Gothic. 8 games with brilliant ideas for narrative

Sometimes it happens that a developer has enormous ambitions, but the technology currently available isn't enough to fully implement them. This statement applies, for example, to the creation of open worlds in games - for example, in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall from 1997, we got a huge virtual space the size of (approximately) 542,164 square kilometers. And yet, the world was built from repetitive elements and glaringly empty.

It can be argued that the company behind the game, Bethesda, wanted to give players a taste of future possibilities, which they can fully experience nowadays in games like Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series. On the other hand, however, it's possible to point to a title from the Daggerfall era, the developers of which have adopted a much smaller scale, while avoiding making players feel like they're artificially limited by the virtual world.

I'm talking about the first Gothic by Piranha Bytes, which - despite some imperfections and the passage of time - can still serve as a benchmark for creating realistic game worlds The "Piranhas" didn't want to surround their audience with invisible walls. Instead, they locked them behind a perfectly visible magical barrier, which served as a foundation to the game's entire storyline.

"We got trapped by our own creation." - do you also hear Xardas's voice as you read this line?

This narrative trick allowed the developer to create a relatively small world, which is nonetheless brimming with content. The Valley of Mines in Gothic, a natural prison, was just asking for a meticulous tour. You wanted to peek into every cave, explore all the dark forests and dive into the deep dungeons. At each step, the player had a quest to complete or a treasure to find.

However, what is most important and at the same time quite paradoxical, the magical barrier surrounding the penal colony didn't feel artificial or as if created to limit the game's boundaries. Its purpose was trivial - it was meant to stop the prisoners from escaping. As one of them, the player wasn't left wondering why they couldn't breach it - they knew about it from the very start of the adventure and understood that the limited area will have to suffice.

The best they could do was to find a way to destroy the dome by joining one of the three factions, discovering the Dreamer's secret, making contact with Xardas, and so on. The magic barrier was almost never at the center of events, although it always shone as a beacon - literally and figuratively (as a goal - an obstacle to overcome). In Gothic II, the entire island of Khorinis took on a similar role.

1. More about Gothic