrain or because there are 5000 stars to explore, or because there are 23,000 different hats or 5 billion 'items' doesn't make a game good, it just means you had a computer generate most of the content that SHOULD be interesting, but isn't because everything is essentially a different shade of the same thing. There is actually value in creating items with real ideas. A flaming sword might not sound very cool these days, but if it's the only one in the game and the player comes across it one way or another, that is going to be one very cool flaming sword. However, if your picking up the 20th flaming sword in your last 2hrs of gameplay... it's just lame and the player knows its a piece of junk to go sell, or just leave on the ground.

  Moral of the story: Relying on randomly generated content is bad, taking the time to hand-craft the world with care and thought is just pure awesomeness and worth the effort, hence Gothic > The Elder Scrolls.

  • Posted Sep 9, 2008 3:58 pm PT
  • Category: Games
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