ROSS'S GAME DUNGEON: GOTHIC

[Ross Scott]

Merry Game Dungeon!

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[Sexypotato]

Well this must be providence, I actually bought this entire series of games a few days ago.

[luvearlykyary]

I wonder, what RPG is the best one for you? I can see why you prefer Gothic over Elders Scrolls, but is there an RPG that even gets there? Maybe Bloodlines? Or Deus Ex? 

Either way, great video as always. Merry Christmas! 

[Steve the Pocket]

I've definitely heard of this game before, but the name was so generic that I wasn't expecting a premise and story this unique. It kind of sounded more like Diablo or something (or at least half the clones of it you've already covered).

 

Also, that cult leader boss would get along famously with Silver the Hedgehog. If you know, you know.

[StrixLiterata]

Bows becoming powerful only after a while is weirdly realistic: they are a difficult weapon to learn, which is why crossbows, being much easier to operate, were such a big deal.

[StrixLiterata]

The absence of women might be a deliberate decision from the king: they are valuable to the male prisoners, so he might want to send in female convicts only as very valuable "supplies" to keep the camp leaders contented. He might also wish for the convicts not to have children, so as to prevent them from forming a true, sustainable society that might grow self-sufficient and stop trading ore for supplies.

[Mugnum]

The game's landscape looks as if it's made entirely out of brushes, as opposed to the now industry standard of displacement maps with their own limitations

[ultrayoba]

I can't really say why Gothic is compared to Elder Scrolls really, as it has a fundamentally lower scope and a different approach to Morrowind and later games, but I guess a part of it is the fact that previous Elder Scrolls titles have fallen into relative obscurity, because in the end, Gothic is an evolution of those third-person action adventure-RPG hybrid games that started to pop out once Tomb Rader become popular. And one of those games was... 1998 The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard.

Do you want a more handmade limited-size world?
Do you want no respawning enemies, unique encounters and landmarks of interest?
Do you want a hero who can climb ledges, slide from the hills etc.?
Do you want a janky combat and loose collision detection?
Do you want a fast travel as more late option that was immersively inserted into the game? And even a compass and a map.
Do you want to pleasure your eyes with cozy late90s-early00s low poly landscapes?

Yeah, basically Redguard does all this and I always felt that Ultima 9 and TESA Redguard are two major influences on what gothic has become. I enjoyed Redguard more than Gothic, but in part, because it has a really interesting world and backstory. It was the first game for which Kirkbride wrote, so it can be combined with Morrowind in kind of a "blob" in this sense, tho I always felt like Redguard in places does a better job than TES3 with those ideas. But you at the start of the video said that you are "not interested in fantasy backstory" so I will give it a 50/50 in terms will you potentially care to read the included manual/lore book/comic or will just pass it by. Same as it has no level or character progression besides gear and items, so you might be bored of it, even tho I think that it is more pleasing to the eyes than Gothic and its dungeons are a bit more "unique" in this sence.

[ultrayoba]

Regarding the games that "have this look" from Modern Indies, I can from the top of my head say Call of Sargnar. It started as a game tribute to older Betrayal at Krondor and Might & Magic 6 The Mandate of Heaven, but the author over time pushed the graphics into partially being more modern, ie something Gothic2-like. (It is always like this with the indies, they lean into inconsistency)

Still, a nice game, but I don't know how much you will be interested in what is basically a blobber with tactical turn-based combat. I feel like those are outside of your scope of interest, otherwise, you would've played or mentioned Wizards and Warriors 2000 or Wizardry 8 or even Might and Magic 9 (even tho this one is raw..) as kind of RPG games from the age with interesting/relatable mechanics and looks. So you probably better search among "action adventure" games from the era, to avoid old-school RPGing and abstractions like "miss chances". Have you played Drakan Order of the Flame, perchance?

[ultrayoba]

Regarding the remake of Gothic there is a thing where I feel like modern gamers (and modern cinema viewers to a degree) are allergic to any kind of strong artistic vision. When the game has any kind of strong stylized visual narrative some people scream from the start "piss filter!" or "much post effects!" and all they want is empty, flat late90s-early00s PC graphics which most often look like just flat render in Blender without anything.
Because of this instead of attempting to implement Adam Adamoviz's concept art in Fallout 3 with artistic representation of absolute monochromatic postapocalyptic industrial horror we good "just colorful autumn forest" in most of Fallout 4. The same goes with Skyrim which you so disliked for "Tinted filters" which actually help to distinguish regions, set the mood, and the artistic atmosphere.

