Why Elex is Better than Skyrim and The Witcher 3

Skyrim and The Witcher 3 are two of the biggest, most popular open-world action-RPGs ever created. Both of these games set a new standard for the genre when they were released in 2011 and 2015, with absurdly high metascores clocking in at 94 and 93, respectively. I was not as enamored with either of these games as the general public was, despite having a strong affinity for and appreciation of open-world RPGs; I had a lot of negative criticism to level against Skyrim, and even while praising The Witcher 3 rather extensively, I felt like it, too, had a lot of issues that seriously diluted and detracted from the experience. Both top-notch AAA productions with excellent presentation and smooth, accessible gameplay, that ultimately felt lacking in meaningful depth.

Enter Elex, the latest open-world action-RPG from Piranha Bytes, the small German studio behind the Gothic and Risen series. On a surface level it's actually much worse than either Skyrim or The Witcher 3, largely due to production limitations of being a much smaller studio (about 30 people, as opposed to hundreds) with a much smaller budget (about two million dollars versus 80 million plus). There's a distinct lack of polish across almost every aspect of the game, which on first impression can make it seem like a thoroughly mediocre, undesirable experience, but if you can get past these surface-layer blemishes there's a surprisingly deep, rich, and rewarding gameplay experience. By no means is Elex a perfect game, but I honestly feel like it's better than both Skyrim and The Witcher 3 in some of the areas that matter most when it comes to open-world action-RPGs.

Before getting any further, I need to make a few disclaimers. Obviously, I'm not saying that Elex is universally better than Skyrim or The Witcher 3; I'm just saying that it does some important things better. Some of this is subjective, in terms of what I want out of the games I play, while other things are a little more objective, in terms of what constitutes good game design. I'm going to be making a lot of generalizations and simplifications about all three games, which doesn't necessarily mean those statements are 100% true 100% of the time, but that they apply in the majority of cases, or in a general sense. There are exceptions to every rule, and I may not bother to point out every little exception unless I feel they're significant enough. It's been almost six years since I played Skyrim, so my memory is a little fuzzy on some of its finer details, and I may therefore be a little more general in my descriptions of Skyrim. Finally, while I'll be criticizing Skyrim and The Witcher 3 throughout this article, the point is not so much to disparage those games, but to show contrast between those games and Elex, to better exemplify why I feel like Elex does a better job in certain key aspects.

EXPLORATION

Both Skyrim and The Witcher 3 suffer from "icon hunting" exploration, the kind of deal where their massive, open worlds are filled with mostly empty space and you simply wander around waiting for the next icon to pop up on your mini-map or compass. It's almost like the developers knew the worlds they created weren't going to be fun or engaging enough for players to explore it on their own, and felt the need to drop icons everywhere so that players could skip actually exploring the world and cut right to the chase, more quickly and easily finding all the places actually worth exploring. Or maybe it's because they knew their worlds were so big, spread out, and diluted with pointless filler content, that they felt the need to mark the important places to save players the agonizing tedium of having to sift through all the dull filler to get to the good stuff. Either way, it really hurts the feeling of exploration and discovery when the game specifically lays everything out for you. You're not discovering things for yourself; you're going exactly where the game tells you. It doesn't help that most of Skyrim's caves, forts, and dungeons feel functionally identical, or that The Witcher 3 litters your map with the icons well in advance, just by reading a notice board in town.

Elex doesn't bombard you with icons. The only icons it shows you are for the locations of merchants, skill trainers, and teleporter pads, but you have to find all of these and interact with them before the map starts tracking them. The map shows you the full geography of the entire playable area, but it doesn't drag you by the nose to every single point of interest because it expects you to find things for yourself. There's not even a mini-map displayed in the HUD, so instead of staring at the mini-map following icons you're looking around the actual world with your own eyes, from your character's perspective, and exploring on your own. When you discover something cool, it's because you put in the work yourself, which makes it feel more rewarding, especially since other players are unlikely to find the same things you find because other players may not be as determined, clever, or observant as you are, and the game isn't going to tell them "hey, there's a thing over here that you should come see." Since the game isn't spoiling its discoveries by blatantly telegraphing them, there's a genuine sense of curiosity about what lies in wait in this world, and it's pretty satisfying every time you find something.

The game also does away with randomized, variable, or otherwise scaled loot which is often the case in Skyrim and The Witcher 3 -- every item in the game has been rigorously hand-placed by the designers, which allows them to tailor a specific reward for a specific amount of challenge, thereby also creating unique and memorable experiences within the world with unique and memorable rewards. That shipwreck off the southern coast has a powerful ring you can equip, if you can get to it and survive the radiation and strong mutants patrolling the area; that tower overlooking the biodomes has a unique sniper rifle and a fun bit of environmental storytelling if you think to climb to the top of it. It's not just a case of "we need to put some Special Loot here because this is a Special Area," because these special areas aren't really that special; they feel like natural parts of the environment. While you can sometimes predict where you'll find good loot, you sometimes end up disappointed by finding nothing at all, or surprised when you find good loot in a place you didn't expect, and you always find little discoveries scattered about in ordinary locations. It's classic variable reinforcement, the very basis for why gambling is so addicting for people, but instead of the variable reward being something the game dictates for you, the variable reward is based on your actions; where you go at what times in the game and what you do within it.

A big part of Skyrim's marketing campaign was project director Todd Howard hyping up a supposed fact in interviews that you could climb any mountain you see. Besides the fact that this was misleading, it wasn't really that fun because you were either following an intended path up the mountain or awkwardly flinging yourself against the collision mesh in defiance of the game's physics. Elex one-ups this entire concept by giving you a jetpack from the very beginning of the game, opening the entire game world to you from all of its peaks to all of its valleys. Most people will say with reverence, when talking about open-world games, how much they love "being able to see something on the horizon and then actually go there" -- Elex is the king of this, because the jetpack enables such a high degree of freedom of movement that you can go virtually everywhere you desire. The only places that are off limits are the edge of the game world and the mountains around the crater where the comet hit. And unlike The Witcher 3's mostly flat maps where your line of sight is constantly blocked by trees, Elex has a ton of verticality in its world, which gives you a lot of vantage points to see long distances across the map, and also makes the world feel more complex with a lot more hidden areas and more meaningful exploration. It is, literally and figuratively, a much deeper world.

QUESTS

The quests in Skyrim and The Witcher 3 are generally both mindless affairs of following the dotted line and pressing the action button on the appropriate things. Skyrim was infamous for its "radiant quests" that generated an infinite number of random objectives to find random things from random enemies from random locations which stripped nearly all narrative purpose and significance from these side-quests, making them feel quite obviously like tedious busy work. The Witcher 3's quests relied too heavily on using "witcher senses" to solve problems, where you essentially just pressed a button to highlight the solution and then followed the highlights to the conclusion. In both games, the majority of quests felt like they were on-rails and devoid of meaningful player input, even when they were presenting you with interesting stories, unique scenarios, and apparent "choices."

