Gothic 3

Technical issues let Gothic 3 down when it first released, but with the latest Community Patch it works fine. There are three completely different regions to explore and dozens of towns and cities, each with its own feel. The art design is just beautiful, and the soundtrack is one of the best I've heard in any game. There are also many quests to do, I advise you to keep every item you pick up because almost everything is tied into a quest at some point..

I know troubled and rushed development history of this game but I'm not gonna sugarcoat it for the sake of whomever profits off the sales nowadays. I approached this one in 2018, holding myself back so long because it was completely broken or just wouldn't run on my older machine :x I expected another try to be painful (or challenging at least) and prepared all the advised mods beforehand but... I never knew it was THIS bad. No mod can fix fundamental design flaws. Gameplay. It's way worse compared to previous titles in the series. UI looks like it's taken out of an MMO. Combat feels like running in your dream. It's floaty, lacks impact and even when you hit something you can never tell because the sword slowly moves through the air all the same with no feedback. Hitboxes might also be misaligned. Even something so common as jumping feels like you are picking a character up, lock it in odd pose and let it awkwardly glide to the ground. There is no sense of direction or weight to it. Even climbing doesn't work like it did in G1 and G2. World: Gothic 1&2 had small but dense worlds. There was fantastic balance between world design and level design. Areas constantly used verticality to make orienting yourself easy and consistent. And despite that locations still felt somewhat authentic. This is sadly absent in Gothic 3. There are a ton of flat open spaces that are huge for the sake of being huge. This makes it easy to overlook lootable stuff there. It might look "realistic" at times but realistic isn't fun. Writing is another issue. Couple retcons really irk me and changed approach to ork faction flips the table in a bad way. Gothic 2 left couple strands for potential key plot-points but those quickly get scratched out, wasted or at best sidelined. Visuals are not appealing. Even decent graphical fidelity is ruined by really ugly design for characters and armor. Dialog animations are somehow junk'ier than they were in Gothic 1&2. Even camera works worse during conversations. Performance. And why does my 1660ti have issues? It "runs" unlike before, but just because you can launch the game doesn't make it enjoyable. Music is at least stellar. Which is why I would recommend checking it out on youtube. There were and still are countless better games out there. This one is sadly a waste of time.

It would have been 5 stars if it wasnt finished

I had high hopes for Gothic 3 back then, and while the backs were surely annoying, my major grief was with a lot of changes in visual presentation/art design to Gothic 2, the overall atmosphere of the world, the repetetive city quests, etc. It's not an outright bad game, but a sequel unworthy of Gothic 1 & 2 in my opinion

I enjoyed the first two Gothic games, but not Gothic III. It's difficult to put a finger just on what's wrong with this game. At the first glance, it seems like it's a wholesome RPG experience. But as I played, I found that I was bored with the game. In part, it was due to lack of direction and the plot just being generally uncompelling - I didn't feel any particular incentive for involving myself in the conflict. There were also just plain annoying elements such as having to liberate a city by yourself, or weird things like mages complaining about how magic's gone even though I could throw lighting around right at the start of the game. Add to this various bugs and a general sense of the game being unfinished, and it ends up a much worse experience than it could be - because this game could have been great if only they had polished it more.