Gothic 3 Worth Playing?

darklord

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Hey Guys,

Is Gothic 3 worth playing yet, or is it better to wait for another patch? My copy hasn't turned up yet, and I'm in two minds whever to save it for a while when it does.

Anyone know when the next patch is due?

Cheers,

Daniel.
 
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Hey Guys,

Is Gothic 3 worth playing yet, or is it better to wait for another patch?

In my opinion, it is worth looking at just to know that you should wait for a patch that fixes balancing. I stopped playing it for now, since the issues ruin an otherwise great experience.
 
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I'm still enjoying it and avoiding the pigs!! I just hope the next patch doesn't invalidate my save games as that always REALLY annoys me!!
 
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I think Gothic 3 is worth playing as it is right now. (Don't have time to wait anyway).

The problem with gothic i have is that i think the fighting can be tedious sometimes.

Have had one crash since i installed it friday. No crash bugs and not anything else than the usually frustratning gothic feeling, which tends to be a incredible satisfaction when you accomplish something.

Am in an interesting part of game right know and wish that more people play it! :)
 
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If you have no problems waiting untill the next patch I'd wait if I were you. I believe the next patch will resolve enough bugs and issues to make the game quite a bit better, so it would give you a much better impression. For instance, the next patch will update the AI, so the weird situations many experience now might be gone.

Still, I'm loving the game now and will untill and after the next patch comes, so the issues aren't big enough to stop the fun. I just hope savegame corruption and so on will end in the next patch, as that will reduce the risk of being extremely frustrated.
 
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Ah nice one hmm, well I've got an extra gb of Ram turning up tommorow, so I may have a peek then, I hear it'll struggle with just 1gb.

Hmm then I have the fun of getting it running smoothly at 1680 x 1050! ;-)

Daniel.
 
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I have a 2gig, GeForce 7800GT, amd 3500 computer and it still doesn't run smooth at the highest settings unless I tweak it a bit. Just follow some tips in the tweak thread and it should be smooth as a babys bottom. :)
 
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That depends on how patient you are.

(1) Yes, there's a great game underneath there, no doubt about it. If you liked Gothic 1 and 2, you'll feel right at home with 3.

(2) Yes, it's still very rough around the edges. I get intermittent freezes -- just infrequent enough that I forget to save, but not so infrequent that I can safely ignore them, as well as stuff that appear to be scripting issues (e.g. I'm pretty certain I completed a fairly straightforward "kill some monsters" quest objective, but the game didn't register it).

There are also some what I'd call "moderate" balancing issues, at least at low levels (which is where I still am). For example, if you get jumped by a bloodfly, you'll be dead in about three seconds flat (I counted); OTOH you can run faster than a wolf, which means that with patience, room to back into, and lots of arrows you can end up killing just about anything (so far anyway).

So, the end-all be-all of fantasy action CRPG's it obviously isn't, but it looks like a very worthy successor to Gothic 2. I'm certainly enjoying it much more than I ever enjoyed That Other Big Open-Ended CRPG, warts and all.

But yes, you might want to hold out for one more patch. And even so, be prepared to do some tweaking around your system; I had to install a couple of drivers from AMD to keep it from crashing every minute or so.
 
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I agree, even without patches it beats The Big O, but it certainly has potential to be even better with patches that solves:
- Bad AI, both enemy and allies
- Several technical issues and bugs
- A bit of balancing. Sure, bloodflies, boars and such are no problem if you use ranged attack or a long 2h weapon, but for 1h combat they require more skill to beat at a low level than most creatures do at higher levels.
 
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That depends on how patient you are.

(But yes, you might want to hold out for one more patch. And even so, be prepared to do some tweaking around your system; I had to install a couple of drivers from AMD to keep it from crashing every minute or so.

What drivers did you install?

Anyone got any idea when the next patch is due?

Daniel.
 
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Anyone got any idea when the next patch is due?

There hasn't been any official word on the next patch since the game was released which I find very disappointing. They could really take the 5 or 10 minutes out of their busy schedule and just make a simple statement about the state of the game and to give us an ETA regarding the next patch.
Also, I believe that it would be only fair if they would offer a hotfix ASAP for the save game corruption bug and for the wildlife AI (toning down of the insane speed attacks at the very least). The latter is just a gameplay issue that's bothering a lot of people. They should've had that patch/hotfix ready this week IMHO.
I'm very disappointed in PB. They used to be more caring about their customers but it looks like they are suffering the same fate as Bethesda where success was followed by arrogance and ignorance *sigh*.
 
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Also, I believe that it would be only fair if they would offer a hotfix ASAP for the save game corruption bug and for the wildlife AI (toning down of the insane speed attacks at the very least). The latter is just a gameplay issue that's bothering a lot of people. They should've had that patch/hotfix ready this week IMHO.

I agree with that...

I'm very disappointed in PB. They used to be more caring about their customers but it looks like they are suffering the same fate as Bethesda where success was followed by arrogance and ignorance *sigh*.

But this judgement seems a bit hasty to me. I think in the Last 2 months they
were severely overworked, "whipped" on by a publisher anxious to get some
market penetration before the holidays (and present some good results for the
end of the Fiscal quarter). I doubt that the game in this state is what they had
in mind to release. Why squander 3 1/2 years of hard work just to avoid 1-2
months of bugfixing and playtesting... ? I am sure that they are working on the
various issues right now and they cant be having a very good time of it. But if
they wanted to take some time off after the release I would understand that too
despite all my whining for a speedy patch in every post I make ;)

Or perhaps its just programmer empathy/sympathy I feel :)
 
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I also disagree :p

Bethesda can't be accused of arrogance and ignorance - just look at their past games for examples of bug-ridden experiences. However Oblivion is by far the most polished and bug free product they've ever produced. Of course it's not perfect, but G3 suffers from the same thing - it's just so darn ambitious. If you have twice the content you probably need four times the testing to get to the same level of polish.

