If you don't want to read the whole thing, you can just read this sentence.
I never played Gothic, and I can clearly say it's a nay nay, I couldn't even force myself to finish it.
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When I saw screenshots of this game, it looked pretty okay.
I didn't read the reviews, as I did not buy it individually so I thought it was a lucky strike to get this game in addiction to the ones I actually wanted, as it looked cool.
Oh boy, was I wrong.
Here's the thing, This game is boring as hell.
I can look pass the bugs and glitches
[first 2 minutes of gaming, I fell into a whole in the ground and ended up floating for a while walking on air]
I can Ignore the somewhat... awful combat system
[I mean, you just press the same button repeatedly until the enemy dies, as they're all sluggish and dumb as a wall, with no reflexes. You have magic but it's basically useless as you don't actually have magic powers and use scrolls you have to buy first]
I can even pretend not to notice the dreadful character design and voice acting ,
But getting tossed into an infiniy of "fetch quests" with no actuall development to the "storyline" [Is a super generic story with the less charismatic main character ever - I'm trying to remember his name, and I actually can't - who goes on a quest for revenge yada yada yada] Just sent me into a near coma journey.
The whole game revolves around you getting from one point in the map to another one, to get some random NPC some random Item, until the next NPC asks you for another random item.

I spent 6 hours in this, and it actually felt like a lot more. I ended up uninstaling it, without even wanting to know how the story ends.

Just never buy this, for your sake.

When you play ArcaniA aka Gothic 4, it seems to be very important how the game is compared to it's predecessors. And there's a lot to live up to because the first 2 games were considered sort of icons of the genre. Here’s a list of remarks made while playing:

Game mechanics:
+ Looting is fast and simple. You’ll get to feel since there’ll be A LOT of looting.
+ One of the coolest looking minimaps I've seen.
+ Main quest conversations trigger automatically when approaching the right npc. This prevents fruitless dialogues with npc's who don't really have anything to say.
+ Health regenerates
+ Interesting lock picking system
+ Game creates savegames itself in important places. Don't remember the previous ones doing that.
- If the quest location stays out of the range of the minimap then the minimap doesn't show you the direction towards the location.
- Minor bugs with characters getting stuck behind invisible obstacles.
- The question weather it is open world or not. Fans of Gothic say that ArcaniA is not open world like the other Gothic games were. I ask: was Gothic 1 open world? They say 'yes, but a really small open world'. I say: well, there you have it. Arcania has those small areas, bigger than in Witcher, but it's not open in the same way Gothic 3, Skyrim and GTA were. I bring it up because it has been noted as a flaw.
- Levelling up badly balanced. The game is way too generous in helping you max your stats. By the time I was through two thirds of the game I had maxed out everything I needed.

Design:
+ Beautiful textures, highly improved compared to Gothic 3 BUT they blend together horribly.
+ Weirdly the game get's better designwise as the it advances. Looks like they created the first chapter just to learn how to do the job.
- The guy who created the 3D models didn't have a clue about human anatomy.
- Like so often in games the main character looks like some fancy-pants out of a men's magazine.
- In game written material is in some kind of modern comic font which doesn’t blend with the rest of the game at all.
- During dialogues, when the characters are zoomed in, armor stretches and bends as if it was part of flesh and muscle.
- Insanely few character models. The orcs, for example, look all the same.

Game flow:
+ ArcaniA’s best feature: they've come up with a helpful, easy-to-use dodging system. My experience with other games (Elder Scrolls, Assassin's Creed, Gothic) is that going in for the kill is more profitable that starting to dodge/ block, which in most cases is hard and pointless. ArcaniA nailed it and I give them huge credit for it.
+ Npc's with quests are marked with an exclamation mark.
+ Auto-aim enemies in malee battle (like in Assassin’s Creed) . In ArcaniA you come across places where you fight off 8 enemies or so at once. The auto trigger feature makes the battle in such occasions more fluent and faster overall.