And Gothic remake actually attempts this: the original game already presents this: this is a drab, dying rocky landscape somewhere in rocky mountains fully cut into canyons and mines. Covered under a magical dome where dwellers probably cut lots of trees and hunted a good chunk of animals and wildlife. And this is the dark, edgy and grim world with to-the-face presentation. Being more brutal and grotesque in its visual stylization will actually help a lot to portray its story and its world, and communicate feelings. Would you want for example Sin City, 300, Terminator 2, and Blade Runner 2049 will be filmed without any monochromatic color grading and with just plane flat "realistic" lights and depth? Be a "fairtylate"?

Anyway, I know lots of people have no respect for academic art, and they will need "realism and logic" only in their settings - so here it is, a place where I've been irl - those are former forests around soviet  Monchegorsk metallurgy plant. After throwing lots of dust, mining and other mineral pollution it becomes a rocky hellscape with dead trees. Can this happen in a place covered by a magic dome where people mine MAGIC ORE? I freely can believe it. And it looks more hooking and striking and memorable than just "green forest". Especially since the original gothic game already had it partially in its colors, landscapes and weird bird-lizard animals. It was never a sonic's green hill to begin with.

[Im_CIA]

I home the next video will be about ponies!

[Kaiosama TLJ]

Well, it seems that Ross mastered the technique of missing the ground mentioned in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. Congratulations!

 

Speaking of RPGs that make you hunger for XP, I would add Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines to the list. You only earn XP by completing the main story quests and sidequests, and some have multiple solutions, but certain solutions grant more XP than others.

[Steve the Pocket]

I feel like there's a better way to achieve a desired color palette than to just run the whole game through a post-processing filter. One that produces more natural results. Unfortunately it would require making it easy to adjust the colors of individual assets after they've been painted and plopped down into the landscape, and do so in a way that doesn't also just make them look they've been run through a post-processing filter. Either that or have very tight control over the asset development pipeline in the first place, and limit how much assets can be recycled across multiple zones. That last part probably isn't too difficult now that studios seem intent on procedurally generating unique textures for every single surface of the entire game, even though it results in games that clock in at over 100GB total and load times that test the limits of even SSDs.

[ScumCoder]

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attempting to implement Adam Adamoviz's concept art in Fallout 3 with artistic representation of absolute monochromatic postapocalyptic industrial horror

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Skyrim which you so disliked for "Tinted filters" which actually help to distinguish regions, set the mood, and the artistic atmosphere.

First, I can't believe anyone can seriously praise FO3 and Skyrim's art direction. Even rather hardcore Bethesda fans agree that it's an ugly eyesore.

It's been talked over ad nauseam. Bethesda sucks at proper lighting; Bethesda throws ambient light sources all over their maps; ambient light sources make everything look faded and withered; Bethesda amps up texture contrast to try to compensate that. It's not artistic intent, it's incompetence.

 

Second, even if we're talking about artistic intent, tint filter is an incredibly cheap attempt at that. It doesn't require any particular artistic talent, it's basically a checkbox and a color picker. It's the equivalent of trying to make the ending of Mass Effect 3 look artsy and deep by throwing in a mysterious child and sad piano music in the last 10 minutes of the game instead of doing some actual good writing.

 

Third, author's intent is utterly inconsequential in comparison with my personal enjoyment of the game. As a game developer, you can throw in any crap to "set the mood and the artistic atmosphere", as long as there is an option in the settings menu to turn that off. (Notice that Ross never complained about vignette filters, grain filters, tinting and other such stuff as long as it's possible to get rid of it).

If you are feeling artsy and your goal is to express yourself - sure, why not; but in this case prepare for people not sharing your tastes to pass your game by and you becoming a starving artist. Otherwise understand that your main job is to please your audience, and shove your artistic vision™ where sun don't shine.

[Deep Dive Devin]

I'm trying to think about all the amazing games with great aesthetics and art direction I've played across my life, and whether any one of them would be improved by tinting, chromatic aberration or vignettes applied across the entire image for the whole playthrough. And nope, I cannot think of a single one. Elden Ring was much nicer-looking when I corrected the vignetting, ditto for New Vegas when I got rid of the nicotine-stained look.

 

I wish depth of field was used differently in games, it's clearly trying to look like a nice photo when it should really be something more like mipmapping, smoothing out stuff that's too busy in the distance. Also, fuck most motion blur.

 

But I agree that the extremely simple option to turn off post-processing effects would solve all of these issues and let devs do whatever stupid ideas they want.

