This game has been through more name changes than Prince. When first announced, it was called Gothic 4: Genesis, and through its development cycle, it has been called Gothic 4: Arcania, Arcania: A Gothic Tale, and finally they settled on Arcania: Gothic 4. Whatever the game may be called, I am happy to inform you, my beloved reader, that the demo for this game is out now.
Arcania: Gothic 4: A Gothic Goth Tale in Arcania, I mean, Arcania: Gothic 4, is an open world, action role-playing game. It’s developed by Spellbound Entertainment and published by Jo Wood Entertainment. The demo lets you play the first 2 hours of the game. This includes all the games tutorials and takes your character to about level 4.
Gothic 3 was a pretty good looking game, so it’s hard for Gothic 4 to really improve a whole lot, but unlike G3 it doesn’t have any frame rate issues. G3 consistently runs at 30 frames per second, which is playable, but crappy. G4 runs at a smooth 60fps (I ran both G3 and G4 on my machine today to check the frame rates). The reason behind the better performance is that the game uses Trinigy’s Vision Engine 7 and uses some features from the upcoming Vision Engine 8. The PC version uses Nvidia’s PhsX technology.
You no longer play as the same nameless hero from Gothic 3, but you are still a nameless hero. At this point I think that if Jo Wood tried to give the hero a name, fans would burn down the developers’ houses with torches.
While G4 still feels very much like a Gothic game, some welcome changes have been made to the formula. A mini map has been added. For people who have never played G3, you don’t know how awesome that is. In previous Gothic games, you had to find quest goals simply by looking for them in the game world. Now, you get nice little quest trackers, and quest givers have that familiar World of Warcraft style exclamation mark above their heads. You level up right from your character skill tree, instead of having to find a skill trainer. While searching for trainers added a level of immersion to the game, newcomers to the series will find this modern feature to be similar to how other role playing games work.
The entire interface feels very modern with a clean, polished look. It’s very minimal and doesn’t get in the way of the games gorgeous scenery.
The Arcania: Gothic 4 demo is available now on PC from Gamer’ s Hell, and for Xbox 360 on the Xbox Marketplace. The full game will be available on October 12 for PC and Xbox 360, and a PlayStation 3 version is planned for March next year.
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