Quests in Elex aren't really that sophisticated since the basic groundwork in most of them consists of the usual "go here, kill this, fetch this, talk to this person" ordeals, but they're not the blase, straightforward affair that tends to cripple these kinds of quests. A lot of quests in Elex actually require you to listen to the NPCs you're talking to, pay attention to what they're saying, and think about what you're doing, instead of just mindlessly following the quest markers. As an example of what I mean: the first town, Goliet, has a set of laws forbidding technology, and they have a place called "the pit" where they throw all the technology they find. One of the town's leaders is very insistent on you adhering to these laws when you first meet him, and if you ask for work to prove yourself so that you can join his faction, he gives you a quest to retrieve a laser rifle from a guy in town. This is actually a test to see how well you understand the laws and how well you follow them; if you treat it like a basic fetch quest and just show up at the guy's hut asking for the weapon, then you'll fail the quest because you didn't question your orders.

In the same town, you're tasked with checking in on some cultivators who're working in the wild lands outside of town. One of the guys there mentions that they're low on food supplies and haven't heard from town in a while. You can either report back to town and bring them a bunch of moldy bread (because the town has no food to spare and that's all they can offer), or collect 50 mushrooms for them. You might be tempted to give them the moldy bread, because you get the same amount of experience either way, except they actually pay you for bringing them the bread, and it saves you the trouble of rounding up all those mushrooms (or parting with your own supply, which you may have already collected in your own adventures), but if you go with this route you later found out that they got food poisoning and couldn't work anymore, and the town leader gets upset with you. It's another basic fetch quest, but it requires you to think about what the possible consequences might be and act intelligently to get the best reward, or else you suffer the consequences.

As a running theme in Elex, most quests have two or three solutions with two or three outcomes, all of which can have lasting consequences and significant effects on the world. The two examples above are both part of joining the berserker faction; if you "fail" enough of these quests by making poor decisions then you can actually become barred from joining the berserkers or even trading with their merchants. In another town, if you lie to a major character, you might think he'd be none the wiser and you'd get away with it, but then later he kills another quest NPC just to get payback on you for lying to him, and then you can no longer proceed in that quest. One of the major towns, the Domed City, has a whole bunch of quests associated with it as different groups push their own agendas; depending on whom you side with throughout all those quests, whole groups of people (or even the entire town itself) can get killed. How you resolve the main quest-line can have huge ramifications for the post-game, with entire factions turning hostile on you.

Compare this to Skyrim where you overthrow the Jarl of Whiterun in an epic setpiece where the whole town is set on fire and you raid the castle, and then everything gets reset back to normal almost immediately afterward, with no major changes and no one really caring. Compare this to The Witcher 3 where you decide to kill the king and nothing really happens -- no one even comments on it. They give you choices that give you the illusion that you're having an impact on the world, but they both tend to skimp on the actual consequences for your actions. The Witcher 3 is actually pretty good with its choices and consequences, especially compared to Skyrim (and most other games) but its variable outcomes are often limited to the scope of the one quest you're working on, like seeing a different ending in a "choose your own adventure" book, not actually affecting the rest of the world.

COMBAT

Combat in Skyrim and The Witcher 3 may look epic and exciting (you're fighting dragons in Skyrim and doing a lot of fancy, elaborate sword moves in The Witcher 3) but they're not actually that sophisticated. Skyrim's combat feels archaically simple, the kind of deal where you basically just stand there clicking on an enemy until one of you dies, not all that different from The Elder Scrolls I: Arena way back in 1994, except without the randomized dice-rolling plus a few additional features like power attacks, manual blocking, and "shouts" (which are functionally identical to magic attacks). It has a stamina meter, but it has a minuscule effect on anything, and enemies barely react to being hit by a melee weapon so it often feels like you're smacking a bag of potatoes. In The Witcher 3, almost every fight boils down to a simplistic, repetitive pattern of attack-attack-dodge, attack-attack-dodge, robbing the entire system of any depth it would claim to have. Meanwhile, its controls feel unresponsive with a complete lack of input queuing leading to a lot of unregistered mouse clicks, and the game's weird targeting system combined with Geralt's highly varied animations can make everythingthing feel frustratingly inconsistent.

Elex's combat is ostensibly identical to The Witcher 3's, since they both use the same combination of light attack, strong attack, block, dodge, and parry, with a third-person camera, in a system that emphasizes timing your attacks and dodges. It even has the same occasionally unresponsive controls, inconsistent animations, and weird hit detection problems. Elex has a few positively distinguishing features, however: a stamina meter that decreases every time you perform any action in combat (except for basic movement) and regenerates after a pause between actions; a combo meter that builds as you time your attacks, causing you to deal more damage as the meter increases; and special attacks that you can unleash once your combo meter reaches a certain threshold.

The key difference with Elex is the stamina meter. With every attack, block, dodge, and parry consuming stamina, every single action you make has to be deliberate and well-timed; if you spam attacks too much, then you'll be out of stamina when it comes time to block or dodge an incoming attack, and if you're blocking or dodging too frequently then you'll be too low on stamina to attack back. Combat in Elex therefore requires a careful balance of offense and defense with every action having some kind of consequence on how the rest of the fight will play out. You have to watch enemies closely and learn when they're going to attack so that you can block or dodge at just the right moment to avoid damage and minimize lost stamina, and you have to know exactly when to attack so that your hit will go through. You have to stay close enough to an enemy to be able to launch into a counter attack at any moment, yet far enough away that you have enough space to react when it comes time to dodge an attack. All-the-while you have to be mindful of your stamina meter, making sure that you're consuming it wisely and making each of your actions count.

Then you've got the combo meter, which increases your damage with each subsequent hit and allows you to execute a strong "finisher" attack once the combo is high enough. Building this combo meter requires that you time your attacks just right. Each time you click the mouse to attack, the meter will build throughout the length of the attack animation, up until a certain point; if you click too early in the animation, then the meter will stop abruptly and give you less progress, and if you click too late, then the meter will reset to what it was before the attack and you'll have to wait for your character's attack animation to reset back to neutral before you can attack again, thus leaving you exposed for damage. If you go too long without attacking, your progress will start to deplete until it eventually reaches zero, or until you attack again. As with the stamina meter, you have to be mindful of how and when you attack, making sure that you're clicking in the right rhythm to build the combo meter as optimally as possible, while waiting for the right opening with enough stamina that you can hopefully pull off a full combo, and keeping your offense going just enough to keep the stamina meter from depleting.

Compare this to Skyrim and The Witcher 3, both of which basically amount to mindless button-mashing click-fests. While both games have a stamina meter, none of them are nearly as consequential as Elex's -- in Skyrim, stamina is really only used for sprinting, blocking, and power attacks, and in The Witcher 3 stamina is only used for casting magic. Neither game seems to reward you for stringing multiple attacks together (at least, not without high-level skills), and neither game has any concern for nuanced timing since you can spam left-click with impunity. The only instance in which timing really matters is when blocking or dodging attacks, and in the case of The Witcher 3 enemies' health bars flash brightly before an attack telling you "hey, you should block or dodge right now," and you have nearly full invincibility while using the basic backwards dodge, which, again, you can practically spam with limited risk of taking any damage. So basically, in both games you just spam left-click and then dodge when you see an enemy telegraph an attack, and repeat the whole process ad infinitum.