Atmosphere:
+ The protagonist actually talks when you trigger a dialogue. Games these days (Skyrim, Half-Life etc.) have taken the silent protagonist approach which in my opinion closes some potent doors.
+ Diego and Gorn are the coolest they've ever been during the whole series.
+ The character is a charming fellow with good spirit. It contrasts highly with the previous nameless hero who at least in Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods was a war mongering bloody dictator who went after some small tribes that wanted to live their own way).
+ Goblins do whatever goblins might do before you arrive, they don't just stand there idly. They have a tribal look and seem a little more sophisticated than those poor bare guys in Gothic 3. AND they carry cool names like ''Warrior of the bugeater tribe'.
+ There's actually an epic story behind the whole thing with twists and drama.
- To the end it doesn't develop that true Gothic atmosphere that made the previous games popular.
- Voice acting is terribly overdramatized, doesn't sound like natural speech at all.
- In the whole there's not much to explore, the world feels empty.

A remark about Gothic: some ancient cultures belived that your spirit is immune to harm if your enemy didn't know your real name. The idea is used in both fantasy books and occult rituals. You have to know the name of the demon to summon him. Knowing the name bends the demon to your will. This allegory now comes to mind as I think of the former nameless hero, now Rhobar III who has been attacked by a demon. While he was nameless, he was mighty, but once he got a name, he became subject to harm. The game unconciously plays with this idea.

The verdict:

Try the game. Never mind the old Gothic games, they had their flaws as well. Arcania had both good and bad sides.

I've you liked Gothic I-III you'll probably be disappointed. Very linear story, the terrain was made without passion for the details, and it gets boring very fast

The initial areas are enjoyable enough. There are a lot of MMO qualities in its design. All of the game's heart is depleted halfway through, however, when it becomes a marathon of endless samey mobs with no reward mechanically or narratively.

Okay I wanted to review this game when I have finished it, but I can´t. When I told myself that I will play arcania, I found myself washing dishes and cleaning my room. That is how much I didn´t want to play it.
In the end I never got to finish the game.
Story sucks
Combat sucks. Even combat in vanilla skyrim is better and that is saying something.
Level up skills sucks
Crafting sucks
Characters sucks
Graphics were okay.
If you are a diehard fan of gothic 1, 2, 3. Do not buy this game. I bought this game for 5 euro and I still regret it. Incredible. Go and spend this money on something else. Or go buy Risen series, they are quite good and they bring back the gothic feeling.

10/10 would rather clean my room again than to play this game.

This game functions better as a virus than a game!

The writing in this game makes youtube commenters seem literate and the voice acting makes Kristen Stewart seem like a well rounded actress. The game is glitchy and forced me to reload when I randomely fell through the graphics. When the game repeatedly crashed right after a boss fight, I decided to unistall it. Unfortunately there is no uninstaller and using steam to delete local content just launches the game without deleting anything. I had to go into my directory and delete it manually.

Save yourself some money, buy a brick to smash your computer with instead of buying this game.

Whoever spellbound are, they ♥♥♥♥ed up Gothic... badly.

Meh ain't that bad i guess, but mostly it consists of holding w for a while then banging mouse 1 to win a combat, the storyline was too linear for me. Overall a very mediocre RPG game
the reason i wouldn't recommend it?
- It took 2 hour just to get it to run on windows 7
- not epic

Insultingly bad. Avoid at all costs.

This is a great game. Yes there are some things you'll need to manually adjust in your configuration folder before you play but once you do you'll be running highest settings on any modern none gaming rig with no lag or any crashing. Honestly I havent experienced anything other than lag until I did my fix(Yay no lag XD).

Who ever says they don't care for the graphics they are insane. The characters faces are my ONLY ISSUE so far. The environment is beautiful and feels real. Grass and trees sway in the wind the sun shines in bits through the trees casting fantastic shadows that overlap very well with alternate lighting and works great with other shadows. There's a day and night cycle/weather system and creatures that aren't blind and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ so there's another plus.

