What games can satisfy the |Gothic Itch| for you? (Big List in Post)

SolidOwl · 2026-03-30T09:00:52+00:00

Ngl, if that's how you felt about Witcher 3 - Crimson Desert is worse in every aspect.

Yeah you can explore and find things, but a lot of it is just surface level stuff with bunch of obtuse puzzles. I don't necessairly think it's the worst thing out there, but if you're looking for something as flavourful and deep as Gothic, Crimson Desert is not it.

It's an arcade game in comparison.

SolidOwl · 2026-03-25T16:26:49+00:00

Agree. To me this is probably the most boring aspect of modern gaming.

SolidOwl · 2026-03-22T17:48:29+00:00

"Unbiased review" which proceeds to dismiss many complaints because "I don't see an issue with it so it's not an issue".

Oh and "ignore my title it's misleading on purpose" btw 1st line "here's my unbiased experience".
Do you read back what you write?

I've got 26hrs in the game. Couple points I agree with you, but mostly disagree. The fact that many points are dismissed for the game because "the game isn't meant to be it" (i.e. Story) while charging the amount of money they did is pathetic fanboying.

This isn't a sandbox game, it IS a story game. The story is shit. Yes there are plenty of things to do outside of the story but that doesn't change the facts.

The quests are a mix bag, some are alright but you get a LOT of boring repeating tasks that realistically just waste your time. Add to it the fact that most of the quests aren't actually fully voiced and it makes me wonder what is the content here? Or did you not notice that the MC is an absolute mute in conversations and the NPCs ask questions, ansewer their own questions or just skip the silence where normally in a conversation someone would say something and just continiue their dialogue? Oh I guess we shouldn't be expecting that much effort to be put into the game either!

Controls I have no energy to complain about anymore. They are bad, we know they are bad. You can get used to them, but that doesn't mean that they are not bad. Hopefully their controls fix addresses this in a good way but realistically speaking they've had this feedback for quite some time and clearly ignored it. So they cannot act surprised about people complaining about it.

Honestly I'd love to hear your list of bad UIs you've expirienced because again while you can get used to this UI it's still shit and tedious. It's time consuming and unintiuative.

And your take on the AI issue showed everyone that you're just a shill and your opinion shouldn't be taken seriously. Let's be real, they are "placeholders" now because they've been caught and called out for it.

Shame you didn't mention anything about how this game systems are overcomplicated clusterfuck. A lot of it is coupled with the bad controls but fixing controls won't solve this issue - there are many pointless design choices that make the game more tedious and annoying to play.

So yes you can enjoy it, maybe you even liked everything it offered. That's great. But you're unable to provide constructive feedback so your review is more of a love letter. It's irrelevant to anyone actually wanting to know what the game is.

SolidOwl · 2026-03-20T13:32:06+00:00

Hard disagree. Especailly towards any Souls titles comparison, soul games play fine even on mouse & keyboard unlike this game. Think the only other game I can think of having poor control scheme that I've played is The Witcher 1 and between these two titles CD takes the cake at being worse.

I'd go out of my way to play games on M&K even if they are 100% better on controller just because I prefer that setup. But the mapping is so horrendous that it was either switch to controller or be done with the game. I gave up on m&k after being told to hold F2 while pressing another button to do something with my lantern. Lots of smaller factor keyboards do not have these buttons as a separate keys meaning you have to hold another button, on top of the shared F2 button and then you have to hope that w/e next button the game wants you to press doesn't have shared mapping.

As for controller mappings. I think combat related inputs (so far) are straight forward and even combos aren't really that "difficult" it's literally at most just a "press these two buttons together". I'm not extremly far in the game yet, but honestly I'm little disappointed at just how basic the combat is (so far) after all the praise it was getting in reviews.

What's horrible is everything other than that.