PROGRESSION

Oblivion set a trend that nearly ruined progression systems in RPGs with its overzealous level-scaling that insured every single enemy in the game would be tailored to your level so that, no matter where you went or what you did, you'd always experience the same degree of challenge and difficulty. There's some merit to its intentions, but the system was ultimately so flawed that it ruined any feeling of accomplishment for getting stronger because everything else got equally stronger with you. Fortunately, Bethesda seemed to learn their lesson with subsequent games and scaled things back a bit, giving enemies and areas a limited range within which enemies can scale, but Skyrim still suffers from things like being able to kill dragons (which should be city-razing, deadly, end-of-the-world threats and end-game enemies) just a few hours into the game. This is not even to mention the scaling loot that gives you randomized loot tailored for your level, such that it never really matters where you go or what you do (outside of things like finding word walls to learn shouts) because you'll always have essentially the same chance to find the same rewards everywhere you go.

Nothing in Elex scales to your level. All enemy types and strengths are present within the game world right from the start, meaning you can be fighting basic starter enemies or super strong end-game enemies right at level one. Those high-level enemies can kill you in a single hit, in most cases, and so it's up to you to figure out where you can go, what enemies you can fight, and to come up with your own strategies and techniques for staying alive and accomplishing your quest objectives. This places a strong impetus on getting stronger; many of your quests and objectives seem impossibly daunting at the start of the game because of how weak you feel, relative to the rest of the world. Leveling up, therefore, is not just a matter of having fun -- getting new skills and shiny new weapons to play with like a kid picking toys off a shelf and playing with them at a toy store -- but of necessity to overcome the game's incredibly tough difficulty.

Elex doesn't hold your hand throughout any of this; it expects you to figure out for yourself what you can and can't do and solve your problems on your own. So when the game throws a tough challenge your way and you find some clever way around it, or you spend a dozen or more hours getting your butt kicked by certain enemies and finally reach a point when you can comfortably face them, it feels satisfying because it's something you accomplished on your own, without the game's assistance. Elex makes you work -- hard -- for every reward. If you want to get stronger weapons and armor, for instance, you have to craft them yourself, which requires the right attributes and skills plus a ton of money and resources, or find them in the world by exploring extremely dangerous areas (again, no loot is ever scaled or randomized, so there's always a deliberate reward for a specific challenge). Even when you do acquire these powerful items they have really steep requirements to use that will take even more time and effort to equip. This challenge persists for nearly the entire game so that there's always a reason that you want to get stronger, and always some useful skill just out of reach.

The Witcher 3 is wise enough not to have any of its enemies scale down to your level, but it has a few major problems of its own when it comes to progression. Primarily, the amount of content in the game (and thus, the total playtime) is disproportionate to the scale of the progression system. I played both Elex and The Witcher 3 on their respective "hard" modes, spending 100 and 130 hours in each playthrough respectively. It took maybe 20 hours in Elex before I felt like I could comfortably handle most of the weaker enemies, whereas I hit that mark in about 10 hours of The Witcher 3. I was maybe 70 hours into Elex by the time I felt like I could stand a reasonable chance against the toughest enemies, and I hit about that same mark in The Witcher 3 at around 40 hours. In other words, I hit a point in The Witcher 3 when leveling stopped feeling rewarding much sooner than I did in Elex, which is made doubly problematic by the fact that The Witcher 3 is ultimately a bigger and longer game than Elex. Secondly, The Witcher 3 scales quest rewards down as you level up, if you go beyond their intended level range, meaning you can reach a point when the game literally stops rewarding you for completing its quests, which is pretty much guaranteed to happen because you become over-leveled so quickly from its huge abundance of content.

STORY

The main stories in Skyrim and The Witcher 3 both deal with preventing an end-of-the-world type of cataclysmic event -- either dragons or the wild hunt are threatening to take over the realm and destroy all civilization as we know it, and you have to stop them. That's all fine and good for a video game plot, but it's not very good for an open-world game to have such a dire, pressing main story about preventing the end of the world when the player is able to ignore the main threat completely and spend all of his time focusing on utterly trivial, inconsequential things like fetching plants for a random person in town or trying to become a tournament champion in a collectible card game. And frankly, the story isn't very good in either one, mostly consisting of boring busy work that either escalates way too quickly (as in Skyrim, with you being revealed as the Dragonborn, doing a few simple tasks, and then slaying Alduin in the span of a few hours) or drags on way too long (as in The Witcher 3, with you spending 75% of the game on a wild goose chase looking for Ciri).

Elex instead goes for the equally-cliche premise of a revenge story. There's still a cataclysmic threat lurking in the background, which eventually becomes part of the main quest, but it's not presented as the main focus of the story; it's something that could happen, not will imminently happen. Rather, the story is about the main character, Jax, trying to regain his lost strength after he's betrayed by his former comrades, so that he can learn why they betrayed him and ultimately so that he can get revenge on them for trying to kill him and leaving him for dead. So when the player spends dozens of hours ignoring the main quest in favor of exploring the world and doing random side-quests for people who should be totally inconsequential to the outcome of the main story, it actually makes sense -- especially considering the game's insanely tough difficulty -- it's all part of regaining his lost strength, and there's no pressing need to act quickly to stop the badguys from doing anything, thus keeping the gameplay from being at odds with the story.

The most interesting thing about Elex's story isn't actually the main story itself, but rather its lore and backstory. Whereas Skyrim and The Witcher 3 both feel like somewhat generic takes on traditional fantasy settings, Elex feels like something almost completely new and original with its blend of fantasy, science fiction, and post-apocalypse themes. That kind of combination shouldn't really work, but it does thanks to a genuinely interesting premise and effective world-building. I, for one, found it fascinating learning about what the world was like before the comet, how the survivors adapted after the comet, how the world split into its three primary factions, how each faction uses elex for its own goals, and so on. I normally don't like it when games resort to fleshing out their lore by strewing audio logs and journal pages around the world (all three games do this, to an extent), but Elex was a rare case where I actually enjoyed reading (and listening to) nearly everything I came across, in large part because of the huge variety of snippets you can find from all different time periods in multiple types of media and formats, nearly all of which relate directly to the game's central premise.

I never read any of the history or story books in Skyrim or The Witcher 3 because I just didn't care; as compelling as the gameplay can be in both of those games, I never felt like I needed (or desired) a deeper understanding of their worlds to appreciate them any further. I still read the random excerpts and journal pages that you find while exploring because they usually had a direct connection to the environment you were in, but it felt more like an obligation and I don't remember them having much of an impact on my overall impression of the game. I've played Elex much more recently than those games so I have much clearer memories of specific notes and audio logs, but I feel like they had a much bigger impact on establishing the world's lore and backstory, to the point that I was genuinely interested in reading and listening to the logs I found, rather than just going through the motions. There's a pretty major sub-plot, for instance, about "Infinite Skies" and Calaan (the clerics' god) that you piece together through dozens of text entries and journals, solving a mystery sort of like an anthropological researcher, which sheds a whole new light on the game's lore and backstory, which is conveyed entirely through environmental notes and clues, and you have to connect these dots entirely on your own to reach its conclusion.

