Gaming Weekly W46: Arcania – A Gothic Tale
Monday, November 9, 2009Since everybody is so hyped up about Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, I thought it would be more interesting to talk about a game that’s in my favorite genre and if I didn’t blog about this one I know that you guys wouldn’t know that it existed. Why? You ask, well since they haven’t released much info on the game at all Which is wierd since Jowood (the publisher) wants it to be an AAA-game. I thought that they would hype it more. Oh well let’s move on.
Arcania -- A Gothic Tale is a western RPG developed by Spellbound Entertainment for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. The game is essentially the fourth game in the Gothic franchise and is being designed for the purpose to appeal to RPG-fans in North America where the series never have been very successful.
The World of Arcania
The world of Arcania is a rich world with several different climate zones, rich and lush environment with the cities,castles dungeons. What’s unique in this game though is that the weather really influences the game world. I’ll talk more about that later. The game is said to take place several years after the last game, where you play as another “nameless hero” who has been tasked to correct the doings of the previous hero which is now an evil king.
Since the game is in the Gothic-series we should expect a lot the same appearing, and that’s a good thing. More than 100 different weapons and pieces of armor is said to be in the game. The different kinds of weapon will include bows, as well as the usual melee roster of weapons. Two-handed as well as one-handed weapon in conjuction with a shield. Destructive magic-spells as well as time-of-day and weather spells will be in.
The weather actually influences the world and as seen and said in this video, and right now it looks amazing.
The game actually features many of the features found in the previous games. It means that we get a skilltree-based level up system, all kinds of skills like alchemy and blacksmithing. The game also has guilds that will keep the player busy, the game is said to be around 80 hours of gameplay and that the story-critical quests only is around 30-40 hours of those.
The release of the game should be coming up in 2010, so after you guys have played Risen and still want more you’ll still have more Gothic-goodness in 2010.
Spellbound
Spellbound is a german video game developer. You have probably played some of their games: Airline Tycoon or the Desperado-series. It was founded in 94 and Arcania will be their first next-gen game for consoles. According to their website they say that one of their highest priorities is to develop games that are free of errors, and that’s why they have their own testing department.
A healthy priority indeed, since the games from Piranha Bytes (developed earlier Gothic games and Risen) have had their games riddled with bugs in their release. Hopefully there will be no problems now that Spellbound develops the fourth installment of the series.