Market penetration before christmas is hugely important for publishers - Oblivion only got away with delaying a planned release at a similar time of year last year because they publish their own work. Very few developers have that luxury.

However, now that the cash is returning to the publishers the developers will have the freedom to work on polishing up the game experience. I'm afraid that's always going to be the way to a certain extent, unless we are willing to start paying in full for games a few months before they're released.
 
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The lack of information about the next patch is the real problem. If I knew how much time there is to wait, I would probably hang in there and make an effort to control myself until it's released. But it could be months before that happens! In a most likely scenario(from my point of view), the next patch will be released a week prior to NA edition, which is due on 20th November! That's a lot of days, hours, minutes to stare at my Gothic 3 DVD collecting dust on the shelf, instead of playing it.
 
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Better than paying for it and having an empty slot on your shelf because you got screwed by the retailer :(

Can I have yours in the mean time? :p
 
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I agree with the comments regarding Oblivion but what I was talking about was communication. Where were Pete Hines or Todd Howard after the game was released? Their names popped up all over the web before the game's release as they gave hundreds of interviews, diaries, videos, presentations etc. and then when the game was out, they all disappeared all of a sudden. To me this always leaves the impression of them grabbing the cash hastily and going 'kthxbye' ;) .
It would have been nice of them to just make a simple statement about the known quest and gameplay bugs to let people know if/when to expect a patch. To top it off, they released crap like the horse armor mod before any patches or before even a statement about an upcoming patch.

Kind of the same with JoWood/PB. JoWood Producer Michael Paeck and PB's Kai Rosenkranz were very active in the media and in communicating with the public and the fans before the game's release, obviously to advertise for the game and to boost sales. Where are they now? This makes them look pretty bad IMHO. Not saying a single thing about a game that very many people are not happy with in its current state is like saying 'Thanks for the cash and STFU'. This is a case where silence is worse than anything else they could say or do.

Oh, and regarding the "early" release date, well, I think we've been through this a few times already back at the Dot but here we go again.
There's an interview at WoG where Kai Rosenkranz of PB pretty much accepts full responsibility because of the way that PB is working (putting together all separately developed game systems at the very last minute).
The release date was not imposed or forced upon them by JoWood. PB got several extensions in the past already and Kai Rosenkranz said in that interview that they were very happy to have JoWood as a publisher because any one of the larger publishers probably would have forced them to make cuts and to release the game a lot earlier even (KotOR 2 anyone?).

Nah. This is not a case of rushing the product to market. The release date was decided upon cooperatively by JoWood and PB. From everything that is known from official sources, it looks like it's PB who screwed up because they didn't manage to deliver any ready-for-testing builds (release candidates) when the testing was scheduled. Instead they sent new builds to JoWood "every other day" according to that interview (you know, like "OK, we're done, this build is it"... two days later... "no wait... check this one"... another two days later... "gaaahh dammit... no this one is really the final one now"... another two days later... and so on...).
 
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Well I have been Lurking in rpgdot since late 2001 but there are periods
I took a break from it (more often than not lately), so I missed that one...

Hmm if this is not a case of obligatory sucking up to the publisher-PR
(and by the way Moriendor puts it it seems there is actually something
there)... Well what can I say... They are still only semi-professional in
the way they work it seems...

Anyway, Totally agree on the need for some news . Even a rough estimate
would be greatly appreciated and would indeed show goodwill to the community...

P.S I wonder if any of the Devs will pop up around here as they did sometimes
on the Dot...
 
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G3 is definitely worth playing. I played through Gothic 1 and then G2 Gold for the first time over the past few months (and I browsed the old Gothic forums extensively to deal with all the weird problems that cropped up in those two games) and I feel extremely lucky that Gothic 3 should come out a mere month after I first finished playing those amazing games, both of which, despite a fair amount of bugginess, are the most entertaining rpgs I've seen. I received my copy of Gothic 3 from the UK a few days ago and, after experiencing some of the issues that have been mentioned (mainly the potentially epileptic-fit inducing white flashing and the occasional game freeze) I changed a few graphics settings based on info in the Gothic tweaks thread on this forum (many thanks to you tech savvy folk!) and now it looks beautiful and both the flashing and the freezing seem to have stopped. I think I'm going to invest in some more RAM to make it even better, which is probably a good idea in general since so many newer games are demanding more resources. As far as game play, there's a bunch of issues: I agree that the boars are a bit too tough, and getting "stunlocked" by them (or anything) is no fun at all, but I finally managed to kill a couple of them with arrows and then a few slashes of the blade as they closed in on me, and I was only level 6 in leather armor without any skillpoints trained. I was kind of upset at first by the fact that there is only jumping and no climbing, and that there were so many generic NPC's around who don't even look at you when they're talking to you, and that the orcs look different... oh, and I miss the old style lock picking as well (but not that much, since that was a sort of love/hate thing for me). The voices were also a bit disconcerting at first; I mean, I was upset by the switch in Diego's voice between the first two games, and now the hero has a different voice as well?!? and he seems to have gotten a haircut while on the boat... waaaah! I also feel strange using the mouse so much, I got really used to the old combat controls and I miss them as well. All that nit-picking aside, it's beautiful and lots of fun, and I'm really jonesing to get out of work and go play it some more. I've got 70 skill points to spend!
 
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