IN CONCLUSION

Make no mistake, Elex is not a perfect game. In typical Piranha Bytes fashion it feels a little under-cooked, as if another six months of development time could've elevated it from a "good game with some problems" to an "all-around great game." Some ideas feel poorly thought-out and awkwardly implemented, while certain kinks and hiccups can leave some mechanical systems feeling a little unpolished. Low production value (relative to other $50-60 games) combined with a mediocre presentation, a "boring" main character, a "clunky" combat system, and a brutally tough difficulty curve will be enough to turn some people off within the first hour. To me, none of the game's problems were strong enough to detract from the overall experience, even though some of them seriously annoyed me and others are completely inexcusable. Some of the game's so-called "problems" aren't even problems as far I'm concerned, with a bunch of mainstream criticism seeming utterly misguided and unfounded -- disparaging comments made by people who never understood the game's intentions and never bothered to learn its systems.

The reason I'm so high on Elex, despite its apparent issues, is because it's an open-world action-RPG that values mechanical depth and player agency over things like presentation and accessibility. This is a game that doesn't hold your hand; what you do in the world matters, and it takes actual thought, effort, and time to master its systems and overcome its challenges, thereby making it a deeply engaging and rewarding experience. And what it does well, it does extremely well. The world is huge while still offering a ton of depth and rewarding exploration, the quests have a lot of great choices and consequences that can have a dramatic effect on the world, the combat demands precise timing and positioning while managing stamina and your combo meter, the progression system uses fixed enemies and hand-placed items to create a very specific difficulty curve that's genuinely challenging and therefore rewarding when you level up and get stronger, and the story has a lot of intriguing elements in terms of the world and backstory.

In the grand scheme of things, Elex is greater than the sum of its parts, but even on an individual level it does a lot of important things better than Skyrim and The Witcher 3, which is especially impressive because it was made by a much smaller team on a much smaller budget. I played Skyrim and The Witcher 3 for about 130 hours, each, and was glad to finally be done with each of them upon completing them; I may never play either game ever again. I played Elex for 100 hours and then immediately launched a second playthrough, and upon completing that I immediately launched a third playthrough. I could even see myself replaying Elex again in five or ten years. This was seriously one of the most satisfying, most engrossing game experiences I've had in a long time, and as a long time fan of Piranha Bytes who's been disappointed with or underwhelmed by everything they've put out in the last 15 years, I'm pleased to say that this is easily the best game they've made since Gothic 2 and that's reason enough to celebrate.

If you're not familiar with Piranha Bytes' previous games, then you should know that Elex is in the same category as industry heavyweights like Skyrim and The Witcher 3, in terms of genre and overall value for the amount of content you get with it, but it has a whole lot more heart and soul in exchange for not having the same "AAA" polish. If you can put up with a lower-budget game with some janky rough edges, and especially if you value actual gameplay and mechanical depth over presentation, then Elex is definitely worth your time and money.

Things Gothic 1 and 2 (Still) Do Better Than Elex

Piranha Bytes have been making open-world action-RPGs for nearly 20 years, starting with the first Gothic in 2001, and now with their most recent game, Elex, released a few weeks ago. All of their games (including the Risen series, released between Gothic and Elex) follow the same general formula with the same components; a big open world full of really tough enemies, where you have to explore, complete quests, and learn new skills to work your way up the food chain so that you can survive and complete the main quest. They've basically been making the same game for almost two decades, with a fresh coat of paint and a handful of tweaks and twists each time, and yet their newer games have never quite reached the level of success that the original Gothic games achieved, in terms of their gameplay design and execution.

Elex is a surprisingly strong effort that I'd say is almost as good as Gothic 2. It has a lot more modern polish, including much more accessible controls, and an actual tutorial to teach you how to play the game (but that's to be expected in this day and age), plus a much bigger world that still contains Piranha Bytes' signature detailed density, and improved quest design that gives you more options and more consequences for how you choose to resolve quests. It's actually better than Gothic and Gothic 2 in a lot of ways, and yet, surprisingly, there's a lot of good stuff about Gothic and Gothic 2 that have somehow never made it into subsequent Piranha Bytes games, and which are sorely missing in Elex. They had a pretty solid formula with those early games, and so it's weird, disappointing, and somewhat frustrating that, about 15 years later, some of the things that made Gothic and Gothic 2 so great still haven't found their way into Piranha Bytes' newer games.

My intention with this article is not to disparage Elex, because it really exceeded my expectations, even though it's still a little rough around the edges, in some ways. Rather, I want to celebrate Gothic and Gothic 2, and also use this as an opportunity to remind Piranha Bytes (if they're reading this) of some things that were great in those games, that really need to make a return in Elex 2. 

A smaller, more intimate world

This is a subjective point, but I felt like the size of the world in Gothic and Gothic 2 was nearly perfect, offering a large enough space to give you a strong sense of freedom as you explored fairly open, unrestricted maps, while never overwhelming you with their size or scale. Everything felt tightly focused and incredibly dense, with no wasted space. Everywhere you looked had something interesting, and you never had to waste time traversing large, empty spaces just to get somewhere. It was a world so finely crafted, with such precise and specific detail, that NPCs could describe a location verbally and you could actually find it just by following their directions and looking around a little bit. And since the worlds were centrally focused around a few hub areas and their surroundings, you were frequently traversing the paths between major locations and building an intimate familiarity with every rock and tree that you passed.

The main map of Gothic 2, with user-added labels for major locations.

Elex, much like Gothic 3, seems to have fallen into the trap of thinking "bigger is automatically better" when it comes to world design. While a bigger world can certainly have its benefits, the world in Elex almost borders on being too big and unmanageable. This is no more evident than in quests, which practically necessitate the use of map markers to tell you where to go because there just isn't enough organized structure to find your next objective without them. The world is designed to be so big and spread out that you see a lot of areas once and then move on, never to see them again; you don't become as familiar with the map, including its layout or its content, especially since it's so easy to fall into autopilot following markers on your radar. It also has the effect of spreading the notable loot out so much that you spend a lot more time looting larger quantities of junk items, because there's not as much unique, interesting loot to fill the space.

New side-quests and changes as chapters progressed

Most of Piranha Bytes' games follow a chapter progression system for its main quest, with each chapter revolving around completing some major step towards your ultimate goal. In Gothic, this simply meant that new enemies would spawn across the world to make it feel more alive, but Gothic 2 took this concept and expanded upon it further by adding new side-quests and changing familiar areas more dramatically as the chapters progressed. Once you returned to Khorinis in chapter three, after visiting the Valley of Mines in chapter two, you suddenly had a new threat scattered across the map with seeker mages trying to hunt you down; then, in chapter five, after defeating the dragons, orcs and lizardmen invaded Khorinis and you had new quests to help different people deal with these new problems. Additionally, the progression of the main quest also unlocked whole new areas of the game that were previously restricted, giving you constant access to new twists and turns as you advanced the main story and went into new chapters.

