Just curious if anyone has played this yet?

Nope, but i'm planning on buying a copy once the price drops a little. I've partially played Gothic 2, and i thought it was pretty decent.

I've always been curious about the Gothic series, but never got a chance to play any of them. Are they comparible to The Elder Scrolls games?

They are comparable in that they are both epic CRPGs and hold huge worlds but they both encompass entirely different playing experiences. I prefer the way Gothic handles gameplay. The world of Gothic has you playing in a living world like no other. The recent Oblivion comes very close to the living world concept but sadly 2001 Gothic 2 beast 2006 Oblivion hands down.

Here's an example: In the Gothic series you can accidentally wander into monsters that are way to powerful and it's game over. In Oblivion the monsters are generally scaled and with a little luck and planning you can beat the game at a relatively low level.

Here's another example. In Gothic 2 if you accidentally bump into this way to powerful monster you can run away. If you are fast enough you can actually out run the monster and the monster will give up. That is unless the monster spots easier prey while chasing you and decides to go for the easier kill. On the other in in Oblivion, if you bump into a monster you do not want to fight, that monster will chase you until you battle him. There is no running away, hiding behind walls or getting lost in the woods.

Still, both games are excellent games and it should never be a choice of which game to pick, but rather which one to play first.

dajjer, I have heard from several sources that Gothic 2's combat system and controls are a real pain. So much so, that though people liked the gaming concept they still gave up because of how user UNfriendly the controls are.

That is true Albromor, to an extent.

Actually it was Gothic 1 that had the horrible controls, Gothic 2 did allow you to configure some of the key to make the controls a little more friendly. However, even reconfigured, Gothic 2 controls were still NON-STANDARD. And this fact turned off a ton of people.

HOWEVER, while the controls were non-standard, they were not unduly hard and it did not take long at all to get accustomed to them. And after an hour or so, they blend into the game play and handling the controls is "second nature."

But sadly it got the bad control rap and it turned off way to many players. I'd say that 9 out of 10 players who gave the game a chance ended up loving it. I was one of the folks that stayed clear of Gothic 1 because of the reported impossibility of the controls. It wasn't until Gothic 2 came out and I heard that it was an easier to use but still a great game like Gothic 1 that I gave Gothic 2 a chance during a lull in the RPG market. I ended up playing and loving Gothic 2 and eventually went back to Gothic 1 and found out the controls really weren't that bad.

BTW, not everyone gave up on the game. Head over to Amazon or any site that stores player reviews and you will see a nearly unanimous thumbs up for this great great game.

Dreamer: They arent quite the same.

Gothic: Pros Great interactive, believable world and NPCs. IMHO a good storyline for a RPG. Cons: Somewhat linear and requires quest whoring for XP. The Gothic 2 add-on required you to plan your character build in absurdum. Damage and armor is additive, meaning that there are certain thresholds you need to overcome to be able to fight creatures effectively (while IMHO more realistic this isnt optimal from a gameplay point of view).

Morrowind: Pros Replayability and nonlinearity. More stats and weapons allow for greater customization of the character (at least in Morrowind). Cons: Crappy NPCs and storyline.

If you play it through once Gothic is superior, but Morrowind is more replayable (I hated Oblivion).

I'm looking forward to G3 immensely but wont get it for a while. Too much overtime at work atm...

Got it today. Haven't played it lots yet, but it seems real great so far. Don't have a whole lot to say about it yet: Seems there's tons of stuff to do, places to explore etc. Really like the combat system... and, uh, you can dual wield swords in this one. That's kinda cool.

Never played the first game, quite a while since I've played Gothic 2, and I wasn't really annoyed with any user-unfriendliness, so I'm not too sure how Gothic 3 compares to those in that respect. At least, it does have some quick-slot bar for easy access to useful items, automatically sorted, unlimited inventory and some such niceties. Controls seem real nice (but due to broken memory, I'm not certain how they compare to Gothic 2's controls); fighting things stuff fun.

Anyways, seems to me it's the best RPG released in quite some time. Everyone should go get it etc etc. *is off hunting wolves*

Well I bought the game, installed it, slaughtered a village of orcs, got some quests and things to do. Couldn't talk to some people, could hardly even walk right. Went out to be slaughtered by a wild boar, over and over and over and the frame rate was really bad.

The controles are not unwieldy or just different in my opinion, they are crap. Feels like someone did an intentional job of making them like this after a bad session with the towns worst dentist and tutorship by a console porter.

The game is also very very far from being finished. People are talking about NWN2 as being crappy and buggy, well ladies and gentlemen, Gothic 3 got really bad scores for being so badly done in Swedish PC Gamer (and they usually bend over for the big titles and give most games decent scores even though they may be buggy as heck!). Several places has said that the game is for a die-hard Gothic breed of people and I can understand that.

I will give my game another try soon, and if it doens't act up better after patching, I might be willing to send my game forward to someone more interested.

The game is pretty horribly optimized, but a lot of the problems are fixed with the second patch (1.08). Boars and some other wild animals are slower. Pre-1.08 bloodflies and boars were more dangerous than dragons if they caught you unaware.

I could get a pretty decent framerate on my mid-end system by getting rid of post-processing, reducing shadows, and lowering the texture detail. A lot of texture is loaded into RAM at one go. The big problem is the loading time when loading a save game (a huge problem given the tendency to insta-die that always was a part of the Gothics).

RAM is apparently a huge bottleneck for this game. I recall someone slagging me for recommending 2Gb of RAM in the TES forum, but this game is practically needs it.

And the game might crash (with an out of memory error) if you try to save while spell effects like fireball-affected corpses are around. This will corrupt the save game, so alternate between the quicksave and a normal save file. I only started running into this problem as my character switched from melee to fireball as main attack out of laziness...

The quest log is also crap, and that hurts when NPCs only give their speech once... After exhausting the dialogue options with an NPC it'll just give you a "dont you have anything better to do" if you approach it...

Otherwise I'm having fun with the game, the world and storyline is way better than Oblivion's, and for its flaws I prefer the combat of this (which doesnt have much in common with that of the older Gothics, and that change was probably necessary as it was near impossible to fight against large mobs of enemies with the old gothic controls).