Gothic 3 - Rumor: Gothic 3 Uber-Patch cancelled

Chekote said:

I stopped playing G3 as soon as I head they were making the patch. I will be *very* unhappy if they drop it. I doubt I would go back to the game after that "spit in the face".

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Same here as soon as I heard about the uber patch I stopped. I was at the desert and wasn't experiencing too many bugs that I keep hearing about. The falling through the land never happened to me, no broken quests ect... but I don't really like playing games twice so I'm waiting until the patch.

As far as the hub bub about the whole mess. Ehhh it's just business, I for one don't give a rats behind about all the 'what he said, what she said' mumbo jumbo. All I'm interested in is if they will release the patch or do the Dungeon Lords example and add it to the extra special premium collectors edition like somebody else mentioned earlier in this thread.

Now that Jowood has confirmed there indeed will be a patch then I don't care about the rest

Skav

Didn't Jowood (and PB?) want to market G3 more to the American market than the European market ? This could maybe explain why G3 is a free roaming game, since it was meant (mainly?) to compete against Oblivion in the US. Sadly --- for Jowood and PB, G3 didn't sell as much in the US as in Europe.

My guess (and it's only a guess) is that Jowood told PB to use this or that engine, (and speedtree), simply to cater much more to the American market than Gothic 1+2did. This solution didn't work, though, as G3 still is a much more complex game than say Oblivion. You can either side with the orcs or the humans, and then the dialoques are also rather lengthy...

I would have wished that PB just had used their 'old' engine to make Gothic 3, and then for G4 used the 'new' engine. Graphics & visuals aren't everything, and I'm convinced that the 'old' engine from G1+G2 could have been tweaked a little more.
(and g2 look absolutely beautifull, still, I think).

I would also wish that PB had not put three huge areas into the game, but instead did have (had?) the guts to cut the Hashishin area from the game. And then developed the two other areas of the game, untill they were (near) perfection.
And then, in about ½-1 year had made the Hashishin area available as add-on to the game.

There is, afterall, only so much a team of 20-30 developers can do...

ETA:

As for the codex, I kind of like it there. It is fun sometimes. However, my main reason for being a member of the codex is not that it is fun, but that it is the only place on the (apart from this site) where you can discuss freely the state of the rpgs today. And where I can say that I like Oblivion, but also can critize its features rather harshly, and where I can discuss why Kotor has so much love. And where my rather lengthy intellectual points and posts are read, and taken seriously (other than this site, of course ). I remember a rather interesting discussion about dialoque etc. we've had on the codex, sprung from Bioware's dialoque system in Mass Effect. I can also say on the Codex (as well as here) somethings about Fallout 3 that I would never say on Bethsoft's forum. And if I did say them --- I would tone it down - rather extensively, simply because I recognize that the codex is a different site than say Bethsoft's game forums. And the other reason, I like the Codex is simply because Vault Dweller does some rather intriguing things. Only on the Codex could there have four developers talking about dialoque and story telling in rpgs. (in very in depth and informative way).

And the Codex review of Gothic 3 was also great, but VD's review got scrutinized and critisized a lot. And VD defended his position on G3, instead of handing out warnings and bans --- as other sites might have done (not this one...but a certain other site ---- )

Thanks, Hx. I guess we´ll wait for Mo (aka the Easter Bunny ) to translate this statement. It´s quite tricky and carefully worded in the things it doesn´t say but imply.

Here´s a quick and dirty summary:
1. JoWooD wants the patch. Cancelling it wouldn´t be accepted by JoWooD "without consequences".
2. They can´t talk about ongoing negotiations, etc. ...
3. ... which of course shouldn´t have any connection to the G3 patch.
He later clarified in answer to a forum post (... have no connection ... ) that he wrote "normally it shouldn´t have a connection".
4. JoWooD will do their best to finally make patches available again, in the highest possible quality and of course for free.


Comment:
I´m surprised Ertl said so much between the lines.
1. That´s a threat towards PB. Of course everybody "wants the patch". But who has to pay for the development? It´s all about money. Hard to say who is to blame.
2. Normal business behaviour. STFU about interna or you can collect your papers.
3. This has to be understood as the patch being a direct or indirect part of the negotiations.
4. Sounds good but is rather soft if you look carefully. Even JoWooD´s best effort can fail, and highest possible quality can still be unsufficient.

Statement by JoWooD

Here is the official translation posted by JoWooDs´ assistant CM Glockenbeat in their forum. Please note that the original German statement is quite tricky and very hard to translate without loss.

Dear Fans, Gamers, Readers,

Of course we heard of the rumors and specs saying that JoWooD cancelled any patch-support for Gothic 3. We want to clarify unmistakably that from JoWooD's point of view these are only rumors and we neither thought about "Cancelling patch-support" nor "Abandonment of any future plans about upcoming patch(es)" nor will we accept such ideas without any consequences.
We ask you to understand that while two companies are into negotiations both of them can't and are not allowed to talk about the progress, but this should of course not concern the patch.