Reaching chapter 2 in Elex.

Elex, much like Risen 3, front-loads its content, making nearly all of it available from the very start of the game. You can actually complete end-game main-quest objectives several chapters before you're even tasked with them, and you can see and complete perhaps 80% (or more?) of what the game has to offer in the very first chapter. If you do everything at the start, you'll spend about half of the remaining main quests telling people "I've already done that" and only get a handful of new quests that actually introduce new content, or that weren't available in chapter one, and some of those are just reiterations of things you've already done previously. The game world shows a lot of dynamic elements, with entire towns being slaughtered or entire factions turning against you, among many smaller things, depending on your choices, but it's kind of disappointing that the game world doesn't change as a direct result of the main quest, as you advance it through chapters -- at least, not until the very end when you've actually completed it -- and that there isn't a lot of extra content tucked away to be discovered in the second half of the game.

The inclusion of "dungeons"

Another way that the early Gothic games helped to spice up gameplay with extra content and challenges, as you progressed, was to sprinkle "dungeons" into the mix. These were self-contained "levels" or "stages," kind of like the dungeons in a Zelda game, where you had to go into a more linearly-structured environment to solve a series of puzzles and challenges to advance to the end so that you could complete some objective. Things like exploring the Old Mine and its labyrinthine tunnels searching for a cog to repair the gate so you could access the minecrawlers' lair and kill the queen, or the Temple of the Sleeper where you had to activate switches in a certain order and unlock different areas to do other things so that you could reach the final boss. These were all loaded as separate maps, so there was a strong feeling like you were entering into a different place, and they were all fleshed-out with major gameplay sequences that tied directly into the main story. They were pretty cool, and added a lot of tension and excitement as you worked your way deeper and deeper into their sinister depths.

Puzzles and switches galore in this temple from Gothic 1.

The closest thing we have in Elex is the converters -- huge mining lasers that the bad guys use to harvest elex from the planet -- but these are basically just a series of rooms where you kill a few enemies, loot some items, and ride an elevator up to the next floor, repeating the process a few times until you reach the top and press a button to deactivate the converter. No puzzle-solving, no exploration, nothing out of the ordinary, and the whole process gets repeated five times. Then, when you reach the Ice Palace to confront the final boss, it's just a series of empty hallways leading up to the boss chamber. Except for maybe the old Infinite Skies headquarters, you spend the entire game in the vast open world wandering from place to place, never really going into anywhere with structured progression, exploration, and gameplay. That gets kind of mundane and repetitive after a while, so it would've been cool to have some of these types of "dungeons" in the game, instead of the boring converters or in place of the empty Ice Palace.

Dynamically upgrading attack animations

In all of Piranha Bytes' games you start out as a pathetic weakling who can barely defend himself before rising to near-demigod status by the end. Besides just representing this with stats, they also demonstrated this with how your character handled his weapons. In Gothic and Gothic 2, the nameless hero started the game holding his weapons awkwardly and striking ineffectively, until you spent some skill points on sword training, at which point the animation changed to reflect your character's newfound knowledge and ability, and then changed again if you improved your proficiency even further. The combat system changed over the course of the game; instead of simply doing more damage, you also attacked more fluidly, quickly, and aggressively, and so it felt like you, as a player, became more proficient with the combat as your character did. Although the basic tactics and inputs for combat remained virtually the same from beginning to end, the overall feeling improved tremendously, and it was just cool to reach a new skill threshold and see your animations change to reflect that.

Fighting a Runt Biter in Elex. 

In Elex, your combat animations remain the same from beginning to end; investing skill points in melee combat only increases your damage and your chance to stagger enemies with each hit. All of the game's combat moves, from roll-dodging to parrying counter-attacks to special combo attacks, are available to you from the start of the game, except for the plunging jet pack attack. So, in a game with 50-100 hours of content, combat is going to feel pretty much the same the entire time, because once you get the hang of the combat you just repeat the same tactics for every fight. The only variety comes from switching weapon types, since different types of melee weapons (swords, axes, clubs, etc) have different attack animations and special attacks, but that's not the same as feeling like you're making progress in a dynamically evolving combat system. Some of the faction abilities can have a cool positive effect on the combat, but I really miss the upgrading attack animations from Gothic and Gothic 2, just because it was so unique.

Better balance of stats, skills, equipment, and personal skill

Gothic and Gothic 2 had pretty simple skill systems, consisting really of only three main stats to increase and a handful of skills to choose from, but the way it balanced with your equipment progression and personal skill was really solid. Every little point you put into something had a noticeable effect on your progression; upgrading your weapon proficiency could unlock new attack animations, and it also increased your chances of scoring critical hits, which did huge chunks of damage; improving your strength might give you enough to equip a better weapon, which would do more damage on its own, but even if it didn't give you enough, the extra strength still applied directly to your damage output. Investing your skill points had a tremendous impact on your character's viability in combat, but it was also possible, with pure skill -- understanding how the combat works, enemy tendencies, tactics, and having quick reactions -- to kill most enemies at level one if you were good enough (and patient). Personal skill was no substitute for better stats, but you still needed skill with the system to do well, otherwise you'd get wrecked, even with good stats -- you needed both.

The stats and skills screen in Gothic 2.

Elex strips this system down significantly, linking your damage output almost exclusively to your equipment. Increasing your strength doesn't increase your damage; it just allows you to equip better weapons. The melee combat skill will improve your damage by a percentage (up to 30% for really steep requirements), but the base damage goes off of your weapon damage. Weapons require different combinations of multiple stats, and the requirements don't seem to scale linearly with damage, which makes it hard to know what kind of stats you're going to need up ahead to equip better weapons and can therefore slow down your progression, unless you pick one or two upgradeable weapons within the same class and stick with those for the entire game. Even then, the stat requirements for using an upgraded weapon increase dramatically, meaning you have to spend a long time saving up skill points to improve your stats enough to use an upgraded weapon, all-the-while your steadily-increasing stats do nothing for you until you can actually equip it. Meanwhile, skill still plays an important role, obviously, but the increased weight on equipment devalues personal skill a bit.

Companions who helped you, not just you helping them

Gothic and Gothic 2 didn't have companions in the way that we think of them nowadays; you didn't recruit party members to follow you around everywhere you went, carrying your inventory and helping you fight stuff. Rather, they had friendly NPCs who were heavily involved in the main story and who sometimes accompanied you on specific quests. Characters like Diego, Milten, Gorn, and Lester felt like real friends by the end of Gothic 2 because they helped you as much as you helped them. When you had a problem in the story, you would often go to one of those guys (or one of the other friendly recurring characters) and they would share some valuable insight, point you in the right direction, offer their assistance, or even tag along with you. You even get to assemble your own crew to take with you to Irdorath, and each person you bring plays some role in helping you out, even if you're the one doing most of the work.

Talkin' nasty 'bout Nasty's ass.

