The Wheel of Dubious RPGs Episode 009-010: Daggerfall Unity and Arcania: Gothic 4

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (Daggerfall Unity)

Developer: Bethesda Softworks

Release Date: August 30, 1996

Time Played: About two hours on stream, messed with it a little more off camera

Dubiosity: The original game is definitely a candidate for the coveted 5 out of 5 Dubiosity rating, but honestly Daggerfall Unity seems like it improves enough to drop that down to a potential 3 or 4.

Number of times I fell through the floor: 0! YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW REVELATORY THIS IS

Would I play more? Yes.

I’ll fully admit that putting Daggerfall on the wheel was entirely an excuse to check out Daggerfall Unity, an ambitious attempt at remaking the entirety of the second Elder Scrolls game with a more modern engine. I have great news: If you wanted, for some ungodly reason, to play Daggerfall in the Year of Our Lord 2020, this would be the way to do it. What if Daggerfall controlled and ran like a modern video game? Or was at a resolution higher than 640x480? What if there were a bunch of small, but significant quality-of-life improvements, and what if the numerous broken-ass technical issues were gone (i.e. Language skills actually working?) What if there was an experimental toggle to make the dungeons a more reasonable size? WHAT IF DAGGERFALL HAD MOD SUPPORT? Are you getting excited? I’m getting excited.

Now, let’s be clear here, it’s still Daggerfall. Even without being in a constant semi-broken state, it’s still this staggeringly ambitious, extremely large game full of a bunch of half-baked ideas and endless swathes of procedurally generated content, all surrounding a massively big world with nothing in it. But if you’re like me, and have a certain amount of affection for Bethesda’s deranged, dungeon-crawling opus, this is like candy. There’s something about this game I really like, and I’m not sure if it’s the part where it doesn’t feel like it was designed for humans, or the part where it’s actually a solid randomly-generated dungeon crawl with all of the absurd power creep you’d expect. Either way, don’t feel like I have a whole lot else to talk about, and if you really cared you could easily play the game yourself. It’s freeware, after all, and so is Daggerfall Unity. They’re updating it constantly, so why not check it out?

Arcania: Gothic 4

Developer: Spellbound Studios

Release Date: September 27, 2010

Time Played: About three hours

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Number of times I was murdered by a single wolf: 0

Would I play more? Couldn’t uninstall a game faster.

Sometimes you get a Daggerfall, sometimes you get a… whatever the hell this is. Arcania: Gothic 4 (sometimes just “Arcania” and sometimes “Arcania: A Gothic Tale”) is one of the games I was dreading the most. After the series’ original developer Piranha Bytes and publisher JoWood split up, the former went on to make “Pirate Gothic” while the latter commissioned Spellbound Studios (probably best known for making the original Desperados games) to make a new fourth installment in the Gothic series. It’s, uh, something of a black sheep among the fanbase (at least the ones who acknowledge its existence in the first place,) and after playing it I think I have an inkling why: It’s not a Gothic game. Nor is it particularly interesting as a non-Gothic game.

Let me be clear: I respect those first two Gothic games in equal proportion to how little I want to play either of them. They’re the crown champions of Eurojank RPGs, beloved cult classics and, alas, perhaps a little too European and Janky for my preferences (they’re also slightly too beloved to appear on this wheel, tbh.) They are games with a very distinctive style and open world design ethos, where your nameless hero crawls his way to competence by solving menial tasks after getting murdered by local wildlife and kicked to death by local children. You know, basic German RPG design. If you want a good primer on the appeal of the series, between its strong worldbuilding and uncompromising mechanics, you’d be better off reading Mento’s recent write-ups on Gothic II and its expansion than my own floundering words. They’re games I wouldn’t be opposed to giving another shot one day, but maybe I’ll just wait for the remake of Gothic 1 before I do so.

So, of course, Arcania has none of those things that makes its predecessors special. In what I have to imagine is a targeted dig at Piranha Bytes, the main character of the original three Gothic games has now become a mad king. Said king is responsible for the deaths of the new nameless main character’s friends and family, in one of the more bizarre opening chapters to a video game I’ve played in a while. Make no mistake, Arcania is a janky RPG made on the European continent, filled with weird, awkward dialogue (delivered in English by a bunch of otherwise prolific LA-based VAs who have done much better work elsewhere), weird, awkward combat and weird, awkward graphical glitches. But Gothic it is not, between the straightforward, boring skill tree of incremental percentile improvements, to the seemingly linear environmental progression made for last generation consoles, to the complete lack of me getting my ass kicked by even the most sickly and infirm of wolves. I can’t help but imagine it’s an ill-advised attempt at chasing a larger, more mainstream or console audience, because it was remarkably playable. In this case, I don’t mean that as a compliment. Playable in the sense that I spent my three hours alternating between dodging very slow enemy attacks and clicking rhythmically to kill things.