[ultrayoba]

 

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I feel like there's a better way to achieve a desired color palette than to just run the whole game through a post-processing filter. One that produces more natural results. Unfortunately it would require making it easy to adjust the colors of individual assets after they've been painted and plopped down into the landscape, and do so in a way that doesn't also just make them look they've been run through a post-processing filter. Either that or have very tight control over the asset development pipeline in the first place, and limit how much assets can be recycled across multiple zones. That last part probably isn't too difficult now that studios seem intent on procedurally generating unique textures for every single surface of the entire game, even though it results in games that clock in at over 100GB total and load times that test the limits of even SSDs.

Real-life color "tints" are the result of the atmosphere or liquids playing with the light source, be it the sun. And actual atmospheric filters and other post-effects were the way we went in video games: this is how we represent things in paintings, and this is how we used them in movies for almost hundreds of years. More than that, in art-media form we can stylize it, force it and twist it to communicate information with the viewer most effectively, which in the end, is the goal of all art.

What you describe is not some "ground-breaking technology that requires an SSD" but an old, archaic way it was done - with texture color tints and baked in-light, in the form of vertex lights etc. other stuff you can see in some PC late 90s games, PS1 and sometimes on Dreamcast (this Sonic Adventure 1 "lantern" engine). This worked to a degree on low resolutions and CRT monitors, but thats about it. PC and Dreamcast (which had a graphics chip from then a PC 3d accelerator card manufacturer) games from the era looked notoriously flat and cardboard with clashing photo textures and any kind of lighting, and it continued throughout 00s, when games from gamecube or PS2 were ported lazily. PC GTA San Anders looks like flat garbage precisely because emotion engine dynamic color filters and reflections and some baked-in lights and light transitions were not ported to the PC, so you need now to install mods to make GTA SA not look like some techdemo in the editor render.

 

[ultrayoba]

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First, I can't believe anyone can seriously praise FO3 and Skyrim's art direction. Even rather hardcore Bethesda fans agree that it's an ugly eyesore.

That's a.. statement. "everyone says it is bad", quite argumentive.

And from Bethesda games which probably, excluding Morrowind, have the strongest and most awesome art direction. Adam Adamowicz
was perhaps one of the best creatives Beth ever hired, with an actual strong vision and core ideas that he carried through all his concept art, and surprisingly, a large part of it was actually implemented - far from fully, because of sad Xbox360-PS3 limitations on detail and geometry, but his world of stylized post-industrial horror, where the world consumed by uncanny, cold and unfriendly "machine". In a way, his Atompunk vision was not just an interpretation of the "future as was seen by the 1950s", but a twist on it, clashing reality, a dream turned nightmare, inspired by classics like the movie "Brazil". And then, this dying world was annihilated and we are in the post-purgatory state, where all remains of life, all remains of hope were turned into eternal piles of mud with remains of rusted sharp metal.

You don't like it? Were you off-put by it? Great! Since this is the goal. From the first minutes of the Iron Zhur's music which heavied general orchestra theme heavied by clashing sounds of scratching metal and industrial machinery to the view of the earth from space where you can see that it is all "brown" - this game was conceived to be about nightmare, about death, about inescapable lack of hope. And despite all the limitations, or laziness of Todd's team in writing and presentation, sole atmosphere and artwork carry it.

 

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If you are feeling artsy and your goal is to express yourself - sure, why not; but in this case prepare for people not sharing your tastes to pass your game by and you becoming a starving artist. Otherwise understand that your main job is to please your audience, and shove your artistic vision™ where sun don't shine.

This is why games are not art. In actual art, the artist has the power to be uncompromised, to be free to make strong statements and expressions of his ideas. To choose the audience with which it resonates or not. But this is not the case with the big game market, or often, big movie market: they need to be "attractive" to as much audience as they can. So they create "consumables" where you can't have any kind of strong visions or to deliver some statements. Everything should be equalized, simplified, and made conventionally "attractive" to the "average person". And what the average person wants is the dumbest, blandest, most empty and devoid of any kind of personality product.

Because "everyone" should be your audience to sell the "product". You can't just say "this guy is not my audience". And it goes for everything - art, gameplay, design, plot, presentation. 

[ScumCoder]

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Real-life color "tints" are the result of the atmosphere or liquids playing with the light source, be it the sun.

