The Chronicles of Myrtana: Archolos is an open-world action-adventure role-playing game, based on the popular Gothic series, which was originally developed by Piranha Bytes in the early 2000s. As a total conversion mod for Gothic 2, created by fans and released near the very end of 2021, Archolos offers a full-length,
standalone experience with up to 100 hours or more of content in an
all-original map and story, plus tons of new mechanics and upgrades to
the existing Gothic formula. It's therefore worth stressing that this isn't just a mod for Gothic 2, but it's an entirely new game altogether, one so extensive and professional in quality that it could easily be confused for an official Gothic game. It is completely free to download and play,
so long as you have a copy of Gothic 2: Gold Edition on which to run
it. The mod was originally written in Polish and features professional Polish voice acting, but includes English subtitles as well as other language options for the interface and subtitles.
While you could conceivably play Archolos as your first introduction to the Gothic series, due to it occurring chronologically first and being a mostly separate adventure that requires no prior knowledge of the Gothic series to understand, it's an experience that's probably best enjoyed if you've already played Gothic 1 and 2 so that you can appreciate the extra refinement that it brings to the established formula, in addition to all the small references and Easter eggs that set up future events in the series.
The game takes place during a tipping point in the orc war against humanity, several years before the start of Gothic 1, as the orcs begin to seize the upper hand and as the war's effects begin to be felt among the common folk in the outer reaches of the kingdom. You play as a young man named Marvin, fleeing from your hometown with your brother Jorn to the island of Archolos, in hopes of escaping the war and starting a new life. While trying to integrate yourself with the local farming village, your brother is mysteriously kidnapped, thus instigating the main quest to track him down and learn more about the people responsible. The rest of the game involves exploring a densely-structured open world map where enemies and loot do not scale to your level; completing side quests for various NPCs and communities to gain their trust and earn valuable rewards; and leveling up your character by investing skill points in different categories so you can get better at fighting all the difficult enemies that populate the world.
If you're familiar with the early Gothic games, then you'll feel right at home with Archolos, since it's based on the same engine and uses all of the same core mechanics, even reusing a bunch of the exact same audiovisual components. That simple basis does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of achieving that authentic Gothic feel, since it shares more of the same fundamental DNA than every other Piranha Bytes game to have come out since Gothic 1 and 2. However, Archolos does feature a certain "je ne sais quoi" in its design that extends a little deeper than simply copying those superficial aspects -- it really achieves an authentic feel in the tone and atmosphere, the early game difficulty and progression, the world design and exploration, as well as the general quest design and character interactions, with the added benefit of a lot of key improvements to various mechanics that weren't necessarily problems in the original games, but are all the more welcome to see in Archolos. This includes things like new quality of life improvements, new evolution on existing mechanics, all-new features and systems, and corrections for certain issues that Piranha Bytes never had the chance to address originally. You could even argue that some things are done even better than the originals, which is facilitated by the developers having 20 years of fan feedback from the original games to incorporate into Archolos. So in a way, it does kind of feel like "Gothic 2: Night of the Raven, But Better."
But with that being said, is it ACTUALLY a better game than Gothic 2? In terms of scope, ambition, content, features, and innovations, sure, I think it absolutely is. But in terms of overall enjoyability? For me, I'm not so sure. Because despite the impressive amount of effort and overall quality to everything, especially for a team of volunteers who I presume were creating the game largely in their spare time and at their own expense, while offering the game to everyone completely free, I do feel that there are a few ways in which Archolos strays from the successful Gothic formula that I love so much, with a few aspects that I feel aren't quite as good as the originals, or that otherwise sour my overall enjoyment a little. So I don't think I can actually rate it as being the "best" Gothic game.
Watch this same review in video format.
Bear in mind that Archolos's praises have been sung high and low already by fans who voted it overwhelmingly as the Best Mod of 2021 and the "best modern mod of recent memory," leading to it being dubbed the "Mod of the Decade" on ModDB. Quite simply, you don't need me to tell you that the game is good and worth playing -- if you know and like the original Gothic games, then of course Archolos is worth playing because it's basically the exact same game but with tons of new features and content. They're so similar that, at a certain point, me articulating what makes Archolos a good game is just me reviewing Gothic, which is not really specific to Archolos and so I don't want to just rehash those same points I've been making over and over again in various written articles and videos for the last 14 years. And at least to me, it's not very interesting for a review to just reiterate all the ways that it's exactly like something that came before, while all of the new stuff that it brings to the table should be self-evident without me having to point it all out. So to me, the more interesting aspect is to discuss the ways in which it's NOT like Gothic and why I would have a hard time rating it as the better game.
This review is therefore going to be a little more critical than your average hype-train praise-a-thon, but I need to stress that I'm not saying any of this to ridicule the hard work that its creators put into it -- their effort is extraordinary and deserves the utmost respect I can give. I just think the game has some issues that I wish could've been better, and they only bother me because the game is so good overall that they stand out as blemishes on what I believe could've been a perfect (or at least near perfect) game. As always I will try to be impartial by considering every possible angle and perspective when I can, but at the end of the day I can only speak to how the game played out in my experience, which may not reflect everyone else's experience universally.
Please note that I have talked about Archolos at length already in three previous videos, not including my obvious April Fool's joke which I did slip a few legitimate criticisms into, and so I don't want to repeat too many things that I've already mentioned elsewhere unless I feel it becomes relevant to some greater point I want to make, here. This review is not really meant to be a comprehensive analysis of every little thing in the game, in other words, but will instead be more of my "Final Thoughts" after finishing the game twice, while trying to focus on what I consider to be the main, important subjects. I will try to phrase and edit this entire review to avoid major spoilers pertaining to the story and main quest, with adequate warnings before getting into any of that, but there will still be plenty of minor spoilers for less significant things, like specific side quests and other bits of optional content, so while I think you could watch this review before playing the game and not have your enjoyment adversely affected by it, you still might want to be careful depending on how sensitive you are to spoilers.
As I've said repeatedly throughout my previous Archolos videos, the story (and by association, the main quest) is one of the things I take the greatest issue with. It has laudable aspects that I enjoy, of course, but its implementation -- and namely its pacing -- served as a major detriment to my overall enjoyment of the game, to the point of making me actually want to quit playing at times.
For me, the game was off to a rocky start from the very beginning, with a main premise that lacked any kind of concrete momentum or direction to motivate gameplay progression. It's supposed to be more of a grounded scenario in which you are simply a war refugee trying to start a new life in a place that isn't very accepting towards outsiders, during a time of high political tension on account of the orc war and the strain that the island has been experiencing while trying to accommodate the king's demands in the war effort. The game's marketing is very clear that you are not the chosen hero, and so your main quest to start the game is not to defeat some evil archdemon or save the world from the armies of darkness, but instead it's just to.... figure out a way to earn a living among society, which is kind of a vague, aimless objective with no clear end-goal condition, and something that I don't find particularly compelling for the start of a fantasy role-playing game.
This proved to be a non-motivating factor in me to pursue the main quest in the first place, because I didn't care about finding
Jorn at all, since the game portrayed him as an
unlikable individual and I didn't enjoy all the time spent essentially
babysitting him in chapter one. So it wasn't just that I was indifferent towards finding him, but almost
actively disinterested in finding him. Plus, you just don't get much time with him in chapter one before he goes missing -- it's basically just a few sporadic conversations here and there -- which makes it hard to develop any real sense of attachment to him. To me, he was just a guy
I barely knew and didn't like at all, which made setting out to find
him feel like an obligatory chore. As before, that can still be fine and acceptable if it leads somewhere interesting, but in this case it doesn't go anywhere at all -- at least, not for a really long time as the game's pacing gets utterly bogged down in a deliberate effort to waste your time with other seemingly unrelated tasks that take away any sense of progress or momentum towards actually finding Jorn.
Because despite everything the game tries to tell you about how finding Jorn is supposedly your highest priority and Marvin's primary motivation for the bulk of the game, that's not really what the story itself is about. The ultimate point of the story is supposed to be about internal conflict
on the island between multiple political factions, which eventually
escalates to outright warfare. As such, the story is really more about the island's story than your own, with it really pertaining to a bunch of key characters other than Marvin or Jorn; searching for Jorn is just the game's pretext to get you interacting with all these different people, with you serving as an unwitting agent in
everyone else's agendas along the way while you go from person to person trying to get their assistance finding Jorn, and doing endless favors for other people before they'll supposedly help you. This constitutes the entirety of chapters two, three, and four, with you stuck on a perpetual wild goose chase running in circles supposedly looking for Jorn while the game deliberately strings you along on the flimsy pretense that "Well, maybe this person will contribute something of value to Jorn's search after you finish their task," and "Well, maybe this seemingly unrelated sub-plot they're sending you to work on will coincidentally reveal some clue about Jorn's disappearance, so maybe it'll be worthwhile in the end." It's not always clear in the moment where any of these different sub-plots are
supposed to be going or how anything is supposed to tie in with your search for Jorn, and so every time the game adds another detour in your path towards finding Jorn, it feels like the game is coming to a screeching halt, over and over and over again, before it can ever get itself going properly.
Throughout chapters two, three, and four, you're doing a bunch of quests to find a way into the city, then doing a bunch of quests to gain citizenship, then doing a bunch of quests to join a faction, then doing a bunch of quests to resolve your faction's primary interest, none of which leads to any direct progress in actually finding Jorn. And then once you finally get a clue about Jorn you do a bunch of quests to figure out where a hidden location is and do a bunch of quests to gain entry there, then do a bunch of quests to gain the confidence of that area's leader, then you do a bunch of quests to get access to a guy who was supposedly one of the two people who abducted Jorn, except this trail proves to be a dead end, so then you just go back to town like "Well I guess I'll report back to my faction leader and see if they need anything else done." And then suddenly you're doing a bunch of quests to figure out who tried to assassinate a wealthy businessman in town, and then you're doing a bunch of quests to gain access to another restricted area, then you're doing a bunch of quests to gain that leader's confidence so you can follow up on another potential clue into Jorn's whereabouts which coincidentally involves helping that person resolve an unrelated problem of their own, and so on and so on. That's all of course in addition to the tons and tons of optional side quests and exploration that you may get involved with along the way. The quests themselves are generally pretty fun and engaging when just considering them by themselves, but they make the whole main quest line feel like a series of random, disjointed side quests that have been strung together with no greater sense of purpose or escalating momentum. And the longer this went on, the more annoyed and frustrated I became with the stagnant pacing that felt like the story was never going anywhere.
The whole thing suffers a bit of Witcher 3 syndrome, where you're presented with a time-sensitive main quest of seemingly utmost importance, wherein your brother is not only in danger from the people who took him, but also the bloodfly venom running through his veins for which you have the cure that you didn't get a chance to administer, and so you're not just trying to rescue him from his captors but also get the treatment to him in time. And yet the open world gameplay design incentivizes you to take your sweet, leisurely time looking for him because it's in your best interest to do as much side content along the way that you care to do to ensure that you're seeing as much of what the game has to offer, and also to make sure you're improving your character sufficiently so that you can handle all the difficult challenges that have been thrown your way from the very beginning. Meanwhile, the side quests don't always synergize well with the pacing of the main quest, meaning that many of them don't seem to be borne out of whatever the main problem of that chapter is, which becomes more and more problematic as the game goes on when your attention SHOULD be more focused on solving the bigger, more pressing issues.