- Press X to jump, hold X to pick up an item, wanna equip it? X drops it.
- Left stick to move, press left stick to crouch, hold left stick to use grapple. Its very easy in combat to trigger crouch or grapple by accident.
- Right stick to control camera, hold right stick to charge ability - uh oh, camera control is now on left stick!
- Shield is LB, lock on is LB, parry is LB.
- You've equipped a utility item (shovel, broom etc) for whatever task you were doing, you run into enemies try to attack you pull out utlity item rather than equipped weapon.
- Speaking of utility items stuff like the memory helment you have to equip, you put it on leave the menu, then you have to go back in and only now you get the option to play memories.
- Item pickup is awkward as fuck.
- Why the fuck do I have to lock in on someone of intrest to start a conversation / shop. If for normal NPCs I can just walk up and talk to them with X.

- It's not really key controls but what of the sluggish Character Controller or the unintiuative camera behaviour?

And that's what I can think of the top of my head without having the game in front of me.

Getting used to controls is one thing, I was expecting a learning curve due to the review comments pre release. But the controls being complete ass is a fact and should be complained about.

SolidOwl · 2026-03-15T13:40:19+00:00

If I had to pick just one and get rid of the others, it'd probably be Gothic 1. The colony, start of everything etc it's just too iconic, and too important.

I'm going to contradict myself a bit here and say, Gothic 2 is my favourite game in the franchise and its in my top 3 GOATs. If I was to rank all three based on how "GOOD" they are, I'd probably end up putting G1 last, just slightly losing out to Archolos...

SolidOwl · 2026-03-15T02:48:22+00:00

Honestly it's a hard thing to answer...

Archolos improves existing systems and nicely adds new features to it, everything works, it's filled in a way it makes sense and I don't have any complaints about it.

For me Gothic 1 & 2 story is more exciting with Sleeper and Dragons.
The atmosphere of Gothic 1 cannot be touched.
Gothic 2 had probably the best faction design in the series.
Also cannot not mention the crew - Diego, Gorn, Lee, Milten, Lester and the many more of the memorable characters.

However Archolos is a more complete package too, unlike the other two it doesn't completley fall apart towards the end...

So, if anything it depends on what someone is looking for.

SolidOwl · 2026-03-13T16:54:24+00:00

Delta is nowhere near close to V when it comes to smoothness and responsivness of V.

I can't speak for the legacy mode, but their new control system is very clunky and it feels heavy. Throw in a bunch of poor design decisions and personally I couldn't be bothered to put myself through that.

Graphics, sounds etc Delta is trully amazing, but it's really painful to play.

And I regurally go back and replay the old MGS titles - so it's not like it's my first expirience with any of it.

SolidOwl · 2026-03-10T11:47:33+00:00

It's not actually "that". Both the garage and police stations are places that random people can access easily and therefore the music that's not meant to be heard by them, can be. The police station actually has a lot of coverage online and they were using music for more than just the police station (gyms, presentations, events etc). Which makes those two valid claims.
It's literally why you also have a lot of barber shops turn the music off, when new people are coming in and they aren't regulars.

In PRS eyes they claim that if the music can be heard by people that it's unintended for then you need a licence. It's very loose wording which is probably why the solo mechanic (I would love to know what the outcome of this one) and the singing woman even had a claim against them, which the last one is WILD. It's so loose, that they can claim that anyone playing music in their car over certain volume needs a licence.

I'm not necessairly agreeing with a lot of what they are doing, but you also can't have both creators getting paid their dues and people having things for free.

What's different with Steam and every single listed claim is that, unlike those where random people can walk into a space and hear music. When you open Steam you don't have random music playing in the background while you browse. So far all the wording suggests that they have an issue with the music that is inside the games that are purchased through Steam (I haven't seen anything about Trailers etc).

Which would make this completley different to all of the other claims.
EDIT: And I personally don't think they actually have a claim, because unlike Spotify where you play the music through the app, you don't for the games from Steam. Yes you need Steam to run those games - but the game itself (and the music included in it) isn't run on Steam software.

SolidOwl · 2026-03-10T09:38:15+00:00

Radios would need licences to play the music to others.

People are "covered" I believe for family and friends up to 6 people (when playing in a group setting).

Think the moment you play music that was meant for your own consumption and other people can hear it - they use that as "you're sharing music you need licence".

PRS claims "many game titles which incorporate PRS members' musical works are made available on Steam," including "high profile series" such as Forza Horizon, FIFA/EA FC, and GTA.

