Yepp, that is a good way to end all the mimicing about ;)

Too bad that there aren't a "real" option for playing a undercover rebel fan that infiltrates. It is more of a build up rep, then kill alot of people anyway sell their loot and of to next town and "sorry about that, got a bit carried away - say any of you orc boys ever seen the Holy Grail?"

Yep, there isnt much depth to the story and particularly the NPCs compared to the predecessors.

Liberating cities only seems to cause problems if you try to talk to Orc or Hashishin leaders afterwards, so you can get away with it if you dont enter their buildings (the leaders in two of the smaller desert cities are hard to avoid though). I had crappy reputation with the orcs and liberated tons of cities towards the end, but never got attacked on sight as others have reported.

I think G3 creates a reasonable sense of freedom in that:
a) most quests are optional
b) unlike in the predecessors you dont really need to max out your level. Thus quest whoring and killing every single piece of wildlife on the continent feels less necessary. As much as I love Gothic 2 NoTR I stopped playign after doing the expansion, as I couldnt stand the vacuum cleaning of maps. Save, fight a group of dragon snappers, rest, repeat...

I'm Loving the Game! I'm playing on the Normal
setting and I still die at the wrong time. Even at
level 24 I forget to press the F-5 quick save button after killing everybody in the Hashishin towns so I end up doing it twice. I do wait until
I have finished all the quests and missions
in the ORC and Hashishin towns before I go back
and kill them all but I need 150,000 gold to be
able to buy the Paladin armor and I want to have
at least 200,000 gold so I don't leave myself
penniless.
I don't have the problems that many have mentioned
I've got a 3.2 Duel core with 6 Gig of RAM. The
only thing that I don't like is the animals and
Monsters that can walk through through and under
rocks and Boulders and kill you from below. Other than that and seeing a rhino or Deer climb or
walk up the face of a sheer Cliff I don't have any
problems just lots of fun.

CrimsonBlade, did you patch your game and what is the latest patch? Have they squashed the hordes of bug issues?

AFAIK they havent done much to it since the last time you asked:(

1.09 is the latest version, and the only addition to 1.08 is that they've dealt with a "crash while saving" bug. The notable differences compared to the release version are that armour works, and that wildlife is a bit easier to handle, but these were fixed by 1.08.

So, are there still several serious bugs needing to be fixed? What about the memory leak? Has it been fixed? Quite a number of people had thatissue which is about as serious a bug as I have ever read concerning a game.

I honestly dont know. I didnt suffer from most of the issues others have complained about with the older patches 1.07 and 1.08, and I just started a game with 1.09 yesterday. If there is a memory leak then it needs more than 1.5h to build up.

The things that I need further patching for are balancing and optimization (loading times:() issues rather than bugs per se. NPC pathfinding and a fundamentally faulty journal being the issues that really can be considered bugs.

Have you looked at the official forums at www.jowood.com? There might be more useful info there. The places I frequent arent that informative regarding bugs.