It really seems like the main quest should have been established a little differently so that there's a little more leeway in the pacing to excuse or justify why you spend so much time on optional side content when Jorn's life is supposedly in danger. Like, it actually becomes meta and self-referential how often Marvin or other characters remark on why you're spending so much time bothering with all these frivolous side quests when you should be looking for your brother instead. Like what if you actually got him the cure before he's abducted, so that you don't really know for certain how much danger Jorn is actually in, given that you don't really know anything about who took him or why? And how about if Jorn's disappearance were a little more ambiguous so that there was some question as to whether he might have gone with the supposed kidnappers willingly? That way it doesn't seem like his life is in immediate danger, but you still have the mystery as to why he vanished so suddenly to motivate your search, without the ticking clock element undermining all the optional side content and vice versa.
To the game's credit, there is actually a secret ending if you ignore all possible side content and focus exclusively on the main quest, which is a pretty cool detail that they thought to include something like that. In a way, that does validate the supposed importance of the main quest because it is actually somewhat time-sensitive, but it's really more of a challenge run easter egg than a legitimate ending as far as I'm concerned, since playing in that way requires that you that you ignore 95% of what the game has to offer; that you challenge yourself to being way lower level than you probably should be; and that you almost completely disregard the whole point of it being an open-world game. To me, that pretty much ruins the whole experience, so I would never care to actually do that myself. So while it's cool that this secret ending exists, I don't think its mere existence completely excuses the self-conflicting balance of the main quest against the optional side content, and vice versa, since either way you're forced to ignore some major aspect of the gameplay or story. For most people, I would say the best way to go is to just play the game as normal and experience the canon ending that 99% of players will get, and then just look up the secret ending on YouTube.
Regardless, the main quest made me want to quit playing altogether during chapters three and four when the game seemed to lose all track of the plot with the endless mandatory diversions, some of which feel very much like content padding put in there simply to stretch out the main quest. I mean, for as interesting as some of the events are at the hidden location during chapter three, it's almost completely extraneous to the main plot since you don't learn anything important about Jorn or his abductors that you didn't already deduce, and the people there don't factor in to the big conflict in chapters five and six when the real story actually kicks off, except for one or maybe two if you do an optional thing -- otherwise everyone else just kind of stays off to the side minding their own business the whole time. So I feel like you could easily cut that whole sub-plot out of the game entirely to speed up the pacing, and you wouldn't really lose anything of importance in the story. Sure, you do meet Ivy there briefly, at the very end of everything, and she ends up playing a bigger role later on, but there's no reason you had to meet her there first instead of just meeting her in the city 10 minutes later during the next stage of the main quest anyway; the same goes for your hometown friend Coen, who could've easily just shown up at the city harbor at any other point in the game to tell you his news of the rumors swirling around your homeland about you and Jorn, and there could've been any other opportunity to run into Beckett -- the guy who marooned you at the start of the game -- somewhere else to get your comeuppance.
I made a note about 70 hours into my playthrough that I was starting to feel bored waiting for the story to start, and it became a damning realization that after 70 hours of Gothic 1 you would already be long finished with the entire game, which has arguably the best story of any Piranha Bytes game, and that after 70 hours of Gothic 2 you would be likely nearing the end if you weren't finished with it already. I mean, my most recent Let's Play of Gothic 2 was only 70 hours in its entirety, and that includes the expansion, so in 122 hours of the original games you can experience three entire story arcs between Gothic 1, Gothic 2, and Night of the Raven, each with its own beginning, middle, and end to the story; whereas 122 hours of Archolos may only get you through the equivalent of the first act of a typical three-act story. And while some might argue that to be a good thing because of just how much total content is available to experience, that can be a bad thing in my eyes if it's twice as long but paced as half fast, making it feel like it's four times slower.
The long play time and slow pacing is not just a fault of the meandering main quest line, but is due to a variety of other factors as well. For starters, there seems to be a lot more content in this game just in general, as compared to the originals, which leads to a lot more time that can be spent exploring a larger, denser map and completing a greater number of side quests, which is further compounded by a greater amount of newly-spawning enemies, not just between chapters but also during chapters. There's even respawning resources for things like wood, fish, and ore which might encourage you to spend way more time in this game repetitively clearing the map out because there is literally always more Things to Do™ constantly. A lot more time is also spent just running across the map, not just because the larger map size and higher number of quests sending you to more places on the map, but also due to the more disjointed fast-travel system, with three different networks of teleport points that don't connect to each other, and that always require you to travel from one starting point to another. So you can't just equip a teleport rune and warp straight to the point nearest to where you want to go; instead, you have to run to the nearest teleporter circle, then cast the spell to warp to another teleporter circle, then run to a Guild Runner or Sailor and then pay them to warp you to another Guild Runner or Sailor, then run to where you ultimately want to be, and then reverse that entire process to get back to the quest-giver. While the game does give you more total fast-travel points, and it does make them available much earlier in the game, it doesn't completely solve the issue because you will still spend a lot of time in this game just going from Point A to Point B over and over and over again.
It's worth noting that many of the issues I've had with Archolos up until this point in the review weren't problems for me with the original games, which I felt did a better job of hooking me from the beginning and getting to the point of things a lot faster.
Gothic 1 you could argue has a similarly vague premise to start the game about having to find a way to survive as a newcomer in an unwelcoming new land, but the anarchic fantasy prison setting alone was just so fascinating that it pulled me into the experience right away, whereas the island of Archolos presents itself as a much more plain and ordinary sort of world at first. Like, I've done quests in quaint farming villages and explored the countryside in so many fantasy RPGs, including Gothic 2, and that's the primary setting for the first chapter of Archolos. It's a very well-realized setting with plenty of high-quality content, certainly, but it is a much more standard, familiar type of setting that therefore doesn't spark as much intriguing desire in me to explore. It also helps that Gothic gives you a clear goal with a specific end point from the very start, to deliver a letter to the fire mages in the castle; even if the task itself is fairly arbitrary, since the letter doesn't come back into the story later, the contents of the letter do foreshadow the main plot with the Sleeper, and I find that it gives me enough concrete direction to motivate gameplay because I know exactly where I need to go to accomplish my objective and what steps need to be taken to achieve it. And then once you deliver the letter, the story gets going immediately in chapter two when you're sent to investigate the strange ritual that the Sect Camp is planning; even though the true nature of the story hasn't been revealed by that point, that's still a very interesting premise to me given the mysterious nature of the Sleeper and the fact that this is alleged to be a potential way out of the Barrier, which I felt was kind of an implied goal from the beginning. Then of course, the map is much smaller and the game is much shorter overall, while focusing heavily on the direct throughline of the plot in later chapters where there's always a direct causal relation of events leading one thing to another. There may not be any new side quests in later chapters, which I've been critical of in the past, but this does help the game's pacing by focusing your attention on what really matters at that point -- the main quest and saving the Colony -- thus making sure that the story is always moving forward at a brisk and engaging pace.
Gothic 2 is often criticized for having a much more straightforward plot, where the game comes out from the very beginning telling you "There's dragons, we have to kill them," and while that does bother me from a storytelling perspective I find that it works out alright from a gameplay perspective because it provides that clear end-goal objective that helps to motivate everything along the way, since you have an idea about where everything is building towards and what the stakes are. The "save the world" plot may not be very engaging on a personal level, but it's easy to understand why the main quest is important and why it must be done because the outcome is going to affect much more than just yourself or one, single family member. Once you get into chapter two, that raises the stakes further and makes it personal for me by seeing all the rampant destruction to the Valley of Mines, a place I had grown so accustomed to in the previous game that I felt a greater sense of loss at seeing it destroyed in Gothic 2 than I did at losing Jorn in chapter one of Archolos. And although it does have a lot of tedious run-around with doing sub-goal favors for other people before you can get on with actually fighting the dragons, it's easy for me to buy into why you go through with all of that because it's understandable that people wouldn't believe you and would want proof of your claims, and each step in the process does contribute directly towards reaching the point where you can fight the dragons. Meanwhile, many (or most?) of the new side quests that get added in later chapters come about as a direct result of some change in the main quest, or else are thematically related to everything that's going on, like how the farmers around Khoronis suddenly need help dealing with problems now that there are a bunch of strange robed figures prowling around their lands, or how new conflicts arise in the Valley of Mines between the paladins and the sudden arrival of the dragon hunters; in this way, side quests that don't technically count towards your overall progress through the game's story still feel like they're contributing in some way. Night of the Raven is a different story, of course, literally, with the way it's artificially injected into the main story of Gothic 2, thus greatly hampering the pacing of that game's main quest, but like I've said before it doesn't bother me personally because I like its story and all the new introductions it brings to the base game enough that that I'm willing to forgive it for those issues.
The net effect of this is that I never felt bored or disinterested in the original games when I was playing them for the first time, like I experienced at times in Archolos. Of course, I did ultimately enjoy Archolos's story once something finally happened in the main quest to make things interesting, although I do have some issues with how it all played out, especially with regards to the ending. I can't really get into that without spoiling things, so if you care about that, then you may want to skip ahead in the review. Consider this your official spoiler warning.
MAJOR SPOILERS
So you finally find Jorn and learn that he was literally tortured to death at the hand of Volker and his men, whom you were working for throughout chapters three and four to bring justice to his would-be assassin, because he thought that Jorn was a member of the Ring of Water due to him apparently having a suspicious aquamarine ring. You then team up with Kessel, a member of the Ring of Water to learn more about what Volker is planning and get revenge on him for killing Jorn and other members of the Ring of Water, when you suddenly get attacked by Volker's men and wind up hospitalized in the Monastery of the Water Mages. This sets up chapter five, where the main quest shifts to planning a lengthy expedition into the Vardhaal Ruins to find a mythical artifact of Adanos -- a sword known as the "Peacemaker" -- in order to convince the water mages to use their influence to intervene against Volker. Upon gaining the Peacemaker, you learn that its powers are of no use to you, in what constitutes the game's single biggest "You Are Not the Chosen Hero" moment when Marvin offers to try his hand at wielding the sword's power to no avail, but then you're ambushed by Ulryk -- leader of the Wolf's Den, who are descendants of the indigenous people of Archolos before it was forcibly colonized by the Myrtanian Kingdom, whom you had helped to reclaim their silver mine during your investigation into Volker's assassination attempt. It turns it out Ulryk was working with Volker to overthrow the city government and secede from the kingdom, each for their own separate reasons: Volker, because he thought the king's obsession with the orc war would bring ruin to the island, and Ulryk because he wanted to return control of the island to its original, "rightful" people. This bloodline seemingly gives Ulryk the power to wield the supposed "Peacemaker," (which it turns out is actually not the sword, but a different artifact altogether); this leads to an all-out assault on the city, now burning into ruins with you frantically racing through the streets trying to help or thwart people along the way, in your effort to stop Ulryk and Volker -- either due to your own sense of justice in saving the city you've come to view as your new home, or out of a sense of revenge for both of them betraying you and your brother.