Pretty much every character in Elex, including your own companions, is there to have you do things for them. There's seemingly no benefit to gathering a group of companions, even though they're kind of implied to be necessary for the story, in terms of building a following to help unite the Free People of Magalan. They barely help defend Origin and they barely help raid the Ice Palace, but in those instances they feel more like background NPCs. The only thing they do is help in combat and provide experience points for completing their quests, all of which are things they ask you to do for them, for no real reason. "You're the person who robbed me blind while I was unconscious? Sure, I'll save your life by helping you track down a bunch of people who're trying to kill you. Let's join forces!" You're doing favors for them long before establishing any kind of friendship, and in fact it takes doing their favors to even become "friends" with them, at which point their development as characters abruptly ends. There's only one companion who actually does something for you, and it's held off until near the very end of the game.

A genuinely intimidating enemy

The orcs served as the main enemy forces in both Gothic and Gothic 2, and they were pretty damn intimidating. There was a lot of potential for them to feel like generic inhuman bad guys, who only existed in the story to give you things to fight, but there was a sense of mystery surrounding them which made them slightly uncanny and instilled a minor sense of foreboding dread in terms of what they were up to and what their ultimate goals were. Most importantly, they were really tough enemies to face in combat, and those games put you up against them very early in the story, when you were still weak and incapable of fighting them, which made them feel genuinely threatening any time they were mentioned in (or part of) the story because you knew, from first-hand experience, how powerful they actually were. It was actually tense and kind of scary having to venture into orcish territory long before you were ready to fight them, and it set a pretty good barometer of how high you would have to climb to be able to stop them.

Fighting orcs in Gothic 2. 

The bad guys in Elex are the albs, who consist of ordinary humans armed with high tech weaponry and who consume raw elex to give themselves better mental and physical prowess. You yourself are a former alb who was seemingly betrayed in a coup and cast from their ranks, set on a quest for revenge. This fact alone makes them immediately less intimidating when the main character has intimate knowledge of who they are and how they function, because there's no mystery or uncertainty surrounding them. Worse yet, they spend most of the game off-screen, basically sitting around in the snowy mountains to the north not really doing anything. You can go there and fight them if you really want, but there's no reason to until near the end of the game, and they're so far out of the way that they never interfere with anything. Otherwise, you just find a handful of roaming alb troops in the other areas of the game, but these are deliberately designed to be easier, so they never really pose a serious threat. Plus, your frequent interactions with alb separatists -- albs who're rebelling against the ideologies of their leader -- kind of blurs the line between "good guy" and "bad guy" when you've got albs on your side of the fight and it makes the real badguys seem a little too mundane and ordinary.

A better penal colony

The first Gothic was set inside a magically-encapsulated prison run in complete anarchy after the prisoners revolted against the guards and took over the colony. It was a lawless, ruthless place full of cutthroat assholes who would beat you up just to steal a bit of money from you, and sometimes just to prove a point. Nearly everyone was a jerk to you, and people often tried to take advantage of you, extort you, trick you, and betray you. Hardly anyone ever loaned you a helping hand, and you pretty much had to figure things out for yourself. Add in the plethora of deadly beasts and the orc warriors who roamed around outside the camps, and you were pretty much in hostile, dangerous territory everywhere you went, with the possibility of getting knocked out or even killed at any moment. Then you've got the really bleak, grim visual design of everything and the dreary, almost melancholic soundtrack putting the final touches on this utterly unique environment.

The central camp in Elex's Valley of the Damned.

Elex also features a penal colony, which is perhaps meant to be a direct reference to Gothic since they're both places where criminals and law-breakers are sent, they're both called "Valley of [Something]," they both have a giant, wooden, mechanical lift used to access them, and they both (supposedly) have no way out once you're inside. Except, the penal colony in Elex is actually kind of lame. People talk about it like it's some kind of hellish place, but it has pretty much the same aesthetics as the normal areas of Edan, except it has a little fog in some places, and spooky sound effects (like cawing birds and rustling vegetation) playing under the normal soundtrack. A bunch of exiled berserkers will attack you on sight, but this makes them feel like generic mob enemies as opposed to cutthroat criminals. There's only one interaction with an exile who lures you into trap, in the vein of the stuff that happened frequently in Gothic. Except for one area with a bunch of mutants and another area with stalkers and poison spiders, the monsters aren't even that tough. Basically, it felt kind of disappointing because I was expecting a mini tribute to Gothic, and didn't really get it. Maybe that was my false expectation, but it did feel like missed potential.

Beginner's Guide to Elex: Tips and Advice

Helping you get the most enjoyment out of Elex's sometimes rough and daunting beginning.

Elex is a third-person open-world action-RPG from Piranha Bytes, a small German studio, that blends traditional fantasy, science fiction, and post-apocalypse themes. Set on a world 200 years after a comet wipes out nearly all life on the planet, the survivors have split into three factions that use elex, a mysterious substance that appeared with the comet, in their own unique way to fulfill their own goals and agendas. You can be a Dungeons & Dragons-style berserker who wields swords and casts fireballs, or a Mass Effect-style cleric who uses plasma rifles and psionic mind control, or a Mad Max-style outlaw who makes their own gear from scrap and enhances their abilities with powerful stims. It's got a huge world full of diverse environments, tons of quests, lasting consequences for decisions you make, and three different factions you can join, all of which radically alter your gameplay experience by offering unique equipment and skills.

It's surprisingly good, but like other Piranha Bytes games, it has a lot of quirks and idiosyncrasies that can make it difficult for unseasoned initiates to figure out how the game actually works, what you should be doing, and so on, combined with a really steep difficulty curve that makes no effort to hold your hand. For many players, this can lead to a lot of confusion and frustration right at the start of the game, which is never a good thing, obviously, but is especially unfortunate because Elex offers an extremely compelling, rich, and rewarding experience for those who can get into it. As a long-time Piranha Bytes veteran, I still struggled with a few things in my first playthrough, and had some of my expectations subverted when I realized, dozens of hours into it, that I wished I had done things a little differently.

The purpose of this article, therefore, is to help new (or prospective) players with general tips and advice about how the game works and what you should expect, with a few basic, spoiler-free strategies to facilitate a better gameplay experience. A large part of the fun in these games is the satisfaction and reward that comes from exploring the world and discovering things on your own, so I won't be going into specific detail about "go here and get this item, then do this quest as soon as possible, build your character exactly like this, etc," because I want to leave you that room to figure things out for yourself. But some things are tough to figure out without doing a lot of trial-and-error and seeing how things pan out over the course of a 50-100 hour playthrough. So, here are some of my thoughts and observations after pouring 143 hours (and counting) into multiple playthroughs, which I think should be helpful to other new players.

Elex has a very steep difficulty curve. It is intentional.

