Do you think they learn from their fuckups?

Yeah I don't think anyone loves Billy Idol that much. Maybe they were just lazy sacks of shit with a lot of money. At least I can confidently say this game is no better than E1 after finishing it. For every little thing it does better there's something worse. E1 had this issue where stats almost didn't matter at all and you could be stuck being really weak if you decided to put your points on the basic shit that you would benefit from at the beginning of the game. This has the issue that very early on you can just become a killing machine without breaking the game.

Stats in 1 were just there to gate off gear and shit - they did fuckall in terms of adding damage or HP.
People flat out increased the values to max through cheating and they still got killed by a Critter at the start.
The ones in 2 actually influenced those now but one has to wonder what even the point was due to the bonuses being absolutely miniscule.
"+1 damage for 5 points in strength" - wow, that surely will make a difference when my weapon does 475.

>keep remaking gothic 2 for 20 years

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If they at least did it right it wouldn't be so much of an issue

do you play elden ring?

>it does seem like they listen to some feedback
Problem is, most of that feedback comes from Germans

Even they are getting tired of PB's shenanigans by now.
Hell, even their fuckbuddies at Gamestar gave Elex 2 the lowest rating of all of their games (well, an 80 but still).

Yeah, I was just joking
>even their fuckbuddies at Gamestar gave Elex 2 the lowest rating of all of their games (well, an 80 but still).
Oof, must be truly grim if shillstar gives them a mere 80

No.

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Lol no. Elex's combat is a good indication how little they've progressed. In fact, I'd argue they've regressed in that regard, because having recently played that Polish Gothic 2 mod, I found the old Gothic's combat system certainly to be the superior combat system compared to Elex's terrible stun lock festival. Not saying G2's combat doesn't evolve into stunfest, but at least it takes some skill and timing to pull that off.

While that's true there's some cultists that run around telling everyone how the game runs perfect and is perfect and never dare to say a thing about these people because muh small team.

PB needs a new capable team of people and a new engine. I don't give a shit they figured out loading times with it, it's getting to the point where it's too demanding for shit that looks honestly subpar and they clearly have people who can't put animations and models together properly. There's a point at which jank is unjustifiable. Shit, when Elex came out it was considered really janky and it was nowhere near where 2 is right now with the latest patch. Risen 3 in comparison looks like it's done by a different team and I played that shit at launch as well. It's ridiculous. Everytime they take longer and it comes out worse. Where's that damn german efficiency? This motherfucker just...

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>Do you think they learn from their fuckups?
They have not made a good game since Risen 1, and Risen 1 was just a pure re-thread of Gothic 1.

Everything else they made was a complete mess.
I don't think the studio knows what they are doing at all. Who ever actually designed the original Gothic 1/2, and understood what made the so unique, is clearly not with the studio anymore. Hell, I think they lost it with Nights of the Raven, which was already a fucking disaster.

I want to have hope for them, because god knows the original Gothic 1/2 were amazing, and we desperately need more mid-range good RPG development, but I really don't see PB having what it takes.

This developer is really something.

Someone should consider their style of RPG and do something proper because PB clearly have some issues.

Well, their style is extremely unique, and if a studio does not feel this design philosophy comes to them naturally, I don't think it's a good idea to force immitation - that rarely ends up working out.
The best RPG's of the last few years were all good because of their own very distinctive design philosophy: KC:D, Underrail, Wasteland franchise, Disco Elysium etc... I can't imagine teams working on those games trying to emulate the old PB design philosophy and not fucking it up.
Just look at how the Gothic 1 remake showcase ended up.
With that said, I feel like the RPG market has been so weak for the past few years that I'm just gradually losing interest in the whole genre. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I'm finding it harder and harder to even care about what is going on. Last RPG that really, really scratched my itch was KC:D, and I don't have much trust in the sequel after the studio effectively sold out.

They got brutally BTFO by a modding team that made a better game than they ever could

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>be me, never played a pb game
>heard gud shit about elex 1, still passed me by
>elex 2 already out wtf, time to try this out
>get thrown into a world where everyone seems to know you and i have no fucking clue what is even going on lol who are these people
>gameplay is ok but fuck me story is all fubar got no clue wtf is happening all the time
>uninstall.exe
yeah, better luck next time pb

also, dat shiddy peformance and those uggly faces mong, lol like wtf hire some better artists and coders

I love how these guys have been making pc games their whole lives and their m+kb qol is still worse than jap devs whose last pc game they touched was probably wizardry
why the fuck do I have to press enter instead of just pressing e or lmb

>99.9% of numerous NPCs in Elex 1 exist solely to promptly tell their whole life story and give you yet another fucking bland sidequest
I skipped on Risen games and don't really remember this bullshit in Gothic 1-2, where did they pick up "the more the better" faggotry from?

I think that unfortunately, the story of Piranna Bites is a lesson in games often being good by accident.
Gothic 1/2 were either a fluke, or they were build off the talent of people who are no longer on the team. Because the studio has been messing up ever since.
It's possible that somewhere between Nights of the Raven and Gothic 3, some key members of the studio just left, and the rest of the studio never really understood what made those original games good.