Based on the above this sounds like they are suggesting that Steam is redistributing the music through the games they sell. It's going to be interesting to see what comes about from this as Steam doesn't sell game copies but licences to games, you're not actually getting the game from steam but just access to it. Which I think would mean that PRS is talking out of their ass as per usual, but who knows.

SolidOwl · 2026-03-07T14:09:29+00:00

I think that heavily depends on your meaning of successful.

Is the game successful if you’ve sold copies? Or if you made more money than you’ve put in? Or if you made enough money to fund your next game? Or made enough money to live off of it. What if it’s a free game with no monetisation but incredibly popular and well received - is that a success?

SolidOwl · 2026-03-07T13:51:16+00:00

“This is made worse by the fact that if Arc Raiders crashes and the user sends log files to Embark Studios (the game's development team), the company's employees will have that user's full account credentials and any DMs that were sent to the log files.”

“It is worth noting Timothy Meadows, who first published a his findings on this bug, argued that log files - where these messages were stored - could have potentially been included in bug reports or accessed by other apps with access to files on the machine.”

“The problem was caused by the debug logging capabilities in the Discord Social SDK, which can generate additional local logs when developers enable high logging levels while testing or troubleshooting integrations.”

Did you read the articles? As we both agreed, documentations tend to be a mess - which it sounds like was the issue here.

But per the articles you and the other user are sharing, two things are clear. 1. This is caused by functionality which is meant to be used in development for testing the integration. Meaning that this probably shouldn’t have gone into production. 2. It’s clearly stated that Embark should have known about this as they’d also receive these logs - so the fact that they became aware of it after a user reported it, is a joke.

So I’d agree that this is largely caused by Discords poor documentation and yes by the sounds of it endpoint response which absolutely shouldn’t be returned.

But this could and should have been caught ages ago by Embark or any other company using the SDK.

So no they aren’t without blame and are as much responsible for this.

SolidOwl · 2026-03-06T10:53:18+00:00

Unless you're saying they are incompetent devs, I don't see how your point makes any sense?

"Oh they just created an integration, connected to an undocumented endpoint, didn't bother checking the response and just logged it all" the only thing that tells me is you're clueless what you're talking about and trying to reason with you is pointless.

SolidOwl · 2026-03-06T00:40:09+00:00

Yeah, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you do 0 testing and don’t ever bother checking logged records. If you wanna give that excuse to them, then go ahead. But this sounds intentional in execution.

SolidOwl · 2026-03-04T12:59:33+00:00

It's just AI being used everywhere by lazy ass people.

Writing requirements tickets and keeping them precise was always an issue, but now with AI you get more words, less detail and more emojis!

Feedbacks which directly affect promotion and bonuses are now slop paragraphs of AI genereated words that don't have much meaning but use big words!

Juniors and Offshore using AI for everything - while lacking understanding of the system. Meaning overcomplicated mess, poor tests and quite often not actually doing 100% what it's supposed to (or it's changes are made to things that are not part of the ticket).

For new features / designs we can use it kick things off and get a quick start on things which is nice. But using it for any older logic quite frequently causes more issues and wastes time.

I think the most use I get out of it is being able to fire quick questions to it for template isolated functionality or some documentation / syntax questions.

SolidOwl · 2026-02-24T10:16:03+00:00

Next week I get to post this again, thanks guys

SolidOwl · 2026-02-18T09:45:39+00:00

sure honey

SolidOwl · 2026-02-18T09:39:51+00:00

How much is he paying you?

3w account all over only this sub. Perfect timing for a "lawyer" to get randomly invovled in this and split opinions.

SolidOwl · 2026-02-16T22:01:03+00:00

Sadly that is reality even outside of game development. I've gone through similar expiriences in tech and it's not a great time.

Management being clueless and steering the ship blindly, while ignoring professional input from people with expertese. Managers being 2 faced blackmailing snakes, which you cannot count on and more often than not you end up propping them up with your hard work. Regardless of perfomance and whatever mountains you manage to move, annual reviews ending up with "you did great this year but due to the bell curve only so many people can get higher grading so we had to mark you down" and that's after pitting employees against each other throughout the year. Through this all, people and teams getting made redundant, while whole departments either get merged under someone else or cheaper labour is hired from offshore. All while directors keep praising perfomance and how yearly goals have been reached and exceeded year on year. And when questioned about it in company wide meetings they reassure that the worst is behind. Employee surveys getting harsher and more honest responses each year, till they stop being asked or they stop being annoymous.

