Gothic 3

The vanilla version of this game has much to offer.The signature features of the previous games - huge and beautiful world to explore,deep and meaningful characters,dialogues and storyline,factions and choices that matter,epic soundtrack,varied equipment and spells and a lot of more - are here. So what's the reason behind the not so great rating,you may ask?One reason.One simple reason.Combat.The fighting system in this game is probably the worst ever conceived for a videogame.I mean,it's just wrong.There's no tactics or strategy in it,you just hack and slash your way to victory.There's a stamina bar that rarely stops you from taking over entire cities.Yes,that's right.Entire cities.Human or Humanoid enemies are a joke.They rarely parry or evade your blows,so a single enemy has no chance against you,even at the very beginning of the game.To calibrate this fact,designers filled cities with a whole lot of useless enemies and give rarely the players some worthy backup to take over the city (an actually good thing in this game:every single city or colony can be conquered by your faction,so there are scripted events that support that) because it would make it too easy,resulting in making conquering events ridiculous to see,with a single hero destroying entire hordes of swordfighters. Please take a moment to read carefully swordfighters.As i said they are pathetic, so designers counterbalanced it by making enemy shamans,beasts,wolves and boars overpowered. Yes,you can actually walk all over any kind of duelist,but a single wolf can annihilate you.That's because wolves sometimes start a series of UNAVOIDABLE attacks that inevitably deplete all of your health.Why?What were the programmers of this game thinking? So you a nice atmospheric and living free-roam RPG world with a broken and unbalanced combat system,but this without the Community Patch,as other reviewers stated. This patch removes many game bugs,and more importantly,corrects the unbalanced combat system.Enemies parry,attack and are tough to fight. Too bad that the patch removes much of the sense of freedom this game had.You no more destroy almost everything in your path.You are weak and defenseless,at least at the beginning,just like in the previous Gothic games.This would have been great,if the creators of the patch actually calibrated it better so that conquering cities could have been at least possible without going crazy.Don't get me wrong,you can still wander freely in the world,but not so freely. If you can go past this frustrating mess of a combat system,if you like deep character building and customization,real role-playing like taking sides and changing the world around you,then take this game. Just keep in mind that it will be a frustrating but surely rewarding experience.

I just finished Gothic 3. I'm new to the series and have never played 1, 2, or Risen, so I can't speak much to that. But I fell madly in love with this one and plan to conquer G2 & Risen next. There is so much to tell, but I'll try to stick to the main themes that stuck out in my mind. In short, Gothic 3 definitely made my top 3 gaming experiences of all time. Starting off was a bit lack-luster. The engine needed work, something that I'm sure the devs were aware of, and you could tell. There are a few tweeks that they could've made which would have broughten it up to Oblivion-level beauty, if only they had made them. The draw distance looked silly and spackled together versus the immediate beauty of the landscapes nearer to the camera. After a while, luckily, your mind begins to tune them out. Not to mention that it gets much more beautiful the further along you get. Gothic 3 is a huge open world. The battles are difficult, and no matter how powerful your character gets, you can still be killed by petty creatures; I recommend saving often. Learn your F5 and F9 quicksave keys well. The combat is difficult in the beginning, but not impossible. Tackle tough foes from a distance with the bow for a while until you gain experience. There is one maddening bug that persisted to goad me throughout the game, which is that there literally is a bug in how the endurance meter functions. Your endurance level is what determines if you can sprint or walk, and often means the difference between life or death in many encounters. At first it runs out quickly and you find that you move very slowly everywhere you want to go. But watch the color: if it's grey that means you're affected by weakness which can be cured by a cure disease potion. If it's yellow, you're good, but there is still a bug that randomly changes how fast it replenishes. It never gets better. So stock up on endurance potions, and make sure to get the Run Like The Wolf trait from the hunter in Silden. That's probably the most important trait in the whole entire game because it changes a barely bearable experience into a wonderful one. The other thing that is a must, is to set Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic filtering by hand to 8x or 16x in your Nvidia control panel. (usually it says Application-controlled). Once you do this, you wind up with graphics that are Oblivion-level, and often better. (in my opinion). Other areas that shined were the story writing, voice acting, creature animations, and plethora of creature types, and just the vastness of the world. All of which are best-in-class I would say. Oh and I almost forgot the absolutely breath-taking music by Kai Rosenkranz. It's miraculous that such care and craft went into making this game. The dialogs often made my belly-laugh, as well as masterful tidbits like the Nordmar Nogginfog. I can't believe I missed this gem and have become an ardent supporter of the devs and look forward to playing all their games.

It was just fun! I loved it! Don't expect Skyrim, but we wouldn't get Skyrim if it wasn't for Gothic III. Gothic III has pulled off some aspects, like the faction-character setup, There's just enough information to light your imagination. Much to do and figure out, so better hurry if you're into RPGs and FP/TP adventure!

Gothic 3 used to be a favourite in the olden days, so I bought it again on GOG for old time's sake. Although the first few hours were still quite fun and had that old feeling, even the community patch and content mod can not hide the dramatic balancing, game design and technical flaws as well as content gaps inherent in this rushed release. It starts with the copy and paste armors and effectively nonexistent helmets and ends with snoozeworthy buggy and idiotic fetch quests on the level of a turn of the century MMORPG - worse, honestly. Who throws sacks of grain all over the farm to play scavenger hunt? If you have the patience for that kind of nonsense you should still be able to enjoy the beautiful organic world and the very assertive and present characters, but I do not.

Gothic 3 follows the trend of the rest of series in presenting a dark medieval setting in bright, epic color, only this time with an ambitious, much larger scale. The game stands out for its immense open world where you can explore three kingdoms with their cities large and small, their political agendas and cultures. As far "openness" goes, Gothic 3 has it covered. You can explore the vast world in any order, and it's LARGE without being overwhelming or impractical, while also not feeling somewhat clustered like Oblivion where you can literally spot most cities of the realm at the same time from a tall enough mountain. The possibilities are many: liberate human cities from orc domination (or crush the human resistance), talk to kings, hunt wolves in the frozen steppes, worship gods, unbury treasure in caves in the desert, climb, hide, steal, attack, run, hurl spells. It's just pleasant that it offers so much to do. Also like other Gothic games, Gothic 3 has a high challenge throughout most of the game, which is just awesome. You can go anywhere, but opposition strength will vary and you WILL die. What I think is much inferior to other games in the series is combat. Other Gothic installments had a challenging (and rewarding) combat system where you had to time defense correctly to overcome the strongest orcs. Also, tackling too many enemies could overwhelm you quickly. Both these things rarely happen in Gothic 3. While you (Review clipped by length limit, have a nice day!)