Wow, surprisingly I actually read all of that in one sitting! You are a pretty damn good writer, what you said was very interesting.

It sounds like a cool game except the archery, but i'm never an archer in any game. It really sounds like a great game, but yeah I might pick up one of the Gothic games first.

One question : Does it have difficulty select?

ELEX has difficulty settings and Gothic 3 has too. I'm playing on normal, which is plenty difficult for me. Gothic 1 and 2 have set difficulty but basically difficulty in Gothic just means when you are able to tackle certain enemies. The game is less about skill and more about stats. So it's not about enemies being easy to beat or difficult to beat and more like possible to beat or impossible to beat with your current level and equipment.

If you don't mind very old school games then start with Gothic 1. It's the smallest of the games with the most rudimentary gameplay. From gameplay and feel Gothic 2 and 3 are identical with small improvements and a much bigger world size. Spoiler: Gothic 2 includes almost all of Gothic 1's map. Gothic 3 is a different beast entirely with a gigantic map and many cities and quests.

Well, if you made so much effort to write all that, i am happy for you that you are enjoying it. Go for it.

The game looks like an interesting B game to me but will wait for it to go way down in price.

I've always felt Gothic 1 and 2 were more similar.

I'm too busy playing Monster Jam: Battlegrounds on the PS3, one of this month's PS+ games, to worry about anything else right now. It's got it all: Monster Trucks, video game. What more could you want? I'll look into this ELEX later, and read your review once I'm in a more comfortable chair.

Gothic 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, but god damn it would be nice if these guys made a better combat system one of these days.......it's just soooooo clunky. If they could make these games and even just copy paste like Dark Souls style combat or something, we'd be gucci.

Yeah, badly worded. I meant that Gothic 2 and 3 are similar to 1, which is true for the core gameplay. But of course Gothic 2 is basically exactly Gothic 1 with everything doubled.

gothic games are great and were outstanding for their time. Many stuff that is praised in modern games like Zelda BOTW or Witcher 3 was actually already in gothic almost 20 years ago. And it still has stuff that goes beyoned those modern aaa games.

Stuff like:
- You can attack/kill almost every NPCs
- If you kill a npc, you will loot exactly his stuff (his weapon). If you kill a trader, you will get everything that trader had
- If you pull mobs to npcs/into a city, the npcs will start fighting

- Npcs react to you (if you go into their houses, draw your weapon, attack somebody and co)

- No loading times entering a house

- All weapons, Npcs and mobs have a certain strengh, nothing gets scaled
- tons of consequences
- very realistic
- Fully open world

I loved the gothic serier but those games have many bugs ...
completed gothic two times, first time as a novice because I couldn't become a templer. complted gothic 2 about 3 times. gothic 3 had a game breaking bug and I couldn't contiue playing it so I just sold it again. risen was fine, risen 2 had some bugs in which I couldn't complete some achievments. risen 3 felt underwhelming after the witcher and dark souls series, I might try it later again.