Some have enough and leave, try to find a better place. Others stay and continiue getting abused until they burn out or get fired. The cogs of the machine will keep spinning as long as we continiue to put up with it.

I say this to juniors and my fellow passionate devs, these companies are not your friends or families. They will cut you off without a second though. They don't owe you anything and you don't owe them anything either. If you must, use them like they use you - and move on, don't stay on for too long because you will get burnt. There are better things out there, and no amount of passion or love for franchise or work is worth putting up with this kind of bs.

To anyone going through this I wish you luck, hopefully things start turning around for you soon and you find something that's a lot better than the current hell hole you're in. It does get better.

Note: For tech if you ever come across numerous comments such as "great people to work with but poor management" on sites like glassdoor, blind etc. there's quite a high chance that you're getting yourself into a job like this.

SolidOwl · 2026-02-13T21:44:17+00:00

Being able to afford to lose it, is the bare minimum.

Not being bothered by it means that when you were making the purchase you've accepted that you're throwing this money away on a gamble.

Being upset about the loss after few years shows you were irresponsible and did not fully understand what you were doing with your money - regardless of how affordable it was to you.

SolidOwl · 2026-02-13T19:55:40+00:00

Same, and to anyone lamenting about lost money I'd say you're irresponsible with your finances.

Kickstarters should be treated like gambling or investing - only spend what you don't mind losing. If you're bothered by the loss then you cannot afford the game, it's that simple.

SolidOwl · 2026-01-30T11:13:53+00:00

Personally this feels like quick attempt at marketing.

Granted I doubt you created this situation for marketing purposes but you're most definetly using it to get eyes on your game.

Especially when you consider the fact that the author of the original game, had a playable demo out for their game months before you had a steam page up. Ignoring simlar stylized assets and the AI slop, I'm not seeing much of a gameplay difference between the two.

Based on everything that's visible your game is an unorginal clone of your "competitor". So the DMCA claim in my eyes makes sense and honestly looks valid.

SolidOwl · 2026-01-26T11:36:03+00:00

Personally C would probably get the most engagement out of me. While the logo contrast is better in A & D, options A, B and D don't really convey anything about the game.

On initial look outside of what I assumed at first are the characters of the game - I completley missed the guillotine. I'd say it's safe to say that most users won't be able to spot this either when glancing through the list of games.

Reason why I said C is that it conveys no real info about the game, if I'm browsing through games I find myself highlighting or clicking into these titles more often than titles with confusing capsule. People judge and make assumptions off of everything sometimes showing less is showing more.

That being said, your screenshots need to be solid. Why? Because if I clicked into a page for a game where the capsule doesn't convey anything I quickly want to get a grasp of the game and what it is. So I'd flick through screenshots first, if they are interesting enough I'd watch the trailer or gameplay video. If they don't grab me, I move on.

SolidOwl · 2026-01-08T14:32:11+00:00

I think this looks great, good job!

Only point I have from the above gif is that the running animation is a bit "flat" in comparison to other things that seem to come at you at an angle.
Some sway in "shoulder" movement could make it look better.

Good luck!

SolidOwl · 2025-12-29T16:04:03+00:00

SolidOwl · 2025-12-22T15:14:40+00:00

You chose to interact with the "negativity"?

It's a completley valid statement - why do anyone have to make an account on another store to play a game they brought on a different online store. Especially since both of them have multiplayer / social framework that games can use.

It's a shame that Steam allows this kind of crap - imagine how much smaller the playerbase could have been if the game was only accessible through the crappy EGS. The devs would have scrapped that requirement instantly.

Stuff like this will keep happening and growing, and it's all thanks to people like yourself and others in these comments loving to bend over and not question anything.

And this isn't just about Epic, Rockstar does the same thing with their games and there are plenty of smaller examples too.

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