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Anyway, I know lots of people have no respect for academic art, and they will need "realism and logic" only in their settings - so here it is, a place where I've been irl

Don’t you see that you are contradicting yourself?.. You mock people who demand realism, then immediately use realistic ugliness as a case for tint filters.
The whole point of games is that they don’t need to look as ugly as real life. If I wanted to see “former forests around […] metallurgy plant” I wouldn’t need to play a game, just look out of the window.

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"everyone says it is bad", quite argumentive.

It’s literally the polar opposite. Everyone™ says that Skyrim is the best RPG ever made (usually because this is the only RPG that these people have ever played). I find it hilarious that you snobbishly distance yourself from “the average person who wants the dumbest, blandest, most empty and devoid of any kind of personality product”, while at the same time whacking off to one of the most egregious examples of a dumbest, blandest, most empty and devoid of any kind of personality product.

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from Bethesda games which probably, excluding Morrowind, have the strongest and most awesome art direction.

That's a.. statement. Quite argumentive [sic].
(Note that I’m not denying your right to have an opinion, merely pointing out that it’s what it is – just an opinion, as subjective as mine).

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This is why games are not art. In actual art, the artist has the power to be uncompromised, to be free to make strong statements and expressions of his ideas. To choose the audience with which it resonates or not.

This is wrong on several different levels.

 

First, pretty much all works conventionally considered “art” (say, Sistine Chapel) were made by people who for all intents and purposes were craftsmen for hire. They were hired by an employer; given a technical assignment; work progress was monitored; then came the remediation certificate, acceptance and transfer certificate, and final payment. In other words, what nowadays indisputably constitutes art, was produced by roughly the same process as modern commercial video games.

You can argue that then the end goal of the employer was to make something that would please them, whereas now the end goal is to maximize profit; but the point is, there is such thing as good management. Not being 100% free to do whatever you want is not an unconditionally bad thing.

 

This brings us to the second point, which is that being 100% free to do whatever you want is not an unconditionally good thing. There is a long, long list of examples of creative people who produced stellar works as long as they were constrained and challenged by people around them, and immediately started producing schlock as soon as the reins were slackened. George Lucas had the same horrid ideas that he eventually implemented in prequels and “enhanced” editions back when the original movie was being filmed, but back then people he worked with had the leverage to say “whoa, this is kind of a crappy idea”. Wachowski brot^W siblings had their creativity heavily constrained while working on The Matrix. Same with Shyamalan working on Sixth Sense. You know what happened when these people got 100% creative freedom.

 

Last (but not least), this is not why games are not art, and this cannot be why games are not art, for the simple and obvious reason that you can make a game under your own steam and thus enjoy being “uncompromised, free to make strong statements and expressions of your ideas, to choose the audience with which it resonates or not”. Nobody stops you. A whole hell of a lot of people do this. Itch.io is bursting with indie games that do just that. We don’t live in Equilibrium society; nobody is going to ram into your apartment if you create and publish a game that looks exactly how you want it to. Go ahead, “choose your audience”.

What’s that? Ohhh, you want to be able to artistically express yourself while also being paid for that? Go fuck yourself, entitled brat. You should be thankful that you are even able to put food on your table while doing a somewhat creative job in the first place. Per each “oppressed” artist like you, there is a dozen of people with infinitely more talent who are forced to waste it by flipping burgers or cleaning out grease traps.

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You don't like it? Were you off-put by it? Great! Since this is the goal.

God I hate people who perceive games as monolithic entities that should either be experienced in their original form or not experienced at all.
If I like 99% of the game and detest the remaining 1%, I have every right to tear that 1% out and throw it away; refer to Ross playing Dark Souls with one hit kill “cheat” and enjoying the hell out of it. (There is a reason why I put “cheat” in quotes and it’s that there is no such thing as “cheats” in a singleplayer game).

There is no such thing as “right” or “wrong” way to play a game. Don’t you dare telling me how I should enjoy it. You are in no right to judge other people’s tastes.

[Deep Dive Devin]

There is nothing that humans do that cannot be art when given the proper context; games are art because we say they are. Bad art, cynical, crappy, corporate art is art. And video games, whether someone sticks their hand in the soup with crappy post-processing effects or not, will always be art.

