So how's Gothic 3?

[Gnarf]

Gnarf, foryou, what has been good about the game?

Exploring, questing, fighting. And, stuff.

Haven't paid lots of attention to the hype, so don't know about that. But, well. Don't think the good things about the game are particularly unique, but rather stuff you'd expect to see in most good RPGs, just pulled off better than in most games. In addition, it manages to avoid doing any of the stuff I think that absolutely shouldn't be in any game (like, say, Oblivion's skill/leveling and level-scaling systems).

Lots of different quests to do. Some that can be completed in several ways and lots that interfer with each other and such. I'm having a real hard time deciding what side to take in the main conflict in the game, which might just mean it's worth replaying. For an action RPG, the combat is real nice. I'm chosing what attacks to use, trying avoiding enemy attacks while timing my attacks right, rather than buttonbashing things to death [img]smile.gif[/img]

All things considered, if they fix the game, it'll be awesome, tho it probably shouldn't have been released quite yet.

[Luvian]

Well I'm installing the game. The music sounds like something you would hear in one of the LOTR movies. I like that you apparently get multiple decisions that affect the story, but I don't know how long I'll play this as I think Dark Messiah come out today.

[Albromor]

Thanks, Gnarf, nice review. Look forward to readin more. And you are right, if they can patch this up it should make for a fine game. Hey, any issues with SecuRom security software that you can see? I know there is no Starforce.


Luvian, I'll be looking for your reviews of not only Gothic 3 but Dark Messiah as well.

[Luvian]

I installed, desinstalled and patched this game 4 times and never even got it to start, I'm never touching this piece of crap again.

[Zaleukos]

I couldnt restrain myself so I got the game:p

Its very poorly optimized with horrendous loading times, but I can make it run smoothly on my P4-3GHz/6800GS-256MB/2GB RAM if I set it to medium detail and lower the resolution to 800x600 (it might run reasonably well at slightly higher res, but it crawls if I try 1024x9xx which is my normal res for this kind of game, and worked fine for Oblivion). The game is IMHO significantly uglier than Oblivion at that setting. I dont notice any in-game lag, but there is the occasional momentaneous freeze as the game loads new cells. According to other forums RAM is a real bottleneck for this game.

The bug I've encountered so far is a scripting bug (if you dont talk to people in the right order in the beginning you miss out on XP and background story). Since this bug is right at the start and pretty hard to avoid it hints at some EXTREMELY sloppy playtesting. I wonder what other scripting bugs I'll run into...

The dialogue is worse than the old Gothics, but still better than most other RPGs. In one way it speeds up the game as you cant initiate dialogue with NPCs who dont have anything new to say, but it detracts from the atmosphere.

EDIT: Tweaked my graphics settings a bit. Switching from linear to anisotropic filtering (while switching off post-processing and lowering texture detail to medium) gives me a much prettier game, without dropping the frame rate much. I'd estimate that I've gotten about 20% into the game and havent seen any more bugs except for one instance of enemy creature falling into the "void" and becoming invisible, and about 5 CTDs in ca 25h of play. Not as bad as expected and actually not that much worse your average release when it comes to CTDs.

My criticism this far into the game boils down to a few points.

They made the Oblivion mistake of not allowing you to name saves (retarded on so many levels) and that the quest log is crap, it doesnt record all dialogue and makes it easy to forget some hints/directions/whether that mine was to the north or the east...

The time it takes to load a save is problematic in a game where you die very often from not spotting a boar early enough.

Man/Beast balance is horrible and borderline broken, but this doesnt make the game difficult per se. If only you spot the beast first and have a halberd ready you can make short work of any animal. But if the beast spots you first you are toast due to stunlock. Even a lowly bloodfly (an oversized mosquito worth 2x as much XP as a tame chicken) kills you more often than not that way... It also makes for some amusing things like it being outright murderous to accept joining a hunter for a hunting quest (and there's plenty of those) as the hunter will be killed by whatever beast it is up against, and the case of me watching an entire orc caravan (that I was supposed to raid) get butchered by boars and wolves before I could intervene

And I just downloaded the second patch (v1.08). It'll be an interesting evening

[ 10-30-2006, 08:20 AM: Message edited by: Zaleukos ]