Was it interesting? No. Not really. I might’ve uncovered something more had I played longer, but at no point during these three hours did I ever feel like I found a “hook” or even a struggle. There’s nothing exciting about a Eurojank RPG that isn’t also recklessly ambitious, and as far as I could tell there was nothing particularly ambitious about Arcania. Games like the first Witcher or Two Worlds are endearing precisely because they reach far higher than their humble budgets (or technical limitations) would call for. This? This was just kind of… there.

Well, as if Karma herself had intervened, my next game is actually the real Gothic 4: Risen. Just for a heads up, the current plan is to play through all the games currently on the wheel before taking a break. I think there’s a non-negligible chance of “The Wheel of Dubious RPGs vol. 2, feat: a bunch more console stuff and CRPGs I overlooked” happening, but for now I’m going to focus on what’s in front of me… which is already frankly terrifying on its own. As always, you can catch my streams on my Twitch channel (no interest in archiving them beyond the 14 day window) and I try to go at least once a week, usually Friday or Saturday.

Until then, just… re-read my 5,000 word Dragon Age Origins write-up, I guess. This whole feature is responsible for that anyway, and you’ll get the sick pleasure of me doing something similar for Dragon Age II once I muster up the willpower to do so.

Ahhhh Gothic 4. What an unmitigated turd. Actually, that might be too generous...it is so lacking in any kind of uniqueness that calling it a turd is probably too strong. It just is. I played more of it than I care to admit on 360 before finally basically saying "What the fuck am I doing I hate this and am so bored" and never touching it again. Highly, HIGHLY dubious.

Excited for Risen, a game I actually played on my 360, a jankfest of the highest, most PB proportions and I utterly ADORE it. It is so busted at times and rough around the edges, but for whatever reason, it really grabbed me and I even got all but I think one of the achievements in it. I have bounced off of everything else they've made (even Gothic 2), especially Risen 2 and 3, and then somehow they roped me back in with the janktacular Elex this gen. What a weird developer. I like a lot of their ideas, but their games are always right on the edge of breaking, their stories are generally hot nonsense (especially their endings), and they have LITERALLY been making the same variation of the same game for decades. Yet, I'm thankful for their weird shit.

I remember trying out Arcania on the 360, and found it so dull I couldn't make it through the demo. Looking forward to Risen; out of all of PB's games, that's both the one I spent the most time with and the one I'd most like to return to.

I was thinking about dubious RPG's that might fit your series and i thought about Volition's Summoner.

It might not be dubious enough with it's 78 metacritic score, but it has been 19 years since that thing came out so i'm sure that it's very dubious nowadays. I think it's basically a PC rpg that was also put on console. The 2nd installment was a ps2 exclusive, so they made it more of a party-based third person action game.

Thanks for going through these games, it's fun to read about.

This is such a good idea :) Really enjoying your posts mate!

I think I got around 4 hours into Gothic 4 - ran like shit on my old PC!

Ah good, I saw Gothic 4 and wondered "Hm, is Risen on this wheel.."

The first Risen was surprisingly playable as of just a few years ago.. it might not be all that bad.

Its sequels though.. man. Decisions are made in those games..

Daggerfall was hilarious in the sense, that while many games try to have creepy pasta elements, Daggerfall had them by sheer accident, due it over ambitions and manual (which was 50% Shakespeare quotes, 20% Not talking stuff which is in the game, 20% Talking about stuff which isn't in the game and 10% spells which don't work). So you sort find stuff, like Vampirism and Lycantrophy by accident, when my character got Lycantrophy, it freaked me out. There was also the whole rumor about adult dragons. Not to talk bugs, falling in the void, endless dungeons... or simple stuff, such as a random npc making ghost noises (it is real, check out the kid npc on wayrest castle, if you click on him, for unknown reason he make a noise that ghosts in the game make).

I remember seeing Arcania on sales and due have only played Gothic II a long time ago, found the whole, Gothic, Arcania and Risen really confusing and end never pick it up.