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You really think there isn't any player base for games like that -at all- where you're from? Okay, well, in the EU there is, indeed. I'm sure it's not just the EU, though.
One could easily argue, using your "same game" logic, how it is that adventure game devs stay in business, or how the whole MMO FPS genre still exists. Having been there at the birth of the PC gaming industry (actually pre-SSI, pre-EA, no joke), I can say that, over time, there will be more and more games that fit into your "same" mold. The truly innovative are few and far between, the last TRULY innovative game I can recall, one like no other, is probably Spore, and that was released 10 years ago. And before that, Morrowind, which brought 3D and action to the RPG, and that was almost 20 years ago. And, sure, people will say, "Well what about DA and ME?" Well, nothing really new in either IP, just a recombination of RPG, Adventure, and a dash of relationship yadda yadda from Visual Novels. Some good games there early on, but not truly innovative.
True. Fun fact: they are a German company. I mean, it's like saying Burger King or KFC is a bit more popular in the US than they are in the EU. It's true, but it doesn't mean much as they are US-based companies. PB is well-known to all German CRPG gamers, and the further you get from the homeland, the lower the percentage of 'fans' gets. It's a natural phenomenon.
If the The Witcher games would have been based on books by a US author, the games would have taken off in the US and blown over to Europe. Now it's the other way around.
Closer to my home, The Smurfs, which is a Belgian franchise, started in the 1950s in comic books and the 1960s on the silver screen. It would take until the 1980s for The Smurfs to become even known in the US, and until 2011 until they hit the US's silver screens.
My point is that the country of origin always will be an epicenter for a franchise. That doesn't mean it explains the OP's astonishment about how it's possible that PB games are still being made today. I mean: a European citizen might ask the same thing when they hear about the second Burger King or KFC being opened in their country (which has recently happened over here) and an Australian might ask himself the same question about yet another US Smurfs cartoon series being planned for next year and which is sure to hit their screens, too.
In summary, I felt the quality of the PB 'franchise' and the quality standards of Europeans was being questioned by the OP, not the geographical epicenter of PB's success. To which I'll gladly repeat my reply:
In any case, while the market for PB games might not be as large as that for, say, the next headless chicken run and gun, it is there. You also have to take into account that PB is a MUCH smaller shop. I think like 30 people total. So they can afford to accept a smaller distro/fan base.
ELEX IS visually impressive. Subpar animations etc. is another story.
... that's basically it.
If you're not required to make even more obscene amount of money year after year, you don't need to make AAA-♥♥♥♥-tier games and can just keep making presumably what they enjoy making and we enjoy playing.
Personally, I love these vaguely-janky styles of games. They have a personality and mechanics that aren't filed to a bland sheen like most modern games nowadays. They're made good enough to be fun and, well, that's all that's required right?
I really like the way you put this. I don't know if it was intentional or not. For people who don't follow: there IS a 4th Gothic game and it even has "Gothic 4" in its title, but it wasn't made by PB and it was a terrible attempt at a Gothic game, so most Gothic/PB fans like to pretend it doesn't exist. I, too, have made statements like that or even, 'Arcania'? Never heard of Arcania or Spellbound!'
'We ALL know?'. Please speak for yourself. I respectfully disagree with you on that one as I enjoyed all of their games. Sure, Gothic 2 was their best game; it was so near perfect that it's pretty much impossible to expect them to ever top that. It's like dreaming of Metallica making a better album than their black album or the Star Wars franchise coming up with a movie that beats Empire Strikes Back. Creating a masterpiece that can't be topped doesn't automatically mean that everything that comes after it is trash. It just means that the fans should be a bit more lenient (i.e. fair) in their judgement. If Elex would have been made by another developer, the Gothic and Risen forums would be flooded with people going, 'Guys, you really need to give this game called Elex a go. You'd swear it's made by PB; it has so much of the Gothic and Risen charm, even though it isn't a PB game!'.
ELIX and Gothic-like games in general are niche games by their very nature and they indeed have one. It isn't particularely large, but it seems that it's large enough to keep them around. They don't make "all the money", but they make enough to work on the next game as it seems.
We love them not for the battle system or cinematographic picture (even though I think ELEX looks quite nice for its budget and have you seen Gothic: Playable Teaser?), but for complex quests with multiple solutions, detailed characters and unique game world. Actually, look at Ubisoft. You can pick almost any game they made recently and it will be exactly the same open world game with simple linear fedex quests and kill everyone at camps here and there. Is this good? Well, it works for them, but from my point of view playing anything like that is even more tedious and soporific than clunky battle system here. Yes, battle system here is quite mediocre and that's true, but we love these games for entirely different reason.
BTW, if you think that to make games nowadays you have to make them multiplayed with microtransactions then you sorely mistaken. Such model is good to make money and that's true, but most of the time not for actual developers. And it's a terrible model to make a game "with a soul". Not impossible (and Warframe would serve as a good counter-argument), but more often than not they end up soulless husks with the only purpose to squeeze everything from the players and quite a few crumble due to greed of their owners. Hey, Destiny 2 almost keeled over exactly due to this and look where Anthem went. Or Fallout 76. Bethesda became laughing stock over the last year just for this piece of trash alone and that's not even all their srew-ups!
I've been wondering the same thing as I just recently tried Elex and ended up getting a refund. Spent an hour wandering around the berserker village, talking to people I didn't care about and doing fetch quests, then I tried exploring and kept getting killed in 2 hits by bandits and animals in whatever direction I went. Quit and uninstalled.
Clunky combat and animations, stupidly hard difficulty, mediocre writing and voice acting, it's like they have not learned any lessons throughout the years. Their only game I honestly enjoyed was Risen 1, and even that had problems.
As best I can tell from the forums they've got a legion of vocal fanboys that will defend the games to the death and dogpile onto anyone who complains, calling them names and saying they need to get gud... but whether they spend enough to keep PB afloat, I don't know.
Well, this PB fan can only say you've pretty much answered your own question. If you want to play games where you can kill anything and anyone you encounter from the very start of the game, that's fine. There are a ton of such games out there: it was possible to finish Oblivion as a level 2 character, and there are plenty of hack & slash games or linear action games that don't depend on your character getting stronger so as to beat stronger opponents in an open-world environment. I enjoy many games like that, too, so I'm definitely not kidding when I say there's nothing wrong with that.
But real RPGs and especially PB's RPGs aren't like that. You can't just wander off and expect to be able to kill anything and anyone you come across. That wasnt the case in Risen 1, either, so I'm not sure why you managed to enjoy that game, then. But yes, there is a player base for games like that. And we're obviously a large enough group to be "spending enough to keep PB afloat", as you put it. Otherwise, PB wouldn't be around anymore after more than 20 years of making similar action RPGs.
In short, PB games aren't your cup of tea and the same goes for the OP. That's perfectly fine. But try to understand that the nearly 8 billion people on this planet don't all think exactly alike, and they don't like and dislike the same things you like and dislike. Other people may enjoy more challenging games that require the player's character to become stronger in order to kill stronger monsters and people, including opponents that the player might have encountered in the first hour of the game (it's an open world, after all), and we like thinking out of the box to even advance to a point where we can tackle more challenging opponents. It's a true role-playing experience. You start out weak and you have to be creative to become stronger and stronger. But it's definitely not for everyone, that much is sure AND it's completely understandable.