It's even quite the contrary ! We're doing our best to deliver high-quality patches in future again which are for free of course !

Your JoWooD-Team

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Dhruin said:

I still see that his comment about starting the game now could be interpreted as "we keep having discussions with people who haven't even played the damn thing, so go play it and then we can talk about the issues" but I can see the context you are referring to and the fact that he is driving some sort of agenda.

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Yes, exactly. He is/was driving an agenda. He's been posting almost daily before and not even once did he mention it before that people should play the game more so it's quite clear that nothing that he said was actually meant in this context. He back-pedaled and made up this "play the damn thing" context after the shit hit the fan.
Well, from reading that guy's post almost daily, I did get the impression over time that he is a -sorry- pretty whiny little critter anyway . I think everyone here who has ever worked for a bigger corporation/company will know what I mean when I say that Ralf is the guy who will pick up fragments of a phone call of higher up or some rumor from a secretary during a coffee break and then runs down the halls like a chicken with his head chopped off yelling "OMG! The end is nigh - We're all gonna get fired! OMG!".
At least, he seems to be rather good at getting involved in things that don't really concern him. And I don't think that he should be doing PR. His spelling and ability to express himself are terrible. Some of his posts are barely comprehensible.


Well, and here's (as ordered by Gorath ) a summary of today's posts of JoWood's Community Manager Ivan Ertlov...

1) Post no. 1

[Edit: I didn't see that Gorath had already posted Glockenbeat's official message so please feel free to ignore my version... Glockenbeat is as official as it gets, of course )

Dear fans, players, readers...

naturally, we have taken notice of the speculations and rumors that are purporting the termination of patch support for Gothic III. We would like to clarify unmistakably that this is -as far as JoWood is concerned- pure speculation, of course, and that we neither plan any such "cancellation of support" or "abandonment of (a) further patch(es)", nor would we accept any of this without consequence. We would like to ask for your understanding that due to ongoing negotiations between the two companies, neither of the companies involved is able or allowed to comment on the developments in public but that should, of course, not affect the patch for Gothic III. Quite the contrary, we will give it all we got to finally provide you with free patches of the highest quality.

Your JoWood team

2) Post no. 2

[some blahblah about his community relations job]
...
However, what this is all about is to clarify that we plan to neither terminate the support nor the patching, and I will post about any new developments as soon as I have any new info.

3) Post no. 3

Today's information is plain and simple: "No patch coming out, as some speculative articles in magazines claim, is bollocks."

4) Post no. 4

[in response to a fan post saying: You better think of something fast before everyone here tears you a new one]

You'll be doing that anyway .

No, seriously:

It was evident for all of us that the next patch had to become all but the "messiah" among patches. According to my definition, this means the elimination of as many seriously disturbing gameplay bugs as possible.

5) Post no. 5

Please do not begin any speculations as the online magazines did. Conspiracy theories are out of the question as well.

As soon as I have new information about the patch, I will post it. I have to work on some other projects now but will be back later tonight.

6) Post no. 6

[in response to a fan accusing him of sitting on and not revealing any new info all along]

No, that's unfortunately not true. If I knew when exactly the patch will be released or if I had a fix list then it would already be a sticky post.

7) Post no. 7

No translation because this post was made in English to the English G3 forums so just click the link .



That was it. Let's hope that he keeps promise (for a change... last time he said he'll be back with more info next week, he was gone for 4 months ) and that he will indeed be back with hopefully more info and details later tonight. So far this is all good news. They can not possibly turn around anymore now. There must be a patch. Maybe it is even already finished as someone else here noted as well and they are just arguing over payment and distribution. Anyway, it luckily seems like the only question is "when", not "if".

This post was a mistake. Sorry.

Just copy your post to the new thread.

Maylander said:

Personally I would rather see G3 as a G1-2 type of game, but I suppose they wanted it to be aimed towards a larger audience.

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Well I already said that G1-2 was my favorite flavour, but actually I like the
aproach they took in G3 a lot too (for the exact reasons you enumerated that
make balancing this type of game difficult). Even in some expense of the great
NPCs and quality story/setting of the previous installments. I think its the right
direction to take and I am willing to support them provided they keep
trying their level best to finetune their design (needless to say for free).

Also I think that a bit more effort in dialogs and unique quests would minimize
the impact in the overall quality/feel of the game while keeping the current
design intact (but that is work for the addon ofcourse, also they have already
done this once succesfully with NOTR as we all know)

Geist said:

The performance of the engine (given enough memory) actually isn't that bad.

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I have to agree actually with that (and with something that Maylander said in
another thread). You can actually tweak the game to look very beautifull (looks
better in my current settings than my texture modded oblivion) and performance
is comparable to Oblivion's even with my X1900XT that should do much better
in O (perhaps they should add an extra step in the game options because
the current "high" settings just dont represent the capabilities of the gfx
engine).

Disk accesses are ofcourse exponentially worse in G... Also the game still
crashed on me untill HiddenX pointed me at his LAA fix (now it hardly ever
crashes)...

Last off topic post in this thread honest