Throughout these chapters you're put through some really unique gameplay sequences that either haven't been done in a Gothic game before, or else that provide some unique twists on things, which is a big part of why I finally got interested once the game turned to chapter five. I really like the sequence when you're recovering in the Monastery, for instance, because they take away all your equipment and force you to solve problems while using a more limited tool set, based on items that have been placed throughout the level. In that way, it becomes more of a pure adventure game where you're trying to solve basic puzzles to get things done; although each puzzle only has the one available solution, which you could argue is restrictive for an RPG, I still like the logic involved with trying to deduce those solutions. This sequence also has the moment when you get shrunken down and have to run around the tops of bookshelves dodging maggots and figuring a way to safely navigate your way down to the floor, which is completely bonkers for these games and shows a lot of creativity that just had me smiling the entire time. I also like the story presentation, here, where your character is mortally wounded and you get to feel that through actual gameplay with Marvin going from hobbling around with an extreme limp to walking progressively better and better as his condition improves. It's a pretty heavy-handed, heavily scripted story sequence, all things considered, which I normally wouldn't care for because it tends to break the immersion when you're forced into these kinds of heavily restrictive scenarios, but with this being such a special case that happens at a critical moment in the story, I was perfectly willing to play along with the scenario.
But getting back to the story, the actual plot that happens in chapters five and six, with Volker, Ulryk, and the Water Mages is all way more interesting to me than the "find Jorn" premise that lasts for the first 75% or more of the game, and so I wish there were more of this stuff happening earlier to drive this plotline more directly. There is some foreshadowing for some events which I appreciate, like how you can spot Volker in Silbach before Jorn goes missing, and how you can actually find Jorn's aquamarine ring in Kurt's hut if you think to sweep up the rubble, or how you can see Volker's men trying to recruit more footsoldiers at various locations throughout the main quest progression, or how some of Volker's metaphorical dialogue during your first meeting directly prefaces what will eventually happen. There's no way to understand the importance of these things as they're happening, however, so they don't really help to alleviate problems with the dreary tedium of endlessly searching for Jorn, but they're neat little details to note on replay once you know where the story is ultimately going and can make those connections more proactively. You likewise get plenty of opportunity to learn about the island's history with regards to Volfzack (its original ruler), the war between Volfzack's people and the Myrtanians, and the legacy of the Vardhal Ruins (where the last battle was fought and Volfzack's remains are entombed), among other things like the influence of Adanos on the island's population and how that affects the Water Mages, which are told through a variety of media like dialogue in quests, history books, diary entries, and so on. So even though Ulryk and company aren't a very prevalent presence on the island until chapter four, and then they don't really do anything important until the end of chapter five, you're always aware of their existence and so their eventual involvement with everything does make sense.
The problem, I think, is that you don't have much active involvement with any of this stuff and so it always feels like periphery details the entire time, and then you don't really learn what people are actually doing or why anyone is doing what they're doing until very late in the game, which makes the story seem to come out of nowhere quite suddenly. It's like the story is happening around you the whole time but the game isn't exactly telling you this story until the big reveal at the very end. Volker for instance is supposed to be the ultimate villain and serves as the literal final boss to the game, and yet you don't even properly meet him until almost chapter four, more than halfway through the game, and then he suddenly becomes the main bad guy one chapter later, which the game doesn't even do a very good job of explaining at first. You just have to take Kessel at his word that Volker is evil and up to no good, which I found especially confusing when Volker's man Sachs (whom I didn't even remember because it had been so long since I met him, and it was just for a single one-off conversation) was trying to pin Jorn's death on Kessel, and then when Marvin and Kessel started talking about Jorn's Ring of Water ring as if it was a known fact when its existence was completely unknown to me as a player, because I never thought to sweep up the trash in Kurt's hut in chapter one and thus I never found it in the first place. That made the whole "seeking revenge against Volker" prospect dubious to me because I didn't really care about Jorn to begin with, and I wasn't certain to what degree Volker was even responsible. It wasn't until his men later tried to kill me that I started to feel any personal motivation to take out Volker, but by that point it didn't really feel like a betrayal because I didn't know Volker that well in the first place.
I therefore think the story could've benefited a lot from keeping Jorn around longer, and making Volker a more prominent figure earlier in the story. What if, for example, you get the cure for Jorn in chapter one while you're still in Silbach, but then your uncle Kurt recommends that you two head to the city and seek citizenship there because he can't afford to keep housing you guys in the village. As you later find out in chapter five, Kurt is actually the one who innocently sold Jorn out to Volker due to the cash reward for reports on aquamarine rings, so he could be motivated to send you to Volker, who has enough wealth and influence to help you out if you can get on his good side, or secure a loan to help get you started in your journey to finding a living in the city. Maybe then Jorn could be involved with numerous quests in which you work together to find a way into the city, and then work together to seek temporary lodgings while you try to gain an audience with Volker, and perhaps even work together on Volker's first task to gain his favor. Maybe you actually get on good terms with Volker in the process, and can be teased that he has big plans for the future and that you can be first in line for a more prosperous future if you stick with him. This way, you get more time with Jorn to develop some comradery and attachment to him so that when he eventually goes missing, you maybe feel a little more motivation to find him, and it also gives you a chance to become endeared to Volker early in the story so that there's more personal motivation for you to help find his assassin since Volker was so kind and helpful to you earlier, while also making it more believable that he will help you search for Jorn afterward due to that established relationship, and then feeling like more of a betrayal when it turns out he was responsible for Jorn's death and is now out to kill you.
In fairness, I do like Volker's characterization where he isn't just a stereotypical evil a-hole who's bent on world domination, or whatever. He's that classically good villain who believes they're doing good in the world, since he's ultimately trying to look out for Archolos' security and prosperity while the kingdom of Myrtana appears to be crumbling under the weight of the orc war. With more of the island's population and resources being sent to fight a losing war, he's worried that Archolos will soon perish along with the rest of the kingdom, so by executing a coup on the city's ruling class he can focus on doing what he believes is best for the island's own interests. He even specifically goes out of his way to close off the poor district of town during the attack in an effort to ensure their safety, because he doesn't want the city to suffer any unnecessary deaths or destruction. Ulryk is in a similar position where he just wants to return control of the island to the descendants of its original rulers, before it was overrun by foreign invaders who forced them to abandon much of their cultural heritage as the population was killed or assimilated. So the two main villains actually have virtuous goals, from a certain point of view; it's just their methodologies involving mass killings and the destruction of the city that make them villains.
The story dealing with themes of class warfare, social injustice, heritage, xenophobia, economic entrapment, politics, war, the consequences of war that affect regular every day people, concerns about the kingdom and the island's future, etc, are all likewise something I can get behind because those subjects are much more relatable than defeating the embodiment of an evil god or slaying dragons. The world-building that goes into setting up these plot points is really good, too, with making it all feel surprisingly rich and complex; the story itself may be pretty barebones throughout the first four chapters in terms of the overall point of what you're doing in each of the quests, before any of this stuff becomes a focal point, but all of these different themes are established early in the game and get reinforced throughout all the various interactions and side quests that you get involved with along the way. Even though I never really cared about finding Jorn, and didn't care about getting revenge on Volker, there was a part of me that cared when the city was under attack, because I'd grown so attached to it and wanted to help as many people as I could. Although, that didn't stop me from "noping" out of the final confrontation altogether in my first playthrough because I'd frankly gotten sick of everyone else's bickering manipulation, and was getting exhausted from such a lengthy playthrough that I just wanted it to be over.
I always enjoy it when games give you the choice to opt out of a final boss fight (quick shout-out to Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone), and Archolos does a similar thing with additionally opting you out of the entire sixth chapter, which is unfortunately less than ideal even though chapter six is pretty short, because there is still a lot of great stuff going on in that final sequence that I really appreciate. Having the game's finale be in the city, instead of an ancient mythical dungeon somewhere, resonates more strongly since the city represents something you actually know and perhaps have grown fond of during your adventures, so it's more emotionally moving to see it in flames and partially ruined. That practical change establishes more realistic stakes for where the story may actually wind up, and hits closer to home, literally, in a similar way as it feels when seeing the ruined Valley of Mines in Gothic 2 after getting to know it so well in Gothic 1. It's also neat how this sequence shows lasting consequences for various role-playing decisions you made earlier in the game, with so many characters and events coming back to affect your route through the city, as well as in the final end screen slideshows. This is another thing that I usually appreciate in RPGs, because it helps to tie a ribbon on the whole experience by showing lasting outcomes for so many things you encountered throughout your entire adventure, beyond the limited scope of the actual gameplay. It also adds extra significance to the full journey by coming back to so many characters and situations that you encountered early in the adventure, which are now affected in some way by the outcome of the main quest. And at least in my case, I found myself surprisingly invested in these outcomes -- much more than I did with the ending slideshows for Gothic 3 or Elex, for example -- which speaks to the quality of the world building and the storytelling overall that I actually cared about these things in the end and found myself emotionally moved by some of the resolutions.
The biggest issue here, of course, has to deal with Marvin's ending, in which you're always forced into a negative outcome where Marvin gets blamed for all the chaos on the island, and gets sentenced to work in the mining colony of Khorinis, with him turning out to be Scar from Gothic 1. For starters, it just doesn't make sense to me that he'd be given a really fancy, high-quality weapon when being sent to prison. I would buy that if he were being sent there as a guard, but the game is not clear that this is the case since it only describes his sentence as "exile to the Valley of Mines," and then we see him sitting with his hands bound behind his back like he's going there as a criminal to be a miner, so I don't know. That's where it feels like the game is trying too hard to make a connection somewhere that didn't need to be made. If not for the scar on his face and him having THAT particular sword, there would be no reason to think that Marvin would be Scar, so why tack on such superficial qualities to a character that really deserved to be something more than just... Scar -- a completely pointless character who isn't really enhanced by having this backstory revealed. In a way, it actually kind of ruins Marvin's character for his ultimate lot in life to be a generic filler NPC with barely any dialogue, who gets beat up and robbed by some nameless low-level scrub in chapter one of Gothic, and then dies like a pathetic loser, either then or later in chapter five.
To be fair, I could see how the events on Archolos might turn Marvin into someone like Scar -- consider that Marvin spends the bulk of the main quest being exploited by other people who won't lift a finger to help him, which leads to his brother's death and then being sent to prison despite all of his good intentions and best efforts to save the city. And who knows what else happened in the interim between arriving in the Colony and becoming an ore baron. So it makes sense that he might be frustrated and disillusioned enough to embrace the role of an exploitative villain after all that. But if that's the case, then I would like to see more of that fall from grace happen in the actual story of this game, instead of just being implied off-screen between games. As it is, this change is just not explained satisfactorily in the actual game, and that's why the ending doesn't really work. After all, you can play Marvin as a good character the whole time, right up until the very end, by always doing the right thing and picking the thoughtful and reflective dialogue options, in which case it might be hard to really envision how that character change would actually happen.
In fact, it's fairly easy to experience a disconnect between the player's
actions and the story that the designers are trying to tell, suggesting that the two weren't balanced as well as they could have been. I for one felt constantly baffled by all the times other characters
would chastise me for rushing ahead in my search for Jorn and acting
emotionally, when I as a player showed no indication of any of that,
even going so far as to do the exact opposite through my in-game
choices. That's fine when playing as a defined character, I suppose, if Marvin is
supposed to be separate from the player, but they don't go all the way
with this and instead strike a weird middle ground where he kind of has
an established backstory and some degree of independent personality, but
not really enough to inform the character or your role-playing
decisions. So while he does have a given name and a somewhat dark past that gets brought up in vague ways on occasion, he's still ultimately a malleable character whom you get to shape into your own perception of that character as the game goes on.
