Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods - Review @ 1UP

1Up joins the club with a harsh review of JoWood's Gothic 3:Forsaken Gods, giving it a score of D- with the caveat that "the only reason this didn't get an F is the original music..." Here's the intro:

My friends, let me take you on a journey through a magical land where everything sucks. On our jaunt, the sights are ugly and outdated, the indigenous fauna's incredibly annoying, the locals have the communication skills of Chewbacca's illiterate, deaf-mute cousin, and the controls on our vehicle are archaic and unintuitive. Sounds great so far, right?

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On the combat:

And in the process of keeping it real, I have to comment on Forsaken Gods' combat system, which is -- without a doubt -- the worst I've ever encountered in a game. It consists of little more than a hyperactive, sword-swingin' clickfest, and your opponents' A.I. is more easily exploitable than the governor of Illinois. But the most important of Forsaken Gods' major flaws: The whole system is built on an awful, awful design foible. Your character cannot counterattack (or do anything) if he's getting hit. As a result, if multiple enemies gang up and take turns hitting you, it's effectively impossible to do anything except a) run away or b) die. Even after leveling up many times, I still feared groups of weak enemies thanks to this fluke.

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Conclusion:

So, do I have anything nice to say about Forsaken Gods? Well, apart from the decent score, it offers a ton of character customization and development options. They're put forward in a vague way that will confound folks unfamiliar with the series' mechanics, but they are there. But I'm really grasping at straws now.

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More information.

Gothic 3 wasn't as good as G2 or G1 and yes it had a lot of bugs in the original version of the game. And yes the expansion Forsaken Gods is not a very good game either. Still, this "reviewer" comes off like a real jerk and his review reads with far less professionalism than the game he criticizes plays. Maybe a job at MTV would be more up his alley...

Bashing FG?Count me in,but I even today I wouldn't call G3's sights ugly and outdated,I think that was a little unfair,not for FG which is the worse Gothic ever but for G3 which has some nice visuals.

I haven't dipped into the Forgotten Gods casserole, myself, but I also thought this review was a bit caustic without taking the game very seriously. It's one thing to pan a game you've been anticipating that turns out to be crap, and another just to pile on, as he seems to be doing here. Things like "the worst I've ever encountered in a game" seem a bit over the top if you're aiming for an impartial style.

I was just accidentally reading "Frankenstein" instead of "Forsaken Gods".
Something must've gone wrong with my mind.
But on the other hand, considering the quality, it seems to fit in a weird way.

I reinstalled my copy of Ultima IX just to see for myself if the visuals in G3 are like the visuals from the almost-decade-old Ultima IX...

Not even close. The G3 visuals are far superior by a wide, undisputable margin, to Ultima IX.

As they should be.

Claiming that Gothic 3 looks like a 10 year old game is inexcusable ... and much of the other stuff seems to indicate he didn't play much at all.

Entertainingly written, though.

The word on Usenet was that it is really bad too. They didn't fix any of the program flaws or game system flaws from Gothic 3, screwed up combat (which was already goofy), and had so many story problems as to make it all but unplayable.

Prime Junta said:

Entertainingly written, though.

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Definitely. What's wrong with scathing, caustic reviews so long as they're entertaining? Unless it contains actual lies--all I see here are, at the very most, hyperbole. Speaking of that, I haven't checked Zero Punctuation for a while. Mmm, time for a fix.

Essaliad said:

Definitely. What's wrong with scathing, caustic reviews so long as they're entertaining? Unless it contains actual lies--all I see here are, at the very most, hyperbole. Speaking of that, I haven't checked Zero Punctuation for a while. Mmm, time for a fix.

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Stating that Gothic 3's graphics are on par with Ultima IX is a lie.

That said, I don't really disagree with the review in the sense that G3 Foresaken Gods is not a good game.

But if I were a reviewer of reviews, this review would get an F for lack of professionalism... though journalistic professionalism, especially on the internet, has been somewhat of a contradiction of terms for some time now.

That's 1up. Why are we discussing one of their articles? Did anybody actually expect them to come up with something decent?

Gorath said:

That's 1up. Why are we discussing one of their articles? Did anybody actually expect them to come up with something decent?

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I don't Really have a 'feel' for 1up... I don't really go there unless I see something referenced for them on RPGWatch... but I take if from your comment that their reviews aren't so good...

TheMadGamer said:

Stating that Gothic 3's graphics are on par with Ultima IX is a lie.

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But he doesn't actually say that - he says "it's a third-person RPG with a look and feel similar to Ultima IX" and that "that's just how outdated Gothic 3's engine feels".

I read it as saying the engine feels clunky, which it does. My performance with this is worse than G3 and I have the sort of hitches and slowdowns I had trying to get U9 to run. Yeah, it's hyperbole but he isn't specifically saying "the graphics are on par with U9".

TheMadGamer said:

I don't Really have a 'feel' for 1up... I don't really go there unless I see something referenced for them on RPGWatch... but I take if from your comment that their reviews aren't so good...

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I also only go there every now and then. It took me years (!) to find an article without obvious mistakes.

Dhruin said:

My performance with this is worse than G3 and I have the sort of hitches and slowdowns I had trying to get U9 to run.

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That makes sense ... I know I have to remind myself that the same system that breezes through Crysis and Fallout 3 and everything else has to be tweaked to manage Gothic 3. Two years later, it still performs like crap.

Dhruin said:

But he doesn't actually say that - he says "it's a third-person RPG with a look and feel similar to Ultima IX" and that "that's just how outdated Gothic 3's engine feels".

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You're right.

Still, the overall tone of his review is obnoxious.

Dhruin said:

I read it as saying the engine feels clunky, which it does. My performance with this is worse than G3 and I have the sort of hitches and slowdowns I had trying to get U9 to run. Yeah, it's hyperbole but he isn't specifically saying "the graphics are on par with U9".

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cue Nelson
ah ha

Except for the fact the it was called Ultima 9 and was supposed to be a sequel, I liked everthing else about U9. I liked the game play, the graphics and the music. True, it was not really an Ultima game, but it was a fun RPG experience for me.

TheMadGamer said:

Still, the overall tone of his review is obnoxious.

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What's wrong with that, if the game really is that bad?

I haven't played it myself, nor do I intend to, but I really have heard very few people saying good things about it. Even the people who really want to like it tend to say something along the lines of it being a bug-ridden near-unplayable pile of steaming orc-dung that's a travesty of the greatness inherent in the Gothic series.

If that's true, IMO it's not obnoxious to say so. What's obnoxious is pushing that sort of thing on the market and expecting people to pay for it -- or, for that matter, publications to pay their reviewers to review it, and reviewers waste their time slogging through it and then writing about it.

I used to write game reviews many moons ago, and wrote a few somewhat caustic ones myself. There was this one submarine game, for example, that was entirely done in HyperCard with one-bit graphics, which consisted of hours of doing absolutely nothing while sailing into position, and then getting sunk by a destroyer. If you were really lucky, you might be able to sink a freighter first. Oh, and there was no way to save the game. And it crashed regularly. The only good things I could say about it was that it came with a nice replica of a Nazi U-Boat Commander's Handbook (which I still have) and that the sonar "Pouyoung" sound was really good.

I suppose it could be considered as fitting punishment for anyone who thinks that being a Nazi U-Boat commander is cool, though.

So, caustic reviews are "obnoxious?" Not if the product being reviewed is, itself, obnoxious. I have a feeling that in the case of Gothic 3: Forsaken Expansion this may well be the case.