Gothic 3

I find this game when I finished Risen (first) and I wanted something similar to it so I checked out Piranha Bytes older games.OMG This game is so complex! Thousands of quests through a whole continent! Every action you make (I mean EVERY!) changes the game end. Buy and play (of course with community patch) it's an EPIC ADVENTURE!!!

Wonderful open world where you can explore and live forgetting the main quest. Terrible combat system full of bugs, not corrected by the community patch, as you can't hit an opponent shorter than you, because the combos hit the air and make your character without defense against a simple counter attack. In that way, wolves and boars, that in every other game make exp for you, became the main source of frustration.

This game is a flawed diamond. It was broken on release, but the Community Patch has long since fixed almost every single bug in the game. There are still a few issues left in the game, but if you can look past that then you will find one of the greatest RPGs ever created.

I picked up Gothic 3 back when it first came out. Having finally burnt myself out on far, far too much Morrowind, and wanting another epic open-world RPG to fill time until the (ultimately disappointing) next installment, Oblivion, I purchased this game based on the breathless previews. I was disappointed. General bugginess aside, Gothic 3 really only does one thing wrong. Unfortunately, that one thing is going to be a majority of your gameplay: Combat. The combat system is at the same time both very simple and hair-pullingly frustrating. It is, in essence, a stunlock race. Both you and the enemy has 'strong' and 'fast' attacks, and whoever spams 'fast' attack first will stunlock the other to death. No ifs, and, or buts. If you get in the first blow, you win. If they do, they win. Combine this with the incredible fragility of your character versus every enemy in the starting areas, and it becomes exceedingly frustrating. What's worse, while this style of stunlock combat is just barely bearable one-on-one, Gothic 3 almost never affords you that luxury. You are expected to fight enemies in groups ranging from a mere handful up to dozens at the same time. You say you want to find and defend a chokepoint? Too bad, attacking forces you to also lunge forward with each swing, and the movement controls in combat are atrocious, so good luck getting back to your doorway. And yet I'm still giving this game 3/5, after all that passionate ranting. Well, once you look beyond the combat, the picture brightens. Gothic 3 provides you with a staggeringly vast and completely seamless world (at the expense of astonishingly long load times whenever you load) that is fully open to exploration, with enemies, secrets and treasures scattered liberally around the landscape, which itself varies from mountain peaks to forests and rolling plains, snowy tundra, and arid deserts. Only 'important' NPCs can be interacted with, but a large number of faceless nobodies populates the world, following a scripted schedule that enhances the immersion as they eat, sleep, work and so on (better than Oblivion managed). There are also a multitude of quests, often tied in to the goals of one faction or another, and giving you broad freedom to undertake them. My recommendation? Set the game to 'easy', rely heavily on ranged weapons, and be prepared to reload quite a lot until you gain a dozen levels or so. Underneath it all there is a fantastic world to explore and discover. It's just a shame the game tries its best to force you away.

I've been a long-time fan of the Gothic series as well as of their precursor Arx Fatalis, but I only just got around to playing Gothic 3 (with the mandatory 1.74 patch). Gothic 3 drops the nameless protagonist into a familiar setting; explore a vast world and side with one of three factions. However, it seems that they have focused on building a larger rather than a better mousetrap. None of the characters in the game have any, well, character. Shift the names around 9/10 of them, and I wouldn't even notice any difference. Since the people in the game don't seem real and their motivations rarely amount to anything other than that of the view of their faction. This is also reflected in the quests which seem all to have been cut from the same tree. A lot of them are either of the 'get me my lost item'- or 'kill them all'-variety. There has been some effort put into creating economic or other rationales for towns and communities (i e hunting, artefact gathering, smithing). However, the towns don't really interact and actions in one town will rarely affect dealings in another. Even the main quests are rather tedious and I never once really cared much about their outcome. As regards exploration, I was disappointed that you cannot dive or swim under water. I also felt that the Minecrawlers and Shadowbeats had been made extremly easy in relation to their terrifying bretheren in the previous Gothic games. I generally think that going large and not having content to backing up is a pity. The first game was the smallest of the three, and yet I never reallly knew what was going to happend next. As a gaming experience, that is far superior to what we have here. To conclude, I think it was nice to revisit the series and get a Gothic-feel once again, but there is really nothing left once once you've finished playing. I would say it's worthwhile playing if you're already a Gothic fan. If that isn't the case, I don't recommend playing Gothic 3.