That is, at least, until the game tries to force a particular interpretation on you, like with locking you into a certain ending from the very start with no ability to influence that outcome yourself. Which, by the way, makes the official marketing on the official website that "you decide your fate" utter BS -- you can influence OTHER people's fate, but absolutely not your own. The only way that statement makes any sense is if they're counting the "Save Jorn Speed Run Ending" as a real ending, which I guess it technically is, but I mean, come on, that's not a realistic option for anyone, and does "decide your own fate" REALLY mean "asterisk, fine print, if you do this one very specific thing with little room for error"? Otherwise, even the ending where you skip the final battle plays out largely the same -- you even somehow manage to "take" Volker's sword even though you never had any opportunity to -- and it doesn't matter if you kill Volker or spare him, either -- you ALWAYS end up imprisoned at the end.
If we have to have just the one ending, then I would think the character and the story would be better served to just say that Marvin became jaded with life on Archolos after all the trauma he experienced there, and quietly disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. That feels appropriate for the character and leaves his future open to interpretation so that it can work with your own individual playstyle and head canon better. The vibe I got is that this isn't even meant to be Marvin's story in the first place, with all the emphasis that you're not the chosen hero and ultimately just being a pawn used to play other characters' games, so taking the focus away from Marvin at the end would drive that point home even more clearly, that the story is not really what becomes of you and your character but instead your role in influencing other people's lives as a catalyst for change, with Archolos itself almost being the real main character of this story. At least, that's how I choose to interpret things, and part of why all the ending stuff with Marvin doesn't work so well for me.
END SPOILERS
Apart from those structural issues with the main quest, Archolos' quest design proves generally satisfying in the same kind of way you would expect from a Gothic game, thanks to the immersive lack of overt guidance systems like mini-maps and objective markers telling you where to go at all times, instead requiring you to follow instructions, explore the environments, and use logical deduction to figure things out. Like when a merchant tasks you with selling specialized goods around town, you have to think who might be the most likely buyer for each specific type of item, and then you try your options to see what works and what doesn't. This is how the Gothic games have always done things so it's no big feather in Archolos' cap to follow this same procedure, but the mod hits an ideal sweet spot with providing enough clues that you can follow along with what's expected of you without making everything blatantly obvious, so that you can feel the satisfaction of actually solving these quests on your own. There are exceptions of course, like with some being so incredibly vague that you have to resort to covering tons of ground and lots of trial and error as you search for a solution, and others being so on-the-nose with the journal straight up telling you exactly what to do, with zero room for any other interpretation, but for the most part I found them to be pretty reasonable.
The actual content of these quests is often relatively simple and straightforward, but there's usually a good narrative justification for why you should be doing these things (at least, so long as you ignore the implications of the main quest). For example, the shepherd wants you to find his missing ram, who's hiding somewhere in the village; the water mage wants you to gather some herbs for him, which are growing right outside the village; the alchemist wants you to post notices around town for him, so just run back and forth between his hut and the village; and so on; but you're a new refugee on this island and need to find a way to earn your keep, so it makes sense that people would assign menial tasks for you to complete, instead of setting you to some highly important task that they wouldn't trust a strange outsider with, or having you solve dark mysteries and saving the world from the get-go like a stereotypical video game protagonist. So while not the most exciting thing in the world, it's at least thematically appropriate for the situation and helps to ground the overall experience of you just being a regular guy trying to make ends meet. In that way, I find a lot of the quests to be immersive and atmospheric, which is further aided by most characters being given a decent amount of personality (with what I presume to be high quality Polish voice acting, given that I don't speak Polish and therefore can't really judge it). This helps to make them feel like real people, even if they ultimately serve no purpose in the gameplay except to dish out a single menial fetch quest. And even though you should intuitively understand that these tasks only exist to give the player Things to Do™, they work pretty well as world-building by painting a broad and comprehensive picture of what actually goes on in this world.
Otherwise, the quests do become more elaborate with more complex scenarios that involve a long process with multiple non-linear steps, which can lead to branching outcomes depending on your role-playing choices, or else they tell an interesting story with likeable characters. A quest like the one to help Lutz get back together with his old flame, Martha, has fairly straightforward errand boy objectives with basically just talking to a few people and fetching a few items to prepare for a romantic musically-accompanied picnic in the orchard, but I find it entertaining because of all the character interactions you get along the way, especially with Martha being an established character from the beginning of the game who's now getting developed further with a new quest. Plus there's a musical cutscene involved, which feels a little weird to me being in a Gothic game, but it's so unique that it makes the quest worthwhile in the end. And then later, you come back to check on Lutz and Martha and get yet more character development with them, as they enter a new stage of their relationship that needs your assistance to smooth things over. In this case, the quest's gameplay mechanics aren't necessarily compelling on their own, but they're in service of an interesting story which proves strong enough to make the quest extremely engaging. This example might be a step above the average quest in terms of its overall presentation, but I feel like it's reasonably representative of the writing quality that exists in the majority of quests, where there's usually a good story or fun characters to experience, so long as you're invested enough in the game's setting and atmosphere to care about those things.
Other quests have more complicated mechanics, like the one in the Merchant Guild's gold mine which tasks you with going undercover as a digger in a scenario that feels highly reminiscent of the mines in Gothic 1 and Night of the Raven, to investigate production issues and prevent a possible workers' revolt. There are a whole bunch of different things going on in this quest, between unlocking access to different areas of the mine and convincing different people on opposing sides to tell you things while you try to figure out what's really happening there, which can lead to completely different outcomes, one of which being that you never discover the true story. There would seem to be a number of different variables influencing the outcome, like what order you do things in, how many people on each side you help, whether you do certain things at all, and so on. That is, so long as you don't permanently lock yourself into the supposed "bad" ending by inadvertently doing something inappropriate on your first time into the mines before this quest is ever active, as would appear to be the case in my experience. The whole quest can last over an hour and it takes place within a really small, self-contained area with several unique gameplay mechanics, including a sort of fatigue system, limited durability on pick-axes, and a bartering economy based around gold nuggets, if you choose to engage with the optional side of just being a gold miner for your own benefit, which just goes to show how involved the whole thing can be. The quest also has a pretty good sense of intrigue with trying to solve the mystery by gathering clues and putting them together as you go through everything, so it's really fun the whole way through. Of course if you get the bad ending then the whole thing ends awkwardly and somewhat abruptly, but I guess that's to be expected with it being the "bad" ending.
In fact, it would seem that most quests incorporate choices and consequences that can lead to these branching outcomes, be that different narrative resolutions and rewards or even failing the quest altogether. These branching outcomes might be even more prevalent in Archolos than the original Gothic games, in terms of the pure number of them -- it really is astounding just how many quests have at least SOME kind of decision point, although it does get to feel a bit formulaic for many of the simpler ones where the quest itself will follow a linear trajectory and then come down to a single dialogue choice at the end that either gives you more experience, or more reward. Still, plenty of other quests and interactions have more substantial branches that will influence their entire trajectory, and that may even affect things in later chapters -- like when you're trying to get information out of someone by poisoning them and levying the antidote against them, you have choices about whether to brew the poison yourself or seek someone else's assistance; what strength level to make the poison; whether to pour it into the person's wine glass or into the wine barrel, and if going for the glass what you'll say to convince the server to give you access; then what you'll tell that person about the antidote, and whether you'll let them live or not when all is said and done. Some of these are in fact false choices that don't actually affect anything, but it does matter whether you poison the glass or the barrel, how you convince the server, what you say about the antidote, and whether you let him live or not, with two of those decisions coming back to potentially affect things in later chapters, and the other two leading to different failure states where you have to try some other option instead or settle for a less ideal result. In that way, this quest and plenty of others throughout the game do a good job of instilling player agency within the world, in terms of how quests and NPCs react to your decisions, thereby making the role-playing feel that much more rich and consequential.
Unfortunately, there's a flip-side to this where many quests and interactions DON'T give you realistic choices and instead force you into very specific outcomes, because in those instances the game is more interested in telling its own story than letting you tell yours. Sometimes this is done for a justifiable technical reason, like when the game is planning for something to happen later with a particular character or location and they don't want you to interfere with that progression, or I suppose because the scenario needs a specialized version of a map to load and they don't want you wandering into or out of that loading zone, but it's not always handled in the most natural or believable way, instead being done in a very blunt, ham-fisted sort of way.
This is where I start getting into one of my major criticisms about Archolos, and it's how often things like this serve to undermine the game's immersion and the player's sense of freedom or agency in the gameplay, which are things I consider to be core design principles of the original Gothic games. Whether it was intentional or not, seemingly every single thing about the originals was made to be as immersive as possible, even down to the controls and user interface, and while a computer game can't realistically predict every action a player might take to program appropriate responses to every possible action, the originals did an above average job in anticipating different approaches that players might take to solve a problem, and allowing for them to happen. There are still weird edge case scenarios that people are discovering to this day where the games acknowledge you doing things drastically out of order or in utterly unconventional ways. And even if they are relatively limited in scope compared to true immersive-sims, without as much truly emergent systems-based gameplay and most solutions to things being specifically pre-programmed, they were good about not calling attention to their arbitrary limitations by making the various options and non-options feel plausible. It was pretty rare in the original games that I encountered something that made me go "Well that's dumb, why can't I do that?" whereas I find myself saying that a lot more often in Archolos.
For example, there are tons of situations where you might want to beat someone up for any possible reason, be it as a show of force to get them to do something you want, or to take something they have that you need, or just because you don't like them and want to teach them a lesson or blow off steam -- but then it turns out they're coded to be invulnerable to all damage, forcing you to either run away, let yourself get beat up, or reload a save. It would be understandable if this only happened with critically important characters that are necessary for the main quest, since even the originals did that, but it happens with all kinds of irrelevant filler characters and side quest NPCs, too, where I would think it would be okay if someone died unexpectedly and the quest got canceled. Even in quests where the ultimate goal is to kill every person in an area, the game will make them invincible until a certain point in the quest line to force you to play along with the entire script, exactly as the designers envisioned it, from beginning to end, versus letting you handle things in your own creative way. I mean, what is even the issue with letting the player beat up a random no-name guard in front of a locked gate that you can't open anyway? Why are SOME characters invincible, others non-targetable, and others vulnerable as normal? Often times, other NPCs that can be knocked down can't be killed, with Marvin just straight up refusing to follow your commands as he waves his arms at you; on the other hand, sometimes you DON'T want to kill random homeless people or refugees who attack you in the city, but they're programmed to be hostile enemies or whatever and die instantly without the usual need for the extra killing blow while they're down, forcing you into committing tons of undesired murders even if it was supposedly in self-defense. So it just gets annoying being in these situations where logical options are inexplicably taken away from you, for seemingly no good reason.
Some of the quests themselves are so deadset on you finishing them in a particular time and area that they forcibly teleport you back into the area if you start to wander away, or put up invisible walls to prevent you from backtracking. These instances are relatively few, but like, do I even need to explain why that's a bad thing in a Gothic game, and why they shouldn't even be in the game at all? It just completely breaks the immersion every time you run into something like this. And while I'm sure the quest scripting sometimes necessitates these restrictions (like when the game needs to load a completely separate, highly modified version of the map for some major incident, like what happens at the end of the game and they don't want you free to wander into the un-modified, normal version of the map; or when allowing the player to backtrack might cause them to get stuck and unable to get back up to a location that required a black screen teleport to get to in the first place), it would seem like there are better, more immersive wasy to handle these restrictions than just putting invisible walls up or teleporting the player back into the designated zone. Like on the Beast Hunt with Detlow -- he could easily just force you into dialogue every time you try to leave the cave and say something like "There's no turning back, we need to finish this now while we have the chance." Or Marvin could stop and say the same thing, possibly even with a cutscene showing him turn around in the process. I could speculate on any number of reasons for why they chose to just put an invisible wall in, like maybe they didn't realize they needed to do this until it was too late and they couldn't get the voice actors back to record those lines, or maybe they just didn't feel like it was worth the extra effort, in which case, this being a free mod made by volunteers I completely understand, but no matter the reason, it still results in a situation that is definitively worse than it would have been ideally, and which seemingly could have been avoided with better foresight.
