RPGWatch Feature - Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods Review

I passed on reviewing this - that's how bad it was. Leave aside the decreased performance (which might be fixed by patches - I don't know) but the even the opening cinematic was so bad, I was crushed.

The argument between TNO and Xardas was just ridiculous...from that moment, I could see Trine couldn't write a Gothic game regardless of anything else.

Dhruin said:

I passed on reviewing this - that's how bad it was. Leave aside the decreased performance (which might be fixed by patches - I don't know) but the even the opening cinematic was so bad, I was crushed.

The argument between TNO and Xardas was just ridiculous...from that moment, I could see Trine couldn't write a Gothic game regardless of anything else.

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I had a hard time getting past that, but between my love of the Gothic universe and my obvious tolerance for crappy games I persevered ... it is the saddest gaming experience in quite a while ..

I downloaded this on the day of release but just haven't had the will to play more than a couple of hours. I have little hope that the game will be fixed (the bugs maybe; but the crappy writing/quests? It needs a new game, not a patch); and my hopes are not particularly high for G4.

Once the Community Patch 1.7 comes out for G3 (which promises some pretty great things) I'll probably replay the trilogy; and accept that the story of Nameless ends with G3.

I guys this is the end of the gothic games.

I wonder what effect it will have on the sales of Arcania a gothic tale and on Risen.

I do admit that I expect more form Risen than Arcania

titus said:

I guys this is the end of the gothic games.

I wonder what effect it will have on the sales of Arcania a gothic tale and on Risen.

I do admit that I expect more form Risen than Arcania

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I'm hoping, perhaps naively, that this whole debacle between Jowood and Pyranah Bytes and the Frankenstein of a game that is Foresaken gods will create a great G4 as well as a whole new series in Risen. We can dream anyway.

I also have higher hopes for Risen, PB at least show they can write a decent story & create a believable world, even if their products are fairly buggy. My only concern is that it will be "consolized" with it being produced for X360 as well as PC.

I also have high hopes and no doubt I'll buy both ... hope they turn out well!

I'm with txa on this and I'll buy both and hope they turn out well.

Well now that I think about it I think I'll wait to see if Jowood releases another "I'm sorry" anouncement when the release Gothic 4. How many I'm sorrys do they get before they just become meaningless words. Still can't believe they hired some unknown company from India to make this expansion. Whoever thought that was a good move should be shot on sight or at least fired and then made to play FG over and over again.

I think it would be more mercifull just to shoot him.

Perhaps I'm being unreasonable, but my hopes are with PB to the point that, as for the moment, I am (almost completely) not interested in G4. I may buy G4 if it will get suprisingly high review scores.

It's just that merely "Gothic" in the title is not enough (as the G3 expansion proves), and I think that the Gothic series is over, but Risen will be a game like Gothic - at least that's the message I keep getting from PB, unless I'm misinterpreting something.

I'm hopeful for Risen, the forsaken gods debacle shows that Jowood can fuck up all on their own so hopefully the fault has mostly been with them.

Let's hope both teams learn a key lesson and really, really focus on starting from the ground up with a fundamentally stable engine even if that means being less ambitious.

skavenhorde said:

I'm with txa on this and I'll buy both and hope they turn out well.

Well now that I think about it I think I'll wait ...

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That's probably the best way to go. Just wait. I got Gothic3 at release because Gothic2 was so great. Argh! Even after setting it aside for a long time and then playing it patched was still, well, Argh! I waited on G3:FG and am glad I did.

So fooled me once, shame on you. And I'm not going to get fooled again. Maybe 2 or 3 months after release *IF* the new Gothics are getting glowing reviews I *MIGHT* consider them.

Jowood is reaping what they sowed.

I had a different experience with Gothic 2 and never actually finished it the two times I played it. So I decided to wait to buy Gothic 3 and will wait to buy PB's next Gothic-like game as well.

More and more I prefer to play older games that have been thoroughly patched and/or modded. They're more fun, at least to me.

Benedict said:

I'm hopeful for Risen, the forsaken gods debacle shows that Jowood can fuck up all on their own so hopefully the fault has mostly been with them.