 

Also, there's something hilarious about using Sonic Adventure 1, a game that famously made such good use of the Dreamcast's unique hardware to bring out a sleek, unique Y2K aesthetic that it was utterly butchered when placed on less-fitting hardware (yes, Sonic Team themselves also did a bad job, but that's beside the point), to illustrate how apparently this was the wrong way to do things. If it proves anything, it's that we should have been squeezing way more out of less-powerful hardware decades ago, and just streamlined the differences between platforms more quickly. Baked lighting and vertex paint is still a perfectly legitimate and often surrealistically-beautiful aesthetic, it's just that stuff like real-time lighting is easier to market with the good ol' shiny screenshots from the Deus Ex 2 video, or else allows a scene to be lit faster than catering each palette or paint to a specific mood. None of this is a defense of aggressive and unflattering post-processing either way though...because it just doesn't look good! And it's not ugly because it's realistic, because it's not realistic. It's ugly. New Vegas looked a lot more real when I changed it to something actually natural looking, and it didn't stop communicating a dilapidated wasteland in that. Elden Ring is a fantasy game, but an annoying vignette cutting off my peripheral vision made it neither more real nor more fantastical, it just annoyed me.

Edited December 28, 2024 by Deep Dive Devin (see edit history)

[ultrayoba]

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Don’t you see that you are contradicting yourself?..

No. The foundations of art are always based on the mix of reality and understanding of human perception and then - twist them, modify, amplify to deliver a message, idea or feeling. This feeling or idea should not nessecery be "pleasant".

However, you took two random quotes from random places and mashed them together, one of which was a comment on a purely technical thing, with cross reference of basic academic principles and technology. If you have any technical comments on techniques of baked-in lighting, vertex color, vertex shadow, normalmaps and so on, to actually answer what was written - I am ready to hear.

 

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The whole point of games is that they don’t need to look as ugly as real life.

There is nothing to answer when a person solely sees something as an object of escapism for their personal taste which said person can not even explain, thus using his personal basic emotions/reflections as "ugly/good/bad" as the description. "Game ugly bad me don't like" - those words mean absoluetly nothing. No technical description, no academic art description, not even some kind of explanation.

 

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It’s literally the polar opposite. Everyone™ says that Skyrim is the best RPG ever made (usually because this is the only RPG that these people have ever played).

And same time you said that "nobody likes the art of Skyrim and Fallout 3", eh? If you wish to play the contradiction.

 

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I find it hilarious that you snobbishly distance yourself from “the average person who wants the dumbest, blandest, most empty and devoid of any kind of personality product”, while at the same time whacking off to one of the most egregious examples of a dumbest, blandest, most empty and devoid of any kind of personality product.

To make a popular and beloved by many thing, you don't need to follow the demands of the audience and lower yourself to a common denominator (which Skyrim still did in its writing and world-building, but this is a different topic). This is how things are done which creates trends, create later imitation: not by giving the audience what they think they want, but by creating something interesting out of yourself, with a vision. Not just base all your creative process onto a checklist of "what the audience wants" and create something for everyone and same time for nobody.
 

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That's a.. statement. Quite argumentive [sic].
(Note that I’m not denying your right to have an opinion, merely pointing out that it’s what it is – just an opinion, as subjective as mine).

I can defend my opinions. With facts - technical, historical, or ones from academic art. Yes, Fallout 3 and Skyrim and Morrowind had the strongest art direction teams out of most Bethesda games. Simple by the fact that Oblivion barely had proper concept art, besides a handful of basic images - they didn't have a big concept art department during the development and some of the things they just failed to carry. The same goes for Tribunal addon for TES3 for example, there is no proper concept art for this at all, and part of it was assembled from leftover ideas. Daggerfall from the old Bethesda team had more than a dozen artists but they got in and left so many things unfinished and inconsistent, and about Daggerfall and later Battlespire and in part Morrowind you can read about in lots of Mark Jones interviews and old articles.

This is not the place for giant walls of text on the history of the development of multiple 25 years old games, so this was shortened in the idea that the person I am talking with is familiar with the context, or, at least, will go and read about all this himself, without this attempt at "gotcha".


Basically all this topic, if simplified, comes from the brainless repetition of some older late 00s-10s perception of graphics without understanding of them: there was a point where games tried to be cinematic and had any kind of personality in terms of visuals, but there was a simultaneous wave of games which or overdid bloom, or overdid color correction. Combined with lower resolution, PS3 and Xbox 360 also had problems with texture resolution and they liked to put some overlay effects to hide it. And from this was born this narrative of "PC games of old were so sharp and awesome! Color - bad, lighting - bad, blur and bloom effects - bad! We need absolutely flat render of idTech3 with maximum size textures and no post effects!"

And then those "piss filter" and "soap graphics" become repeated without any meaning to them from people who can't explain their taste properly or can see something wrong, but can't say what and leaning into braindead absolutism and then to just "me like - me don't like".

It is sad that real life is ugly for you tho, that I can say for sure.