Other times, these decisions might just be made for the sake of tighter narrative presentation, to control the pacing and order of a particular sequence the way they want it to go. The intro is particularly rough in this regard with how much it forces you to follow the script as you slowly make your way from the shore to the town inn, hitting you with invisible walls and black screen teleports if you try to do anything out of the intended order, even when there might be a perfectly logical reason to do so, like if you see shiny objects nearby, or you forgot to do something in the starting area before you left, or you want to check in with the other group when you hear their weapons being drawn. The main character will even refuse to interact with basic things in the environment on the way to your destination if it isn't directly relevant to the quest. I can accept the character saying "no, I don't want to mess with that right now" if they're trying to emphasize the critical importance of the story, but if they want you to follow a path and not wander off, then why not just make the level design more linear and restrictive in the first place -- like the original games did at the start with putting you in a narrow canyon with high walls -- until you get to where the game wants you to be. That way they wouldn't have to ruin the player's immersion with a black screen teleport. And if the player chooses to run ahead and ignore the main quest, you would have nowhere else to go but into town, and then they could just write an alternative dialogue with the guard to account for that situation. And if they don't want you wandering away while in town or trying to interact with other things, then why not just have Jorn pass out during dialogue with the gate guard and have them say "We need to get him to the inn!" Then either fade to black and warp everyone into the inn, or show a cutscene of him being carried into the inn. In that way, they're still taking control away from the player to prevent you from doing certain things or to make things happen in a particular order, but at least it's not directly interrupting the player's actions, which I think would make the overly controlled pacing of the sequence much easier to accept.
There are plenty of other random, innocuous areas that are apparently intended to be used for a quest at some point, but they're arbitrarily closed off until that point, and I don't see why some of these areas have to be closed off in the first place; sometimes it makes sense, but what's the problem with letting the player find an empty cave in the forest, or break into a random cellar early, and then later spawn in the NPCs or quest items when a quest changes things? Why will the door to the alchemist's hut supposedly never open unless you go there with a specific quest active? Why can't you just visit the alchemist and use his normal services, as normal, and then go to him with a special dialogue option later when it becomes necessary? Similarly, why can't you read his bookstand to gain its information until you're explicitly told to -- I mean it's sitting right there and can be targeted just like a normal bookstand, so what's the harm in letting the player look at the book early and then just tell the alchemist you already know its contents when he asks you to read it? Stuff like this really breaks the immersive grounding of the world design in these instances, by making it feel like much of the world revolves around you, with so many things artificially changing only to suit the needs of the player at an exact, specific moment, instead of just being a natural place that exists and you're there exploring it.
Then we've got all of the cutscene deaths and one-shot kills that completely break the rules of the gameplay, thereby creating a strong ludo-narrative dissonance when characters that you would normally be able to defeat quite easily in ordinary gameplay are killing you in one shot during dialogue. It's worth pointing out that this kind of stuff is preceded by Gomez killing you in Gothic 1 if you say the wrong thing during your interview, but at least that game put you back in control of your character to have an actual chance at a fight -- it's just that Gomez moves so quickly and has such high stats that you're never going to beat him. When other characters ambush you, it likewise leads to just a regular fight with you having the chance to defend yourself. Archolos doesn't give you that opportunity, even when you're deliberately TRYING to provoke a fight with someone so you can beat him up; you're forced to watch him slowly stand up, walk over to you, and draw his weapon before knocking you down in one hit, all while you're locked in dialogue with no chance to do anything. If you wander into a particular area before you're supposed to be there for the main quest, you just straight up die in a cutscene with no chance to defend yourself or run away, thereby forcing an immersion break on the player by making you reload and just pretend like that never happened. But if the goal was just to keep the player from sequence-breaking the main quest, and the people in there are supposed to be adamant about strange people not discovering their secret base, then why not just put up a wall in the cave with a locked door that needs a password for them to open it? Or make the entrance to this place somewhere actually hidden and inaccessible so the player can't accidentally wander in, like making it REQUIRE a teleport rune that you only get through a quest, or make the entrance be on a high ledge where someone has to lower a ladder to let you in provided you send the appropriate signal. Any of those options would fulfill the main objective and feel much more natural and less disruptive to the flow of gameplay than what they ultimately did.
I suppose there's an argument that these cutscene deaths are meant to represent choices and consequences, which should be a good thing for an RPG, but I would argue that many of these are bad consequences that actually stifle role-playing opportunities. Because if you're doing a quest where you're investigating a bunch of renegade guards hiding out somewhere and need to talk to their leader, and three of the four dialogue options lead to a game-over screen where you have to reload and pick the one and only acceptable answer through trial-and-error, then that's not really a choice, and there aren't any real consequences since anything bad gets immediately reset by the reload. The player is the only one to suffer any consequences in that situation by virtue of having your time wasted, while the character remains completely unaffected, thus it isn't really a role-playing effect. Instead of just killing the player and forcing a reload, it would be a lot more productive for these to be "soft failure" states where the gameplay can still continue, but with the character and situation being affected in some adverse way. Like if they make you pay a bunch of money to get in, or sucker punch you and make you go into the cave with only half your health, or make the subsequent conversation with the leader significantly harder, or secretly buff the enemies' combat stats if you say the wrong thing to the gate guard because then they're aware that someone is there to cause trouble, or something else. Then it becomes your CHOICE if you want to reload to avoid the CONSEQUENCES, or if you want to continue and live with the CONSEQUENCES of your CHOICE.
The original Gothic games are of course not perfect at achieving true role-playing simulation, either, and they're of course limited in their total scope compared to even some other computer-RPGs out there, but I always felt like those games were good at reflecting my particular proclivities as a player, in allowing me to do the things that I felt were most natural in a given situation and not forcing me into weird situations I didn't want to do. And to be fair to Archolos, these types of instances that I'm being so critical of are but a minority of the total experience, perhaps even a very small minority, but they feel so fundamentally against the principles that I value so much in the original games that their mere presence bothers me, and there are enough of them that I can't just dismiss them and ignore them. I understand if people want to disregard this criticism of mine as mere nitpicking, but things like immersion and player agency are extremely important to me and so I take these issues seriously. By the same token I don't want to blow things out of proportion, because these are absolutely not game-breaking issues in the grand scheme of things, and there's enough good role-playing and high quality content all around that you could easily say the good far outweighs the bad, but it's just one major reason why I have a hard time considering Archolos to be a universal improvement over the originals, because in some ways like this I do think they took a step backward.
One area where I feel Archolos really excels, even compared to the originals, is the world design and world-building. The Gothic games have always had fleshed-out, believable worlds, but Archolos takes it to a whole new level with a greater degree of backstory that explains so much more about how most every facet of the world came to be. There are all kinds of details in books and conversations that exposit what the culture was like on the island with its original people, what happened when the Myrtanian colonizers arrived, how major structures like the monastery bridge and Vardhal fortress were ruined, how the island's economy operates, why the city was constructed the way it is, and so on, which you can learn as you explore the island and talk to people and experience all the game's content. You certainly don't need to know any of this to understand the world just fine, but there's an entire extra layer of storytelling going on, here, that makes Archolos a richer world to explore because of how much deeper it all goes with learning all this backstory to better contextualize the "how" and "why" of everything you're seeing and interacting with.
You can argue that a good deal of this is "telling" instead of "showing" by relying so heavily on just reading text and having other characters telling you stories, but even without that I think you get a pretty good sense of the island's history through the architecture and geography, so even if you don't necessarily know all the context you still feel the practical effects of everything regardless. The city itself, for instance, is a sprawling and convoluted design that's awfully difficult to navigate at first, but it makes sense in a realistic sort of way, in terms of how the different regions are structured and why certain areas are in the places they are. Like with the chapel being built on a high ledge overlooking what is now just the harbor district, but at one point was probably the main and only section of the city; or how the demands of a developing society necessitated specific districts like a service arcade, residential areas, city hall, and so on, which all had to expand off existing areas or else be repurposed from older areas as those needs arose. I get the sense that if this city had been conceived in its entirety from the very beginning the layout would've been a lot more straightforward and easy to navigate (and indeed, that might have been the typical goal for a typical video game design to do everything possible to benefit the player's ease of play), but in this case the design winds up feeling much more natural and organic, as if it were made by the actual historical architects of this world over a long period of time, who were working within the natural confines of the terrain itself, instead of omniscient video game level designers making everything all at once to serve only one limited perspective.
The rest of the world has a strong sense of liveliness to it, thanks in part to a higher degree of dynamic events in Archolos. The big change, here, is the newfound inclusion of random events that can occur in all different places of the island, where little things just happen spontaneously in your presence to indicate that there is constantly more stuff going on in the world besides just the Player Character and Your Own Ordeals. These are almost always just a simple, one-off encounter with an NPC where they say something to you and then run off, or they offer some kind of dialogue choice or option to take them up on something they're offering, but some do actually have recurring developments where the same character can keep coming back with escalating situations. There are supposedly around 200 such events, which is an impressive number in and of itself, but it's equally impressive just how varied they are since each one feels totally distinct when it would've been easy to just copy/paste a bunch of similar situations while replacing a single variable here or there. A lot of these encounters are straight up fun and amusing, too, or else break the fourth wall by going slightly meta, while others help to flesh out the world-building with small little stories from the perspective of the mundane and ordinary people going about their daily lives, so there's a wide range of tones and subjects represented herein, making them pretty enjoyable all-around. This is actually one of my favorite additions Archolos brings to the Gothic formula, because the original games could start to feel a little stagnant when you would clear an area of all quests and monsters and then have nothing else to see or do in that area for the rest of that chapter, but Archolos keeps injecting small moments of excitement in the ordinary gameplay with these fresh and unexpected events occurring in places that you've seemingly already cleared -- sometimes even spawning new enemies on roads between locations within a single chapter, outside of a specific quest -- so that there's always something worthwhile to discover or experience in familiar areas.
All of these different details, from the developed histories to the random events to the dynamic world-building, go hand-in-hand in making the exploration pretty satisfying because the world itself feels so real. It helps, too, that the physical world-design has a lot of that classic Gothic appeal with being fairly small and condensed but with lots of depth and complexity. A lot of this is achieved with vertical topographies that allow more content to be tucked away in tight spaces, since areas that are right next to each other can be separated by larger distances that require more effort to navigate around, thereby by making the map seem much bigger than it actually is, while the physical obstructions help to limit how much of the map you can see at any time so that you have to actually push yourself forward to see where each path leads and figure out how everything connects to everything else, thereby instilling the gameplay with a constant sense of discovery at seeing things for the first time each time you turn another corner or reach a new vantage point to see more of the world. The map has a pretty good structure to it, where you can tell that each region is meant to serve as its own self-contained zone for exploration, but with good transition points that help them to blend well with the rest of the map and feel like they're part of a cohesive whole; this allows the exploration to feel manageable despite the map being seemingly bigger than any individual map from any previous Gothic game, because you can sub-divide it into smaller regions and tackle it in chunks. There's a good balance there that provides the sort of open-ended freedom that you want from an open-world game to explore in any direction at virtually any time, but with small-scale elements of linearity to provide structured gameplay challenges as you try to work your way through certain areas that consist of tight pathways or more-enclosed spaces where you have less room to avoid difficult enemies, and where just getting to the other side of the region is a challenge in and of itself. And as usual, or perhaps even more than usual, there are tons of hidden areas to discover if you choose to explore off the beaten path, with plenty of hand-placed loot and even occasionally special side quests to find, which make the exploration genuinely rewarding, if not merely for those practical rewards but also the psychological gratification that comes from realizing that you were on the same wavelength as the developers, who thought to anticipate players going off the beaten path by putting in little discoveries to acknowledge that effort.