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Not really. Trine Games, the Indian budget studio that developed FG, isn't a part of JW. They did neither get the time nor the funds to develop their own engine for the expansion. Instead they had to deal with the buggy mess of an engine that PB left behind (or to quote Ralf from PB, one of the main issues of the engine other than general instability and poor performance was that the content editors for the game didn't correspond overly well with the engine, thus producing bugs faster than they could fix them).

That does not mean that I believe that Trine could have done much better if they would have had more time and more money but the premise and the odds were really against these guys.
Let's face it: JW knows very well that they have limited time to cash in on the Gothic brand and they are always hurting for cash. So they chose to look for the cheapest way to get a G3 expansion in the least amount of time. Trine was a welcome "victim". Of course Trine knew that they wouldn't really get anywhere in terms of quality given the time and the budget but did JW's money stink? No, it didn't so they gladly accepted it, hoping for the best and taking this unlikely chance to make the best of the impossible mission laid upon their shoulders.

As for PB... their next game will be nearly flawless. They know they fucked up (and admitted it, too) so they'll put an extra effort into making Risen as perfect as possible. What will be more interesting to find out is if a Risen expansion or Risen 2... or 3 will be as flawless as well. A lot of that will depend on Deep Silver's patience. We will just have to wait and see.

Moriendor said:

Not really. Trine Games, the Indian budget studio that developed FG, isn't a part of JW.

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Perhaps I should clarify, I didn't mean that JW themselves made it. I meant that I could sort of see when it was an ongoing JW / PB relationship that there could be faults on both sides - JW & PB agreed a budget & timescale, PB used those to make a buggy product, JW took a poor decision to release anyway but was backed into a financial and logistical corner by PB producing a buggy product etc. I couldn't say for sure which was mostly to blame.

But when PB has left and JW has taken an already incredibly buggy original game very badly received by the market and given it to the cheapest labour they could find and still underfunded them and given them too tight deadlines with too poor quality control and shipped it anyway, I'm ascribing 100% of the blame to JW for poor decisions and blatant profiteering, which makes me think that all along it's been poor management by JW that's been the issue. I mean look how long it took them to get the english language NoTR available, and that was a good product ready for market that PB had done bloody well on!

Plus I think there's a big difference between JW hoping that PB would go the extra mile to produce a good product when it's PB's baby and the staff really care about it, and expecting independent contractors with no attachment to (or even familiarity with) the franchise to go anywhere beyond the very least that they're being paid to do.

Benedict said:

I'm ascribing 100% of the blame to JW for poor decisions and blatant profiteering

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I agree that it was a really retarded idea of them to produce FG the way it was produced. They should have either put real effort into it or none and just skip the idea of an expansion but putting out a second half-assed Gothic game after Gothic 3 was pretty damned stupid. No question about it.

I mean look how long it took them to get the english language NoTR available, and that was a good product ready for market that PB had done bloody well on!

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That wasn't JW's fault but Atari's. Atari had the distribution rights for NotR for North America but for whatever reason chose not to make any use of their rights for a long time. Rumor has it that they didn't want to release a product that would compete with or steal attention from their own D&D CRPG brand products (NWN etc.).

Anyway, if we want to look for proof that JW can indeed fuck up all on their own then we do not need to look further than the Realms of Arkania trilogy re-release in Germany. That was 100% JW's fault. They did a really poor job on that one.
But with G3 and FG I think there is a lot of blame on the developer's side as well which is not even a big secret since both studios openly admitted to doing a poor job on both respective products (in fact there was a really hilarious interview with Trine's studio head that was unfortunately pulled as far as I can remember in which he very openly and blatantly admitted that they just did it for the money).

How does G3 play with the 1.6 community patch? I just tried 1 and 2 from GOG and would like to continue the series...minus forsaken gods of course.

I didn't optimize things *before* installing Forsaken Gods, but I know that the newer patches are definitely better than 'vanilla' G3. But nowhere near as nice as G1 or G2.

xanderhal said:

How does G3 play with the 1.6 community patch? I just tried 1 and 2 from GOG and would like to continue the series...minus forsaken gods of course.

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If you are referring to technical performance you should be ok with a Geforce 7600 or better and 2 gigs of RAM (you'll probably need a better GPU to run high settings smoothly). In terms of gameplay the game is fine if one can stand the mediocre melee combat.

Community Patch 1.7 is around the corner. Better wait a couple of weeks longer before you play G3.