Gothic 3 - Review @GamingExcellence

GamingExcellence has just published their review of Gothic 3, giving it an above average score of 6.6. They sighted the visuals and audio as the game's high points, while sighting the presentation as its lowest:

The stuttering gameplay makes this game feel unfinished, not to mention the extreme presence of bugs. The interface, save for the questlog, is much improved over previous iterations though, as is the control scheme.

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A honest review.

To get anywhere in the cities, you’ll need to build up reputation within them, and so you need to complete quests given to you. Unfortunately, this leads to something of a ‘city-grind’. You’ll enter a city, find everybody with quests, go complete said quests, and gain access to the head honcho/inner sanctum/council of leaders/whatever. Whenever you run into a new city, it feels like you’re doing the same thing over again.

As much as I'm enjoying G3, the above statement is true. RPGs should avoid this type of repetetive structure. It reminds of the process of obtaining the sigils in Ultima IX - Go to town xyz followed up with complete dungeon XYZ. It's interesting once or twice but then gets really repetetive.

having not played G3 yet (i'm holding off 'til the next patch in the unrealistic hope that they might do something about the randomised chests in addition to bug fixes) i'm not really in a position to comment but would this possibly suggest that G3 suffers from having too many cities thereby not being able to full "flesh out" any of them?

in this respect would G3 have been better served if quests and such were concentrated in a single major city per realm with the rest merely providing a few side quests/trainers etc unless linked to more important quests from the major city?

again i must reiterate that i've yet to play G3 (bar installing it once and getting to reddock to make sure it works) so i've yet to have an opinion either way but i was curious to see how others feel

oh and apologies if something like this has been asked before as i really haven't been keeping much of an eye open

The point that needs to be made, is that while the overall structure is the same, (build up rep in each city), the quests needed to do this are varied and often interesting/fun!! OR, you can skip building your rep at all with the consequences that follow from that line of gameplay!!

Yes, I enjoyed doing the quest for each city, its what gave the game variety and depth.

I haven't played past Reddock yet (I only just finished Gothic 2 and on top of that, I'm trying to wait for the next patch ), but I thought Reddock was fun, what with the captured paladin, etc. If every city has details and small stories like that, then I'm not too worried about repetitiveness.

I agree with Corwin, most of the quests given in each city are fun a vary greatly. Sure, there are some similar quests but when comparing with most other RPGs, the variety is quite impressing.

To me even when they are similar as when certian areas might need help recruiting, it makes perfect sence, during a time of war/rebelion and as always there would be people whom want recruitment stop.
Thats one the nice things about Gothic is the quest are relative, even if the premise is the same as long as it fits with story and they always change the details it keeps it fresh.

Once I understood what was going on, I did decide to go looking for all the Teleporter Stones since they were such an intrcate part of moblity.

Yep, first thing I did was collect all the stones!!

Montera & its surroundings were the best to me. It felt like that area was the most complete and for that brief stretch of gaming I felt like Gothic III was as good as G1 and G2.