This aspect of the gameplay alone was a strong motivating factor in me to continue playing, because even though I didn't care about the story or the main quest whatsoever, the exploration was just so engaging to me that I wanted to explore everything I could to learn more about the island, to see more of its communities and side quests, and to achieve that sense of accomplishment from essentially conquering this world by finding every hidden area and beating every enemy that stood in my way. In that regard Archolos proved as good or better for me than the original games, which is high praise considering the world design and exploration are arguably some of the best qualities of Gothic.
There is an unfortunate side effect to this aspect, however, and it has to do with the usual difficulty balancing and progression being subverted by just how much total benefit there is to gain from exploration and completing content. Mind you, the Gothic games have always centered around a "zero to hero" progression curve where you start out as a pathetic weakling and then become a nigh unstoppable demigod by the end, in a world where enemies have fixed stats and don't level up with you; this is a big part of why leveling up in those games feels so satisfying, because there is actual, challenging adversity to overcome, and leveling up your character allows you to feel like you're actually getting stronger relative to the rest of the world. Archolos does alright with the first half of this formula -- the "zero" portion -- for the first couple of chapters, at least, by always having enough difficulty thresholds to gate your progress in some ways so that you feel like there's a definite need to get stronger, while consistently opening new opportunities in other ways to reward your efforts as you get stronger and clear previously locked gates. Difficult enemies that are practically impossible for you to beat without some major improvements to your character; high monetary costs to train your stats so you have to be really selective about how to spend your money; limits to how much individual trainers will teach you before your skill level maxes out with their teaching ability; and needing specific stats to equip stronger gear which will be necessary to break required damage thresholds to actually do more than the bare minimum of damage against certain enemies, all contribute towards making the game challenging at the start while maintaining that degree of challenge for the first few dozen hours of gameplay.
The problem comes in the second half of the formula -- the "hero" portion -- where the sheer amount of content in the game combined with a bunch of new ways to further enhance your character's stats (for little to no cost) allows you to reach that over-powered state where nothing on the island can pose any serious threat to you any longer, way too early in the gameplay if you're someone who's thorough in exploration and completing as much content as you can. In my case, I reached that point by the end of chapter two, and I didn't feel like I was going ridiculously far out of my way to power-level my character or anything excessive like that; I was just doing my usual thing that I do in all these games of trying to experience as much total content as possible in each chapter and being smart with how I build my character. And so from the start of chapter three onward, the whole game felt incredibly easy because I was curb-stomping everything in sight while most enemies could barely hurt me; the only ones that ever posed any moderate amount of challenge were mini-bosses like the various Wanted Poster enemies and some of the literal boss battles, but even then some of them proved to be complete push-overs, too. Even the final boss could barely hurt me while I stood there fumbling through my inventory looking for buffs to apply to make the fight even easier. This is yet one more compounding reason why I started to lose interest in finishing the game during chapters three and four, because I was not only disinterested in the story and main quest by that point, but I felt like I had already "beaten" the gameplay progression less than halfway through it, and so there just didn't seem like there was any further incentive to keep playing if the story wasn't doing anything for me and there was nowhere left for my character to grow, with no more gameplay challenges to overcome.
Simply put: it is really easy to become over-powered in Archolos through basic, ordinary gameplay because there are more total enemies to kill and more quests to complete just in general, which means there's more total experience to gain and thus more total Learning Points to spend improving your character. And with virtually the entire map being accessible from chapter one with only a few human outposts being restricted until later chapters, it means you can acquire a TON of free gear and upgrades from the very beginning depending on how much effort you're willing to put into exploration. For instance, there are a s**t ton of king's sorrels and dragonroots and goblin berries and other such ingredients used in brewing permanent stat potions to find in the world, and you can learn master alchemy in chapter two to give you an insane early-game boost to all of your vital stats. That's in addition to a bountiful amount of apples and raspberries and dark mushrooms that give you free stat upgrades for every so many you consume, or all the various cooking recipes that give you free stat boosts with the major ones being more effective than consuming the raw ingredients while not requiring the learning point investment of alchemy, or all the other permanent potions and things that you just happen to find when you're out exploring. You can even learn multiple skills for free without having to spend Learning Points at all, and you can earn so much money through exploration, apprenticeships, and special merchant deals that you can easily afford any and every possible upgrade you might want by the end of the game, even going so far as to clear out every merchant's inventory of permanent stat potions, of which there are a bountiful quantity. There's a high degree of power bloat, in other words, where Archolos just gives you so many more ways to improve your character that it becomes ridiculous by the end. For reference, I went into chapter six of my first playthrough with 278 total strength, having only officially trained it to a mere 80 points, meaning I had nearly 200 free stat boosts that cost me practically nothing; and on my second playthrough when playing as a mage, I had 450 total mana, having only trained it to a mere 90 points, meaning I had 360 points of essentially "free" mana. That just seems excessive to me that so much of your character development can come from these sorts of auxiliary means outside of the conventional leveling system through Learning Points, and of course the more that you explore and do in the game the more total benefit you can gain from these auxiliary means.
And unlike in Night of the Raven, there's no longer any penalty for consuming any of these permanent boosts as soon as you acquire them. While that does sound like a good thing due to it eliminating the tedious need for meta-gaming all your upgrades by removing jewelry to make sure you're not overpaying on learning points or using soft exploits like training up until one point below when it would start costing more so that you can get four "discounted" upgrades by paying for five all at once at the lower rate, or having to wait until late in the game before actually using those permanent stat boosters since you'd effectively be punishing yourself with higher stat costs earlier in the game if you use them right away -- I find it actually does impact the game balancing in a way that I surprisingly miss about Night of the Raven. Because for all the practical problems with managing your stat boosts in Night of the Raven, I find that, in retrospect, those limitations actually help to ensure a more lasting degree of challenge where you have the choice to make the game easier, now, by using all of those free stat upgrades when you first acquire them, which comes at the cost of making the game a little harder towards the end because you won't be able to buy as many stat upgrades through Learning Points so your total stats will end up being lower; or else you have the choice to make the game more challenging, now, by saving those free stat upgrades until much later when it's more economical, after you're already at the point of paying the maximum Learning Point cost, in order to achieve a higher maximum skill level, later, thereby making the later portions of the game easier. Either way, you're choosing to make some portion of the game harder for yourself to make the other portion easier, and there's strategic costs and benefits to either decision that you can weigh to make your own personal decision. I'm the type of player who likes to strive for high efficiency, viewing the character-building as a resource-management puzzle of sorts, and so my choice in Night of the Raven has always been to save them for later which has the two-fold impact of making the early game harder, for longer, and then also allowing me to feel more total reward by the end; those are two beneficial aspects that become lost in Archolos with it tracking your free stat boosts separately, where there's no tradeoff whatsoever and no strategic decision-making involved -- it just makes the game easier in general, and the only other choice is to arbitrarily handicap yourself for no reason except to enforce an external challenge on yourself which won't pay off in any way down the road.
The original games, or at least Gothic 2, seemed to have much tighter control on how much power you could achieve in each chapter to better tailor the difficulty progression to expected ranges, while also making it take more deliberate and conscientious effort to get ahead of those difficulty curves. In other words, they did a better job of tying your character progression to chapter progression, which helps to synergize the gameplay with the main quest a little better. In those games, you don't get adequate armor to do a lot of extensive fighting until you join a faction, whereas Archolos gives you ample opportunity to buy pretty decent sets and even upgrade them long before joining a faction; likewise, Gothic 2 restricted half of the map until after you'd joined a faction and advanced the game to chapter two, so there was a greater physical limit to how much experience and loot you could achieve on the starting map in chapter one, whereas Archolos lets you explore 90% of the entire map right from the very beginning. Archolos goes even further with adding even more new enemies to the map in subsequent chapters, and more enemy respawns during chapters, and even goes so far as to refresh natural resources like fishing spots and ore nuggets and fallen trees so you can continually harvest yet more total experience and materials from the world, beyond what was ordinarily possible in the original games.
Mage styles aren't really my preference, however, and I'm not the type of person who can knowingly choose not to explore major chunks or the world or not do optional side quests that I come across, and so for me on my first playthrough playing like I typically do in all of these games, I just found Archolos to be far less enjoyable when it came to the gameplay challenge and difficulty progression. And if Archolos really is intended to be played in a more casual sort of way than I approached it, then that's surprising to me because I would figure the vast majority of people playing a mod for a 20-year old game would be superfans of the originals who would already know all the common strategies to make the game easier and would be on board with a more challenging gameplay experience. After all, Night of the Raven re-balanced Gothic 2 to make it more challenging specifically because the core audience for Gothic WANTED the game to be harder than it was. At the very least, I feel like I've always been the target demographic and core audience for the Gothic games as they were coming out, and with Archolos it feels like it wasn't really designed with players like me me in mind, and that's not what I would have expected.
Now to be fair, you can absolutely break the difficulty curve in Gothic 1 and 2 if you know what you're doing, so it's not like the game being too easy is something wholly unique to Archolos. After all, it wasn't until Night of the Raven that Piranha Bytes really cracked down on the difficulty to provide a more consistent challenge for players that would last the entire game, and that's where my personal sweet spot of preference lies, where I find the challenge in that game to be pretty satisfying the whole way through. Otherwise, Gothic 1 is notoriously easy to break with how simple its leveling system is and how easy it is to acquire the best gear in the game, in chapter one, no less, and Gothic 2 while being a little bit harder to exploit still allows you to grind your way to a high-level pretty early in the game with things like transformation scrolls and other such special tricks. However, that wasn't my experience playing either of those games for the first time, or even Night of the Raven when it came to the US a few years later, where I didn't exactly know how things worked or what I was doing, but still followed the common advice to explore everywhere and do as many quests as possible before joining a faction, and still didn't reach a point when I felt like I was starting to become over-powered until later on -- like in chapters four or five, which I feel is a much more appropriate point to start reaching the peak of your power -- certainly it's more ideal than getting there at the end of chapter two. Which, in Archolos, kind of feels like Chapter One since the actual Chapter One can be incredibly short and limited in scope. And at least with Gothic 2, the chapters provide enough sizeable difficulty jumps, with having to avoid orcs in chapter two, fighting magic seekers in chapter three, then fighting orcs, lizardmen, and dragons in chapter four, and then seeing a higher number of these enemy types invade Khorinis in chapter five, that it does feel like the game is staying ahead of you in your character progression to maintain some degree of challenge throughout at least the first two-thirds of the game.
