Yeah. I was bored, wanted a game, so despite my poor impressions of the demo, I picked this up.
And guess what? I like it! Read on to find out why.
So, what bugged me about the demo? Well, first and foremost was the easy difficulty. I'm happy to say that you can crank up the difficulty to Gothic (highest) right away, from the start, and I definitely recommend this for any people looking for a challenge.
Another thing that bugged me was getting crazy gear near the end of the demo. Well, this portion of the demo is not in the full game, so there's none of that, thankfully. So getting to awesomeness will take you some time, as it should!
Also, when I left what I'll call "tutorial island" in the full game, is when I realized I was going to enjoy Arcania, because I could finally explore in a big open environment, find some dungeons and just do my own thing. I spent about 5 hours doing that, not following any quests, just looking around and killing monsters, and was pleased to be rewarded for my search. If you look, you'll occasionally find named monsters who carry a decent piece of gear, or skeletal remains behind a boulder accompanied by some trinkets to loot.
Combat is fun, but it took me a while to get used to it and master locking on / unlocking on (and more importantly when and when not to do it). I got my butt kicked quite often by not being careful, and this is exactly as it should be. For my character, I decided to go with a ranged / magic build, with 75% of my focus on ranged (so most skill points go there). It works surprisingly well. The spells you can access at level 4 are handy, being able to slow or stun enemies and then pepper them with arrows. Melee is fun too but since I haven't invested many points, I'm fairly weak in that aspect, so I save it for last resort, or if I have no room to kite monsters.
Honestly, I'm quite happy with my purchase, and found it easy to get lost in the game, playing for several hours straight in a single session. It's too bad that the demo turned off so many people (myself included) as many of them are probably not going to pick this up.
The one thing I'll mention though, is graphics. While there are some really nice effects, and draw distance is very good, the texture resolution and frame rate are a problem on the 360. You'll have a good idea of that by playing the demo, but there are areas that are worse than that after the original tutorial island. I got used to it, but it might bother some players more than others.
Other than the FPS, I'm happy to say that load times are rare, and fast when they happen, and I haven't hit a bug except the occasional enemy having pathing issues. So, it's worth a second look if you really like this sort of gameplay (like I do) and can forgive the engine performance.
- Jorlen