But it's also possible that Gothic 1/2 were just a product of an extremely specific circumstances that can't be recreated.

It's currently impossible in today's gaming environment for a studio the size of PB to go back and make smaller and methodical open worlds like Gothic 1 and 2.

Not sure what give you that impression, given that we live in an era of the strongest mid-range development since the late 90's.

Games like KC:D have done this quite succesfully.

they had about 3 times the manpower and budget
the game sold well enough because of marketing and fancy graphics, the actual gameplay is uninspired garbage made by people who have no idea what makes an rpg fun (hint: it's not hours of lame cutscenes or realistic forests and castles)

>Make the same game with a different setting and features on top for the entirety of their existence
>Do you think they learn

They can't redo Gothic 2's approach to progressive world design that refreshes and changes as the story progresses, because PB insists on making bigger and bigger game worlds with no gates. The problem here is that this approach of refreshing the game world scales horribly the larger the game world gets, so PB at some point just gives up.

This is where Gothic 2 did something brilliant: it doesn't refresh the entire game world, it only refreshes the parts of the world that you'll be often returning to. Gothic 2's world progression is structured much like a hand, where at some point you leave the palm (the Khorinis mainland) to go visit one of the border areas--i.e. one of the fingers (the Mining Valley, Jharkendar). These fingers only become accessible once you progress the main story enough, so you can't accidentally get lost or invalidate the game's early game by prematurely finding some high-level gear in some of the higher-level areas with enough skill. These areas are meant to be explored only once, and after you're done in them you most likely won't return to them. Eventually you return back from the finger to the palm, after which you find that the mainland has changed considerably in the time that you went away to the finger.

ELEX on the other hand insists on making almost everything open right from the get go because fuck yeah freedoms. This makes the world tremendously harder to balance, because the player can be anywhere at any point in the story, whereas with the fingers in Gothic 2 being locked by the main story the designers could assume how strong the player was at that time, and balance an area accordingly. In ELEX they just had to kind of guess. This is also why ELEX has a wack-ass difficulty curve where the hobo phase lasts too long, but past the hobo phase the game has almost nothing to offer challenge-wise.

>they had about 3 times the manpower and budget
Compared to who exactly?
>the game sold well enough because of marketing and fancy graphics, the actual gameplay is uninspired garbage made by people who have no idea what makes an rpg fun
You have very clearly not played the game. But cool absolute bullshit spewing just to seem contrarian and edgy, I guess.

Of course not, or they would not have been making pure dogshit since Risen 1.

The problem is they haven't been remaking Gothic 2 for 20 years. Everything that made Gothic 2 good is gone after Risen 1 which was the last real "Gothic-like" game they made, everything since then has been a total mess, especially Elex 1 and 2 which are horrendous games focused on massive open worlds instead of smaller more detailed ones.

Yeah.
There is a weird illusion among the Gothic "fans" that the games were unique due to their incredibly open nature and structure, and I feel like the devs themselves bought into this illusion.
In reality, in both OG Gothic games, while the first 1/3 of the game is quite open, it's also very carefully gated, and more importantly, after the first 1/3rd, the games switch into actually very linear gear for the rest of it. This is a pretty good structure, because it allows you to gain a sense of coherent, complex world initially, makes you invest into certain factions and thus into the whole word building, but then allows the further progression to be very carefully curated and ballanced out.

But for some reason, most people I see praising Gothic games tend to put waaay too much emphasis on the freedom, and ignoring the fact that it's not really THE defining trait for majority of the game.
Careful gating, and with that, sense of very strong and deliberate character progression is what really made those games so memorable.
The use of the open world also reflects this: it's really a hub world that seems open, but is actually gated off by hard-coded difficult enemies, and which only gradually expands together with the player's power level and state of progression.

And yeah, I feel like this core concept was not fully realized by the developers themselves past Gothic 2. You may argue that Gothic 3 was such a mess due to publisher meddling, but I think it was such a mess mainly because it was the first game where the studio deluded themselves into thinking the "opennness" and scale of the world is their primary asset.

And the only reason why Risen 1 managed to somewhat capture the spirit of Gothic 1/2 was not because the studio figured shit out, but simply because their extremely limited resources forced the more restrictive design on them.
And the moment they got more cash, they just abandoned it again.

Only reason Gothic 3 is shit was because their publisher ran out of money and they had to release it early.

In ELEX 1 and 2 they added these "legendary weapons" that just tear the game apart. ELEX 2 does it worse by giving you a jetpack that sure, is convenient to get around quickly when backtracking, but also makes you just want to skip most of the map because there's fucking nothing in it. Most of the exploration outside the main story and the basic sidequests is just "go here to find map piece or gemstone". It's big, empty and even worse than in ELEX 1, there's next to no variety. You got a lot of green, a lot of shit, a lot of snow and some coast. Maybe a mountain with a reference to an old character from different series. It is empty as all fuck and dull. I finished 2, got infinite jetpack, and it was interesting for about 30 seconds before I quit.