It is it's own story so what it's not some fast paced over the top madness some may be use to (COD Players) but the pace allows me to craft forage and fight where im not being overwhelmed meaning I get to enjoy the game and feel like im in a real adventure. Seriously I really did think at several points that I'd get some cliche' nonsense missions that just turn to your character not even dignifying the quest by basically telling the npc to piss off lol (not in those words[I wish]).

The combat is like if twoworlds wasn't terrible and clunky and was refined instead of a rushed mess. (Twoworlds had a better spell system)

I got this in a bundle awhile back and I'd say wait for a sale. I don't really see paying anything more than 10 for the game despite the joys I'm experiencing. I say this because I find there is a major combat flaw that maybe I'm just not noticing but the keyboard controls don't have a lock on button. The dodge works great until large monsters rush you so being able to strafe i combat would be nice. The Gamepad has it but you'd still have to use a keyboard and mouse for your hotkeys and inventory management more less defeating the purpose.

so far a strong 7/10
AMD A10 Quad-Core Laptop Integrated GPU

There are plenty of reviews for this game. Many pro's and con's. One thing that I have noticed, that I have not seen anyone mention, is that the water effects are pretty nice. When it rains you can see the water running on the ground and off the armor. The waves look good as well.

The most poorly optimized laggy fetch quest simulator I've ever seen.

Bad game it has alot of glitches, bad voice acting plus the whole follow the line aspect of the game for an rpg hell no!!

Not having played any of the previous Gothic games (but will do so in the future) I can safely say Arcania, as a standalone game, is a very poor, dumbed down action RPG. It is almost an insult to the RPG genre and this is coming from someone who isn't even such a huge fan of RPG games.

A nameless "simple shepherd from Feshyr", as he is often called, becomes an unexpected hero after his home village is destroyed. He starts to seek for revenge and leaves the village for an adventure which will lead him to a fight against a mysterious evil power.

Arcania can be pretty much described with one word: boring. The more I played the more annoyed and bored I got with the overabundance of flaws showing up. I'm not even sure where to start.
The main character is such a blank character that I never felt sorry for him. Which actually made me not so motivated in completing the game. His attitude was more of a jerkish (if you could get any kind of personality out of him) and many times I wished he would fail with his quest rather than complete it. In general all the characters in the game are really bland and nowhere interesting. The cringeworthy dialogue and the laughable voice acting didn't help either. Nor the horrible looking character models which often looked almost incomplete. Even most of the NPCs you talked to and received quests from had been recycled making you talk to the same men and women multiple times. It wasn't believable at all.

The main problem the game has is that it is far too easy. Everything is easy making it boring. Combat means spamming one button. Well two, if you bother to either block the attacks (so useless when you can only do it if you stay in place) or evade them by rolling. Enemy movement is predictable. Magic instead is in scrolls which you can buy and I found it to be not only useless but unnecessary. You really don't need any skills in playing this game.
Do I still need to go on? Story was so generic that I already forgot what it was. Oh wait, just some everyday generic guy becoming a generic hero and saving the kingdom from generic evil power because he was angry that his generic village was destroyed and finding about that created as much emotion in me as going to the toilet. So many of the enemies too were generic and boring fantasy game enemies such as wolves, skeletons, lizards and orcs.
And why do they have to make endings so bad? Finishing the game I felt like I actually didn't do so. It wasn't rewarding after playing such a poor game.

One of the only good things I can mention is kind of pointless anyway with the game being as easy as it is. There is variety in items: potions, foods, weapons, armour and all the stuff you can craft by yourself. But then again you really don't need any of that. Only after playing 3/4 of the game did I truly need to use a potion. All the stuff you needed were to be found from the world or you got them from finishing quests so you didn't need to buy anything. Arrows were the only things I bought. And by the end of the game I accumulated so much money which kept me wondering what could I have possibly bought with it.
At this point I've had to look hard for positives. The other one I could come up was that all the armour and weapons look pretty great. It think it is sad when you have to put your brain cells to the extreme thinking what you liked about the game. I even put off writing this review for so long because of that.