Archolos kind of attempts to do something similar by replacing weaker enemies with tougher variants as chapters progress, like how in certain wooded areas you might start with fighting Hungry Wolves, then later Wolves, then Black Wolves, and eventually Wargs. Or Hungry Lurkers might get replaced with Regular Lurkers and then Sea Lurkers. Or Swamp Sharks might become Sea Sharks. Or Harpies might become Black Harpies. Or Bears might become Black Bears. Or Field Raiders might become Forest Raiders. Or Goblins might become Goblin Warriors. While I appreciate the intention behind doing this, the way it's handled in this case feels very artificial to me, like it's bordering on just straight up level-scaling enemies to the player's level. It's not actually level-scaling because these are technically different enemies and they spawn based on the chapter, not the player level, as far as I'm aware, but they serve the same practical purpose in taking basic enemies and just making them arbitrarily stronger later in the game to coincide with the player also getting stronger.
In many cases, it just doesn't make sense to me why there are suddenly stronger enemies in some of these areas. Sure, sometimes it does, like how you might see more Frogmen out and about come chapter five, since they're established creatures who are appearing near their natural habitats, and they're just more active now than they used to be; and even if you had previously killed them all, it's no stretch to assume there are always more roaming about somewhere off-screen who move back in after you've left. That logic applies for more common animals as well, like how there might've been a nest of scavengers nearby that have recently hatched, which might explain why there are suddenly new scavengers appearing even though you'd previously killed all the ones who would've laid those eggs. Likewise, you can buy into seeing more orcs appearing around the perimeter of the island in later chapters because it coincides with a major storyline regarding the orc war. Same for the Bounty Hunters who appear in chapter five -- it makes sense because it's following a major development in the main quest where the situation changes to justify the presence of these new enemies.
The final point I want to bring up as to why I don't like Archolos as much as the original games, is that it doesn't feel as unique as they did, by virtue of being somewhat derivative. Obviously that's going to be the case to a certain degree with it being a mod, given that all of its mechanical systems and a lot of its assets will be taken directly from the original source material; however I feel like there are numerous creative decisions where they elected to simply copy the previous games instead of doing something new and original.
The entire map, for instance, uses the exact same sort of atmosphere and general aesthetic as what was in Gothic 2, save for like one or two very specific areas, with the same green fields and farm lands and forests for most everywhere like you see in Khorinis; a city with the same wooden hut slum district in the harbor and the same half-timbered buildings everywhere else and the same upper quarter where the wealthy and governing class reside like you see in Khorinis City; the same sort of ruined, desolate look in some areas like you see in the Valley of Mines; the same swampy regions like you see around the swamp dragon and also in Jharkendar, complete with an ancient stone temple occupied by sentinel statues; the same sort of Monastery sitting out on its own separate island with a long bridge and three archmages seated in front of a giant statue; the list goes on. Even the same music gets recreated to set the mood for these places, with the same main themes and motifs when exploring the wilds, the same melody playing in the harbor district, and even the Old Camp music being reused to represent a quaint idyllic farming village in Silbach. That one really bothers me in particular, because I associate that music so specifically with the Old Camp that it feels awkward and out of place to hear it in some other location; it was fun the first time I heard it just to recognize a familiar song in a new context, but the more I thought about it the more it started to clash tonally in my mind. The same goes for the old monastery music from Gothic 2 being reused in Archolos, where I associate that music very specifically with the Fire Mages of Innos -- to me, it's not just generic monastery music that you can sub into any monastery, and so it feels weird to hear that same music being used to represent the Water Mages of Adanos in their monastery. Both Silbach and the monastery actually feature brand new, original music as alternate tracks, and in both cases I actually like the new music better, because I find more excitement in experiencing things that are genuinely new, and these tracks feel more specifically tailored to the atmosphere of these specific locations. The water mages themselves, by the way, now also feel weirdly derivative of the Fire Mages by virtue of having the same type of Monastery structure and now their own similar types of shrines that you can pray at. They even run around casting fireballs at everything instead of using Circle of Water spells. So like, why couldn't the Water Mages have had a more unique interpretation applied to them instead of just copying what Gothic 2 already did with the Fire Mages?
Many of the major gameplay scenarios follow pretty much the same structure as before, too, like "do menial labor around a small farm to start the game, then find a way into town, then find a way to become a citizen, then find a way to gain an apprenticeship, then find a way to join a faction, then find a way into the upper quarter," and so on and so on. I mean, even a major main quest in Chapter Four has you doing essentially the same thing you did in Gothic 1 when you had to explore a mineshaft that was infested with crawlers before fighting the queen, and needing to recruit a group of guys to defend the gate before the guard would open it to let you in; and then a major main quest in Chapter Five has you doing essentially the same thing you did in Gothic 2 when you had to perform a bunch of extensive preparations assembling a crew and gathering supplies before setting out on the Point of No Return to face the final dungeon. A major main quest in Chapter Three has you performing a criminal investigation to acquit someone who's been wrongfully accused in a similar type of situation like you do in Chapter 3 of Gothic 2, and another major main quest has you ingratiating yourself with a group of bandits hiding in the swamp similar to what you do in Night of the Raven. There's even pirates there, too, which was likewise introduced previously in Night of the Raven. There's a sizeable quest where you go into a different mine to work as a digger in a situation that feels thematically and tonally similar to the general vibes of Gothic 1; the Chromanin quest from Gothic 1 gets essentially re-done with its own new hidden locations to find; and even the core premise of the main quest to find Jorn is highly reminiscent of the initial quest in Night of the Raven to find missing people around Khorinis. You can draw an even more direct comparison to the main quest of The Witcher 3 where you likewise spend the bulk of the first several chapters on a wild goose chase looking for a beloved family member while getting wrapped up in largely irrelevant subplots. It may not be a Gothic game, but it's such a monumental presence within this genre that those similarities count towards the shared experience from which Archolos intentionally or unintentionally draws.
With Archolos, I get that feeling, like I'm just playing Gothic 2 again, with most of the same visuals, music, communities, quests, and gameplay scenarios, just slightly remixed to be technically different and with the intensity dial cranked up to 11 for most things. Sort of like how the game's final dungeon feels like the Halls of Irdorath on steroids, with hints of the Sleeper Temple mixed in as well -- it's technically better than either of those two dungeons in a lot of ways, and that whole sequence including the preparation is one of my favorite quest arcs in the entire game, but there's a part of me that goes "you know, it is kind of just the Halls of Irdorath again, but done better, and that's a good thing, but at the same time it doesn't feel as unique or special." Similarly, the quests in the city are all generally entertaining in their own right and I enjoyed doing most of them, but it's hard for me to get excited about going hunting for animal skins right outside of town to gain the favor of the local bowyer, or fighting people for pay in a back alley slum in the harbor district, when I've already done those exact same scenarios in Gothic 2. These quests are more elaborate and have been developed further, so they're technically superior quests, but they're still derivative of the originals. Many of the other quests are technically unique, like how releasing a caged harpy from a rival shop to sabotage another store owner, or trying to spread demand for a new craft beer in local pubs, are both new things that I haven't seen before in a Gothic game, but they're still in that same vein of "doing a task to help a merchant in a harbor city with half-timbered architecture while the same soundtrack plays in the background," so they still feel generally similar to things I've already done before.
I mean, even just the simple fact that Archolos LOOKS and FEELS so much like Khorinis is a big part of why the whole game feels so similar overall. Granted, it makes thematic sense to be that way if you consider the world-building where Archolos is not that far away from Khorinis so it would probably have a similar enough geography and ecosystem, and the fact that it was also colonized by Myrtana means it would likely have similar architecture in the city -- but those are creative decisions where I feel there's room to put a more unique spin on things. Like it could've easily just been a different sort of environment altogether, like what if it had a more tropical look to it, or what if the volcano were emphasized with more rocky terrain and ash? What if Archolos had been farther south so we could see a slightly more sandy, desert aesthetic? And what if the Myrtanian invasion happened more recently after the city had already been fully built by the indigenous population so that it could have more of its own unique architecture, with just a sprinkling of Myrtanian half-timber construction in some of the newer districts? This is where being a mod makes it understandable to just have the island look like Khorinis, because I imagine it's a lot of work to create an entirely new sort of environment, which might mean building all new models for structures, re-texturing a bunch of different creatures, modeling new plants and texturing new terrains for everything, whereas just basing it off the existing assets means you can drop in a lot of pre-made stuff to save a ton of extra work. These are volunteers making this game for free, after all, so I'm not shaming anyone for not going that extra mile to create all-new EVERYTHING from the ground up, but regardless, the end result is all the same with Archolos feeling a bit same-y in some ways, and that deflates some of my excitement and enjoyment a little bit.
To Archolos's credit, it's not like the whole game is literally just copying Gothic 2, since there is still a ton of brand new, all-original content in this game, like with several new music tracks, new weapons and armor, new quests and storylines, new gameplay systems, a new customizable player home, new skills, new combat animations for human enemies, new glorified boss battles, new twists on existing mechanics, a handful of new environments, new quality of life improvements, new enemy types (that are technically modeled after existing creatures but which still manage to feel new and different), and so on, all of which are genuinely fun and exciting to see added to the familiar Gothic experience. Even when it's reusing the same original music tracks as before, they've been recreated with a full orchestra so they offer a new kind of sound so you're not hearing literally the exact same tracks just copy/pasted into the game. All in all, there's probably more all-new mechanical twists going from Night of the Raven to Archolos than there is going from Gothic 1 to Gothic 2 -- it's actually extremely impressive just how much new stuff they thought up to add onto the core experience. A lot of these new additions are things I never would've thought were lacking in the original games, and yet they serve to make the core gameplay more robust and varied so they're a welcome sight all around. The problem is that many of these new things are only exciting for a brief amount of time, like seeing a crazy new boss fight mechanism with special attacks, or seeing a new enemy type for the first time, or realizing "Oh hey, you don't kill people automatically when using a ranged weapon, that's neat!" -- before the gameplay settles back into the same rhythm of doing similar tasks for similar characters in similar environments with similar visuals and similar music.
On the other hand, the fact that Archolos DOES feel so much like Gothic 2 is a big part of WHY it's so satisfying and engaging to play. There is a certain nostalgic charm to settling into a familiar gameplay experience that feels just like something you know so well that was a big part of your life 20 years ago; there's a legitimate risk that it could've lost that captivating quality if things were too different, to the point that it no longer resembled the thing it was trying to recreate. That's a very real concern I've had when looking at other Gothic mods, where I'm always like "Okay, but does it FEEL like Gothic, or does it just LOOK like Gothic?" It's such a big concern for me that I've never been interested in trying Gothic mods at all until Archolos came out and was so heavily recommended. With Archolos maintaining a look and feel that is very consistent with the original games, and with all of its actual content being technically brand new -- at worst merely "inspired" by the originals -- it allows you to feel like you're experiencing something you know and love so dearly for the first time all over again. That's honestly Archolos's single greatest accomplishment -- just the fact that it taps into those nostalgic feelings so strongly, while also feeling extremely authentic to the original experience. The fact that it uses so many familiar elements may be a direct contributor in how it manages to achieve that nostalgic feel. So maybe I'm over-thinking things on this point, but I still wish that it could've done some things a little differently to stand on its own a little more independently, like if there could've been some more unique environments that we hadn't seen before in a Gothic game, or if the story and main quest could've gone in a different direction to feel like more of a brand new experience that still builds off the existing source material, instead of being essentially just a new and improved version of what came before.