Honestly I like the style of these games but I can't just force myself to play these new entries anymore. At this point, all I would want is an improved version of Risen 1. A version of it that has the same map, the same scale even, but is interesting throughout instead of being a fucking fetch quest towards the end. But I'll say something: it's not just the freedom these games offer that can actually be frustrating and create this problem, it's also that some quests cannot really be completed in latter chapters, or you can barely do shit if you don't do what's available at the beginning, so even if you wanted to spread some of these quests out yourself, you're sometimes cockblocked, ironically enough. Unless you're a masochist.

It's not even empty in terms of content but also when it comes to variety.
Where's all the crazy shit like the domed city, the giant totallynotgothic lift, the dam, the giant bunker installment, the rocket silo, the weird alien flora along the coast or cool faction camps like the Cleric hort inside a ravine/cave or the Berserker fortress inside a broken hotel ruin?
Even the vegetation took a nosedive and instead of countless different flowers there are nothing but fields of daisies everywhere.

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Yeah, it's almost as if the game is trying to tell you that world hearts were a fucking mistake, but what's a mistake is whoever designed this world in the first place. There's an entire chunk of the map that is nothing but endgame mobs and ruins.

Is that a wig ?

>In ELEX 2 they did a thing I will never forgive them for, and it's just too many of these "Kill 30 enemies to win" quests that are just fucking absurd.
When I was playing Chapter 3 I kept thinking it wasn't even that bad, sure there's some killing but they even go out of their way to dissuade you from clearing more than two of the Formers literally straight up warning you "it's all just copypaste from now on, don't even bother", twice even. And then
>okay, now kill 143 robot
lmao. What the fuck were they smoking.

At this point I'd take a Spiders game over Piranha Bytes. So no. I don't think they do.

>you think they learn
>clunky gameplay in literally every game they produced
gothic 1&2 are the only good games they have and just because it was a small team of white men producing what they thought was good in a more simpler time
they will never do a good game ever again

Poor resource management forcing the studio to start cutting corners on the second half of the game.
It's so fucking common, honestly. The studio lays out an ambitious plan, miscalculates the amount of resources they will need to complete every individual segment of the game, and is forced to start cutting corners. You ALWAYS cut corners on the late-game rather than the early game because by the time people reach that point, they are way past returning the game options.

Even AAA games end up doing this all the fucking time. Hell, remember TW3's late game? And that was AFTER they literally cut out the entirety of Tuissaint, which was originally planned to be part of the core game. It's incredibly difficult to properly anticipate the cost of development ahead of the time, and if you misjudge it, you'll end up in this scenario.

sadly not... they could have been the german CD Pro... ohhhh... maybe they didnt fuck up

Because I can't really find anything else, I've been thinking of replaying either G2 NoTR or Risen 1. I'm not sure, but fuck ELEX 2. Never again.

they do but they just don't care

Mararcor was meant to be their crazy alien biome, but I'm not sure they managed to capture the atmosphere they were shooting for. Even though more or less all the elements are there.

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THEY ARE LITERALLY MAKING THE SAME GAME OVER AND OVER AGAIN SINCE 2000. EVERYTHING IS JUST A GOTHIC 1 DERIVATIVE!!!

Last not mediocre game was Risen 1. Elex was just okay and I couldn't care less for Elex 2.

>They made Jax a bit too emotional though, motherfucker gets angry.
His new English VA is so goddamn shit. I actually really liked his E1 voice.

This one has a scene where he's basically yelling at a fucking AI like he's tired of the fucking quests in this game. I liked the previous one better but he was less "mad at everyone" for obvious reasons so it was a bit monotone.

No. Because people don't want them to. They like the jank.

It was a good voice for a career soldier though. Ironically enough it's the exact opposite in German. In E1 Jax sounded buttmad at all times, while in E2 his emotional range greatly expanded.

>Do you think they learn from their fuckups?
No because they refuse to let go of their archaic engine and they refuse to let THQ Nordic invest more money so they can hire more people. And they refuse to try something else with their writing. It's always the "Ruhrpott"-style of dialogue responses.

Those fuckers get what they deserve.

How's Risen 2 specifically as a pirate game anyway?

>>Do you think they learn from their fuckups?
>No because they refuse to let go of their archaic engine and they refuse to let THQ Nordic invest more money so they can hire more people. And they refuse to try something else with their writing. It's always the "Ruhrpott"-style of dialogue responses.
>Those fuckers get what they deserve.
And the German media outlets are too afrait of giving that studio a justified thrashing. Elex 2 got critized fairly lightly even though it's mediocre and like two steps back from the first Elex, which already was mediocre.

You can't even swim - nuff said.

There will never be a masterpiece like gothic 2 ever again

Fuck you, the worst butcherd shit game of the series. Kys zoomer. Fuck that makes maddeing!!!!!!

Gothic 1 and 2 are in my top 10 list of all-time best RPGs ever made with Gothic 2 taking first place. It's very hard to improve on a masterpiece but besides first Risen I'd you can skip everything else.