+ Armour and weapons looks good
+ Lots of items to choose from
- Boring story
- Boring and easy combat
- Boring enemies
- Bad dialogue and voice acting
- Bland main character
- Recycled, awful and incomplete character models
- Useless magic
- Ending

If you're thinking of getting this game wait until its on sale. It is hard to recommend this game to people simply because of all the things you have to look past in order to enjoy it. The voice acting is hit or miss (and when it's miss its a HUGE miss), some character models specifically female characters) look really weird and poorly made, and the first couple of hours are just a huge tutorial filled with horribly boring quests, like "kill the molerats invading my farm" and "Bring me some mead" and "collect some iron bolettes".

The strange tradition in RPGs to start the player out doing menial tasks for other people, like the quests referenced above, is super over-done and desperately needs to be retired for something more meaningful and fun in the beginning of a game. This is especially true when the trailer for said game shows a bunch of awesome monsters to fight but only after you go through hours of "go fetch me this" and "kill these rats!" quests. The Witcher 2 did this great by starting out with that badass castle siege pretty early on. Another RPG to have a great opening was Skyrim where once you got to the first village of Riverwood, you had the ability to begin a quest that sends you through a dungeon filled with bandits and draugr, AND ended with you seeing your first wordwall.

Through all the horribly played out beginning quests and the god-awful voice acting and modeling, I'd give Arcania maybe a 6/10 at best.

Don't buy it right now. I bought it out of hype because of the previous risen games but the combat feels even more fixated than before. Though the path the true gothic devs went into with the story/characters/graphics is great and I like the health system a lot. The combat is however tediously boring due to the somewhat buggy and dodgy tactics you need to 'cheat' yourself with to kill all the enemies in the exact same way. After both using a controller and mouse/keyboard I didn't felt like hurting my hand for too much longer. My advice, pick it up at a steep sale or wait for a combat overhaul mod, as I'm going to do the last.

I Really enjoyed this game, It's not a blockbuster and I have never played any of the previous titles, But you get a compelling romp around a good looking world with most dialogue being voiced, The graphics are very good and the rain effect is one of the best I have seen with water running on the ground and your avatar, The combat is ok, and you can switch at will to ranged and melee though I stuck to sword and shield, Dodge is your friend and makes fighting foes fun, But it's not Dark souls and remains rather shallow. If you want a cheap 10 hours enetertainment then this could be it, It's not the complexity of Skrim etc but it delivers on story and enjoyment. Look for the version with the expansion pack.

Like chain fetch quests? You'll like this, then.

Seriously. Here's a list of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ -

- Have to go to archives
- Guy won't let me into archives unless I rescue their lord from orcs
- Orcs won't let me in unless I get some beer
- Shaman won't give me beer unless I find some guy

Done.

I'm not going to pretend that this game is amazing, nor am I going to re-hash the issues that everyone else has more eloquently gone over. I came into this with fresh eyes, never having played previous Gothic games. I can't even remember how I ended up owning this; likely with a coupon from a badge or something.

BUT, that being said, it's not terrible. It's somewhat mediocre, standard high fantasy fodder. But it's very easy to pick up and play, it's -for the most part- nice to look at, and you could certainly do worse. If you're looking for some nice medieval aesthetic, go for it. If you're looking for something in-depth and groundbreaking, look elsewhere. Simple game for folks who aren't expecting more than what's at face value.

Can't play it and no solutions to fixing it, waste of 20 dollars and guess what no DEV's are active and willing to fix the issue. So GG to the Dev's and GG for steam allowing them to sell a game that they won't fix.

♥♥♥♥ this company.