In a change from the established formula, Archolos only features two joinable factions instead of the usual three, but they feel more differentiated this time around in terms of what their respective quests actually entail, leading to a much more unique experience overall with more replay value to experience on subsequent playthroughs. As usual, you get a specific initiation task for each faction to sell the unique flavor of that faction, like how the Merchant's Guild is working to stop a group of smugglers who are undermining their business in the city, and the City Guard is looking to stop a group of rogue guards who have turned into bandits masquerading as guards, but then these tasks come back in a later chapter with an extra step to resolve as the situation evolves, so that your faction selection has more of an impact late in the game. Each faction offers two branching rank promotions into more advanced units, typically specializing in some form of melee or ranged combat complete with their own special armor set, and each one comes with its own associated quest to convince the unit leader to accept you into their ranks. Plenty of extra optional side quests appear in later chapters, as well, depending on which faction you've joined, and even the main quest changes in chapter three with a different way to get into the Scoundrel's Haven and a different task once in the Haven to gain Cortez's confidence, each depending on your faction. When it comes time to resolve your faction's primary quest arc, you can even choose to opt out of it entirely, in which case you get yet one more branching quest opportunity to join the Royal Envoy, and later to join the Ring of Water as a separate faction with its own quest, thereby replacing your original faction. With all those different options, this adds a lot to the replay value, since you can not only choose to go with a different build and playstyle or role-play certain quest outcomes differently, but you also get much more brand new content to experience in a second playthrough through your faction selection. So while it might seem disappointing to only have two factions to choose from, they feel more developed and fleshed-out, and there are more total branches to experience within a given faction and also externally if changing your faction late in the game. I was skeptical of this two-faction prospect at first, but came around to really appreciating the all the extra evolution and unique distinctions after I did my second playthrough.
There is no official mage faction, however, and that's a bit of a bummer because I'm just not a fan of the way the magic system works in practice. Instead of joining a mage faction and having a trainer who can teach you magic circles and grant you new runes through some kind of deterministic process, like as you advance in rank through that faction, you're instead forced to join one of the other factions and learn magic essentially as a freelancer by finding magic spell books and runes as you explore the world. That's kind of a neat concept, to be able to mix-and-match magic playstyles with the other factions since that lends even more unique variety when it comes to replaying one of those factions, but it really does feel like pure, random luck as to what books and runes you find, when and where. That makes it awkward to commit to a full mage playthrough without just looking up where all the important items are and making a beeline for each one, since you can unwittingly spend a lot of time missing key books or runes that would actually help to make the mage playstyle viable. There are multiple instances of (I believe) every book to find in multiple possible locations, so you will probably find them all eventually if you're thorough in exploration, and I think you can eventually just buy everything you need by the end of chapter five, but for how dependent the magic system is on finding a small handful of very specific items that are NECESSARY to even engage with the magic system in a progressive manner, it does feel like too much of a crapshoot as to whether you will randomly stumble into the things you need in a timely manner or not.
You can argue that physical weapons have that element of progression through exploration where you will just naturally find better weapons the more you explore, which can actually reward exploration by getting you access to some of these more powerful items sooner if you can find them in time and get your stats high enough to use them, and so maybe it's appropriate to do the same thing with magic -- but the physical weapons are all functionally identical to one another, so a better sword is effectively the same exact gameplay just with more damage, so I would argue you're really not missing much if you go a long stretch of time without finding a better sword. Whereas the magic spells have completely different functions, some being straight missile attacks, others being chargeable to do extra damage, others dealing damage in different sorts of area patterns, some being for crowd control and others being for exploration, so on and so on, while the better, more powerful spells are restricted to higher circles that not only require you to find those runes, but also a whole series of books to use them at all. So it is possible you might NEVER find a particular rune or book and would just have to miss that entire gameplay function for a huge chunk of the game. I imagine it would break the game's story to have you join the Water Mages as a novice in chapter two since that would ruin the big monastery reveal in chapter five, but I still wish there were a way to become a mage apprentice with one of the ones in town, for instance, so that you could learn at least *some* magic circles and how to make certain runes without needing to rely on pure luck through exploration.
Despite that, there are a few new additions to magic playstyles that help to make them a little more interesting, what with being able to use magic staves that deal magic damage and rely on your mana as the minimum stat requirement to equip, and giving you ways to improve your base spell damage, both of which allow magic specializations to feel a little more viable when you're starting out. It's always kind of bothered me in Gothic 2 how you could join the Fire Mages right away but were still basically forced into being a melee fighter for so much of the game because the spells either didn't do enough damage or they cost too much mana to use all the time, and so it's nice for Archolos to help mitigate those issues without forcing you to spread your points into other fields to compensate. You'll still need some points in two-handed combat training and strength if you want to do comparable damage with magic staves, but the fact that they do magic damage instead of physical and come with armor piercing offsets some of the need for more physical stats, thereby making it a decent backup option for weaker enemies or times when you want to conserve mana. There's also now a mana regeneration function that unlocks automatically once you learn the fourth circle of magic, and can be additionally unlocked with certain jewelry sets, which honestly kind of trivializes the mage difficulty since that gives you effectively infinite mana, but considering how obnoxious it was in the previous games to have to constantly chug potions or run back and forth between beds to recuperate spent mana, it's a welcome addition to have in Archolos; I just think there maybe should've been a higher cost to learn it, like if it needed extra learning points as a separate skill, instead of being passively gained on the fourth circle, and if it couldn't be supplemented with jewelry.
As I come to the end of my review, I need to remind everyone that this is not meant to be a comprehensive evaluation of every single thing in the game. There's a lot more stuff I could cover regarding all the new twists and mechanics on the established formula, with things like how lockpick combinations are randomized every time you load the game so you can't exploit the solution which thereby places a higher premium on lockpicks and higher skill training, or how the cooking system has been expanded with all kinds of new recipes that do different things and which call for a wide array of ingredients, or how notice boards provide mini-boss challenges to find during exploration through the wanted posters or bonus trade deals that reward going the extra mile to sell a specialized item to a particular merchant, or how there's now more emphasis placed on underwater exploration with being able to actually loot underwater objects, and so on and so on, all of which contributes towards making Archolos a much more robust and varied gameplay experience than either of the original games. There's also plenty of quality of life improvements to go around, like with the immersive tutorial system that actually explains game mechanics to you through in-world books and terminology, the new inclusion of a dedicated torch button, ranged attacks no longer being an instant-kill so you don't have to deal with the hassle of landing the finishing blow with a melee weapon, needing to equip only one single teleport rune and then selecting your destination from a menu instead of juggling a dozen teleport runes in just a few quick slots, the inventory screen that combines the Gothic 1-style tabs with the Gothic 2-style grid for a more efficient use of space, and so on and so on. Not all of these things are perfect implementations, however, seeing as the inventory still gets poorly organized within tabs leading to a cluttered mess the longer you play, or how the cooking interface is utterly fiddly and cumbersome to use (in addition to the designers just going overboard with, in my opinion, too many different recipes in general). The translations from Polish to English are generally pretty good but occasionally do some really weird things that don't make sense, and sometimes the logic for what quest-givers want you to do is a little baffling and I can't tell if it's due to translation issues or just sketchy quest design. There are a few too many static objects that look like normal interactive loot but which are actually just set decoration, which is kind of annoying. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
This is all stuff I've already covered in previous impressions videos, and there's probably even more stuff I could talk about if I really wanted to -- like I could probably talk for 15 minutes on just the cooking and new crafting systems alone -- but for the most part these are all just minor details that don't move the needle for me in terms of my overall assessment of the game. This review is already overly long as it is, and I don't want to get bogged down with so many specific details, so hopefully just mentioning some of them here will suffice to provide a more generalized overview of these extra subjects.
With all of that being said, The Chronicles of Myrtana: Archolos is still an outstanding game that deserves a ton of praise and respect. For being a mod created by fans, it is absolutely stunning just how much total content is in this game, and how good so much of that content is. But it goes beyond that relative qualifier of merely being good "for a mod" -- it's really good for a game just in general, rivaling and even surpassing the depth, quality, and overall enjoyability of many big-budget, AAA RPG's in recent memory. In my case, Archolos is probably in my top five, or maybe top six favorite RPGs that I've played in the last 20 years, at least of those that released after Night of the Raven hit the US near the end of 2005. Obviously there are tons of other RPGs that I just haven't played yet that might be in that conversation as well, so it's possible that Archolos might ultimately settle into more of a "Top 10" sort of spot as I get around to playing more recent releases, but that's still a high honor to be featured that high in any ranking.
The fact that it feels so much like the original Gothic games is unquestionably Archolos's greatest strength, considering that for myself and many similar gamers who have long considered Gothic to be among our favorite games of all time, there have been few to zero games to ever come close to recapturing the magic of those original games. Even Piranha Bytes never came as close as the Archolos team has, even when they were still making official Gothic games, or deliberately trying to recreate the same successful formula with a new series, or supposedly claiming that they were "going back to their roots." Of course, with Archolos using the exact same engine with the same core gameplay mechanics and a lot of the same audiovisual components, it is a little bit like picking low-hanging fruit, since those things will automatically make it feel much closer than other games built on different engines with a different sort of generalized feel -- but it does extend deeper than that with things like the world design, quest design, character interactions, tone, atmosphere, early game difficulty, and progression, all feeling generally authentic to the Gothic experience. In that regard, Archolos is something of a White Whale that many of us have been searching in vain to find for the last 20-some years, and so finally having a full game experience that's even close to being on par with originals, and which actually feels like a genuine Gothic game, is like a small miracle that earns this game an extra special degree of sentimental appreciation. Then you add in all the modernized updates, quality of life improvements, mechanical evolutions, and brand new features, and it's easy to understand why this game would be so well-regarded among the Gothic community. Some things like the exploration, world design, lore, dynamic events, skill systems, factions, and so on, are arguably even better than the originals.
However, despite it being technically superior to Gothic 1 and 2 in a lot of ways, I just can't put Archolos higher than either of those games, because for me, it does have some notable issues dealing mainly with the story pacing and presentation in the main quest feeling slow, meandering, and uninteresting; the difficulty progression and balancing not offering the same degree of satisfying challenge throughout the whole playtime; the quest scripting with regards to freedom of choice and immersion being decidedly more restrictive and obtrusive even if in only in a minority of instances; and the overall atmosphere and setting feeling a little too derivative without as much originality behind it. There's a part of me that also feels like there's maybe a little too much total content in the game to the point that it started to make the experience much more exhausting than any of the originals, which felt better paced and didn't start to wear out their welcome for me like Archolos did, and I also kind of prefer the more fantastical elements of the originals, what with the magically-encapsulated prison colony and uncovering the dark mysteries of an ancient god in Gothic 1, and battling the armies of darkness in all different forms in Gothic 2. Archolos, in comparison, is a much more grounded sort of game, with a story that's based on a personal quest to find your missing brother while dealing with human conflicts surrounding various political factions on the island, which is itself much more realistic and down to earth -- some people may ultimately prefer that, but it's not really my cup of tea, personally.
So overall, I like The Chronicles of Myrtana: Archolos and would easily recommend it to anyone who's familiar with the original Gothic games, or anyone who just has an interest in playing more old-school RPGs. It doesn't dethrone Gothic 1 or 2 in my eyes, however, but it fits in great with those two games to round out a sort of "old school trilogy," and is now basically an official Gothic game as far as I'm concerned. It's still not my favorite, and it's maybe not the best at being a Gothic game, but it's pretty darn good nonetheless, and therefore worth including in the same ballpark as those original games.
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