You will die a lot in this game. Most enemies will be too strong for you to even think about fighting in the beginning. Lots of enemies will kill you in only one or two hits. Some quests that you pick up early on will be basically impossible to complete until much later because of the enemies they expect you to face. This is an intentional aspect of the game's balancing and ecosystem; you're meant to start out feeling incredibly weak and helpless so that as you level up and get stronger, you actually feel like you're getting stronger. You're supposed to feel yourself working your way up the food chain, so to speak, and it's meant to be satisfying when you come back to kill enemies that were giving you a tough time in the beginning. It's also part of making the world feel dangerous and hostile, which adds tension to exploration and quests because you never know what dangerous threats lie in wait and which NPCs could betray you and kick your ass at any time. So if you feel like you're struggling a lot in the beginning and can't kill anything, don't get discouraged; that's how it's supposed to be.

Avoid combat early on; level up by completing quests.

With the game's steep difficulty curve in mind, you need to accept the fact that you won't be a badass killing machine at the start of the game, and therefore need to pick your battles. In the beginning, this means avoiding combat basically whenever possible, because you're too weak to fight anything but the absolute weakest variants of the weakest enemies in the game. Even these ones can pose a serious threat, and the reward you get for killing enemies really isn't worth the time, effort, or risk of killing them. A typical enemy that you stand a reasonable chance of killing may only give you 10 experience and net you a single piece of raw meat. This pales in comparison to the hundreds of experience and shards (the game's currency) you can earn by doing a single quest within the safe confines of the first town, Goliet. Duras, the first NPC you meet on your way down from the radio tower, will escort you there; follow him, and do as many quests in town as you can. If a quest tells you to fight a tough enemy, save it for later. If a quest sends you into dangerous territory, try to complete the objective while avoiding the enemies. Basically, don't even bother trying to fight until you've leveled up several times and have put significant upgrades into your equipment and abilities.

Get a companion as soon as possible. 

One of the quickest and easiest ways to mitigate the game's tough difficulty curve is to get an NPC companion who will follow you on your adventures. They each have their own quests associated with them, interject in conversations, and react to the way you behave in the game, but their main function early on is that they're all decently competent fighters who can tank hits for you and dish out a lot more damage than you're capable of, making difficult fights much more manageable. Duras, the first NPC, can become a companion if you work on the quest associated with him. You can also find CRONY U4, one of your combat drones who became separated from you when your raider crashes in the opening cutscene, somewhere in Goliet, though he's a little harder to find. In each case you'll have to trek long distances across the map through dangerous territory to advance the quest, but you don't actually have to fight anything, especially with Duras's quest, so keep the above point in mind about avoiding combat and just focus on getting to your destination and completing the objectives.

Make sure "close combat focus" is set to manual.

On normal and easy modes, when you approach an enemy the game will automatically lock on to the target, which focuses the camera on them and alters your movement patterns so that you stay facing that enemy at all times. While this can help keep your eye on the target and ensure your attacks are more likely to hit, it's extremely problematic when facing multiple enemies. First of all, it hampers your mobility because your movement speed gets lowered slightly, and you lose the ability to sprint, or turn and run. Plus, it just becomes awkward trying to weave in and out of enemy attacks and switching target locks. With it set to manual, you can choose when you lock on to enemies, instead of being forced to. You may still want to use the lock-on feature against single targets, but against groups you're generally better playing unlocked; it just improves the feeling of movement and gives you a little more control of your positioning and what you're attacking for virtually no downside, as long as you're capable of adjusting your facing and the camera orientation when you attack.

Time your attacks to take advantage of the combo system.

When you attack, a blue meter in the bottom left of the screen progressively fills up; this represents your combo meter, which on all difficulties except for easy, requires you to time your attacks just right to build the meter faster. After it crosses the light blue line in the middle, you can execute a special attack, which does extra damage. If you click too quickly, then the bar stops filling prematurely, and you'll likely run out of stamina way before reaching the special attack point; if you click too slowly, then you'll stop attacking for a brief moment and have to restart the attack animations. You want to time your attacks so that you click immediately (or very shortly) after each attack connects, which you can gauge by the sound effect, or just by watching the meter fill up and clicking right before it reaches the full threshold of each attack. You also need to monitor your stamina, since each attack, dodge, parry, and block will consume stamina, and you can't perform any actions except basic movement when your stamina is depleted. You need to pick your moments to attack, ideally attacking in moments when you have enough stamina and a clean opening to execute a full combo on the enemy.

Put a skill point into stamina.

At the start of the game you have just barely enough stamina to execute a full attack combo, if you start from full, but doing so leaves you completely drained afterward and therefore unable to dodge, block, or parry possible counter-attacks from enemies. With a single skill point invested into stamina, you can boost your total high enough to leave you with a little bit after a full combo, which gives you a lot more flexibility and control over your options in a fight. You don't really need this skill to get by with melee combat, but if you find yourself struggling or want to focus more heavily on playing a melee build, then you should consider investing in it. 

Attributes don't give the benefits they suggest.

Each attribute gives a brief description of its function in the game. For example, strength says it increases melee damage, and constitution it says it increases your health. This makes it sound like each point you put into these attributes will also improve your melee damage or health by a small amount. That is simply not the case. People have tested this, and if there is any increase it's so minuscule as to have no practical benefit. For that reason, you should treat the attribute points as simply requirements necessary to equip better gear and to learn new abilities, and therefore don't have to push your attributes any further than the minimum necessary for your next upgrade.

Attribute costs increase as your attributes increase.

At the start of the game, it costs one attribute point to increase an attribute by one, in other words, you increase your attributes at a one-to-one ratio. Once an attribute hits 31, it starts costing two points to increase the attribute by one, a two-to-one ratio. At 61, it starts costing five points, a five-to-one ratio. At 91, it starts costing ten points, a ten-to-one ratio. This is easy enough to discover on your own, but I want to warn you in advance, because it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking "I just need 20 more attribute points to learn this new skill, which means I can learn it in two levels," when in actuality you're looking at three or four levels because you didn't realize the costs would increase. 

You can increase attributes and skills with jewelry, but...

Rings and amulets (and even sunglasses) can give you a lot of good benefits, like increasing your attributes or allowing you to use or benefit from certain skills (like +1 lockpicking, or highlighting items in the environment) as long as you have them equipped. These can be extremely useful, especially if equipping a ring or amulet will give you enough of an attribute boost to equip a new weapon, but these attribute boosts do not apply when learning new skills at a trainer. If your base dexterity is at 30 and you've improved it to 35 with a ring, a trainer's skill window might show that you have the 35 of 35 necessary dexterity to learn a new skill, but when you click on the skill, you won't actually be able to learn it, and the game won't tell you why. This is because learning skills requires your base attributes to meet the requirements, meaning you have to get your natural dexterity to 35, without the aid of rings or amulets, to learn that skill. You can still use those extra attribute points to equip weapons and armor, but not to learn skills. Note that any skill for which you meet the base requirements will be marked with an exclamation point to the left of the list; if that exclamation point isn't there, even though your stats appear to match the requirements, then they're being boosted by equipment and thus you won't be able to learn the skill.

Join a faction sooner rather than later.

Don't be afraid to join a faction relatively early in the game because you think you'll miss out on other factions' quests. Although there are many quests that you can do in each faction before joining them, only the faction leader's official membership quest will be canceled if you join another faction, first; every other faction quest will still be available to you, later, even if you've already joined another faction. I'd still advise visiting all of the factions and checking out their skills before making a decision (don't just rush into it), but the faction armor and abilities give you a pretty big boost early in the game, which means the sooner you join a faction the sooner you can get into enjoying all of their benefits and having a somewhat easier time with the game's tough difficulty curve. If you wait to join a faction until you've already done everything else, then you'll just be unnecessarily handicapping yourself and missing out on the fun, unique faction stuff.

Periodically advance the main quest; don't put it off.

Likewise, don't put off advancing the main quest until the very end of the game. You can continue playing after you complete the main quest (though how it resolves will have consequences for how different NPCs and factions treat you), so you don't have to save it for last. But really, the reason I say you should advance the main quest is because a lot of the objectives send you out to explore wide swaths of the world map, and a lot of these objectives can be completed or discovered long before you pick up the quest to actually do them, which I feel has a negative effect on the pacing and impact of the story when you meet an important NPC, and they tell you to go do a whole bunch of stuff, and you tell him then and there that you've already done all of it, because there's no build up for the next section of the plot. So, since you're going to be exploring all these areas, anyway, you may as well have the actual quest for them active so that you discover things when the main quest expects you to, rather than basically spoiling the plot for yourself.

Understand how the "Cold" meter works.

Based on how you act in dialogue and how you choose to solve certain quests, you'll see "Cold increased" or "Cold decreased" messages appear on screen. "Coldness" represents Jax's stunted emotions as the result of his heavy use of elex as an Alb commander. Your coldness level begins at "neutral," after most of the elex has waned from Jax's system following the failed execution at the start of the game, and decreases as you choose more emotional responses, or increases as you choose more cold-hearted, machine-like responses. It's not a morality system, and it's neither good nor bad. Getting mad at someone and yelling at them is an emotional response that will decrease your cold level, but obviously may not be the best course of action in a situation; while cold responses may be dispassionate to the human condition of others around you, they tend to be guided by reason and logic, and therefore could make a lot of sense. It's mainly a tool that allows you to role-play as Jax, but it also affects your relationships with companions, and is the primary factor in deciding which ending you get, based on what your net coldness level is at the end of the game.

You have a jetpack; use it.

Elex has an extremely varied topography with a lot of hills, mountains, ravines, canyons, and so on, meaning a lot of areas are hidden out of view by being on a completely different plane from the one you're standing on. The jetpack, which you gain in the starting area and remains with you for the entire game, gives you a ton of freedom to explore vertically. You can find a lot of useful items, cool hidden areas, and fun easter eggs by descending into obscure low points or flying on top of things that you would never be able to reach in other games. You can even use it in combat; with ranged weapons, you can hover in mid-air and fire down on opponents, and with the jetpack attack skill you can do a devastating plunging attack on enemies with your melee weapon. It can also be useful for evading attacks and getting out of a tough spot when you run out of stamina, but be careful because many enemies have ranged attacks and will try to shoot you down if you spend too much time in the air or get too far away from them.

Consider exploring at night.

Nighttime is not nearly as dark as it used to be in the early Gothic games, and it actually comes with a few benefits. A lot of beasts and monsters will go to sleep at night, which can make it easier to sneak past them or avoid them if you're trying to complete quests in dangerous territory, and the rare plants like golden whisper glow very brightly at night, making them much easier to spot at a distance. 

Plan to learn (and use) crafting skills.

Modify weapons, chemistry, and each faction's unique weapon enhancement skill, all give a huge benefit and should be learned by every character build. Chemistry lets you brew your own potions from the plethora of plants that you find out in the wild, but more importantly, it gives you access to permanent stat upgrade potions, which can give you a ton of free boosts for a minor skill investment. Modify weapons lets you upgrade your weaponry, which is by far the most reliable way to improve your damage output; it's faster and easier to improve a weapon you're already using than to hope you can find something better, and weapons that you upgrade to max often perform as good or better than legendaries that you can find in exploration. Each faction also gets an ability to add extra damage types to their weapons (fire, energy, radiation, etc), which act as damage-over-time in addition to the weapon's base damage, further enhancing your weapon's total damage output, which can only be done with that skill unless you luck out and find something good that already has a damage effect on it. Goldsmith is a little less important, but lets you craft jewelry that will often be stronger than what you can find normally. Gem socketing is even less important because not all weapons will have gem sockets on them and you generally don't find enough gems to get a big enough boost, but it can still be a nice benefit if you've got nothing else to spend skill points on.

Pick up everything you find.

This might seem like obvious advice, but I feel like it's worth pointing out: you have no inventory restrictions, so you can (and should) pick up everything you find, because everything in the game has some sort of value. Most items can be sold to merchants for extra money, and since money is hard to come by and a lot of things are really expensive, you'll need all the money you can get. Plus, you never know when a particular item might come in handy.

Junk items have no use; sell them.

Mugs, forks, cigarettes, toilet paper -- basically everything that appears in your "other" tab of the items screen is completely useless except to sell to vendors, with one exception: old coins can be used to buy food and drinks in vending machines at the clerics' headquarters. There's not a single NPC who will ask for a few packs of cigarettes, or a dozen rolls of toilet paper, to complete a quest. These things only exist to populate the world with "stuff" and to give you things to sell to vendors for extra cash. This also applies to items in the "other" tab marked "valuables" like chalices and caskets. Hold on to any old coins you find, because you may actually want to use them at some point, but sell literally everything else in this tab. 

Learn the "animal trophies" skill as soon as possible.

As previously mentioned, you'll be needing a lot of money in this game, and it's often in short supply because you have to spend so much of it learning new abilities, buying armor, and upgrading your weapons. The "animal trophies" skill is one of the best ways to earn money, because it grants you extra rewards like claws, teeth, pelts, and so on, which can be sold to merchants for money and/or used in crafting, for every animal, monster, and mutant that you kill. The earlier you get this skill, the more animal trophies you can accrue over the course of the game, meaning more money in your pockets. You can go for the second level of this ability right away, if you desire, since it'll grant you even more trophies over the course of the game, but you should definitely get at least the first skill level. Hold on to a small supply of each trophy type (say, 20-30), because you'll want to have some available for crafting, and then sell the excess. 

Personality skills aren't really worth it.

Most of the skills in the "personality" tab are about boosting skill checks in dialogue and giving you other such social rewards for how you interact with the world. Most of these skills are, generally, not worth it. You'll see a lot of skill checks in dialogue early on, when they're either low enough for you to meet without needing the extra boosts, or so high that you'll never meet in time, in which case the personality skills don't really help. Worse yet, these opportunities become pretty rare in the second half of the game. The skills that grant extra attributes are kind of nice, but you can achieve the same effect through standard elex potions. The skills that grant extra experience points also seem nice, but this amounts to a meager 5% -- against most enemies that means an extra one or five points. The skills that reward you for your coldness level are kind of nice, but are situational depending on your build and playstyle, and sort of force you to meta-game your role-playing so that you stay within a specific range. A few of the skills in this tab can be useful, of course, but you should be prioritizing other skills first.