Gothic 3 - Rumor: Gothic 3 Uber-Patch cancelled

I like the new angry Moriendor.

edit: I have no interest in G3, but your post was very informative. Thank you for taking the time to put everything in order and translate everything. The drama surrounding this issue is more fun than most games that come out these days.

roqua said:

I like the new angry Moriendor.

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Haha, you ain't seen nothing yet. The real ANGRY Moriendor can be much worse than all of this pussy talk up there .
But I want to keep my account for a little while longer so need to adapt to the local rules (I mean, look at you, you're not exactly behaving like you are at the Codex on here either ) .

I started here (or at the dot) and got a bunch of warnings before I figured out the fine line I can walk, you know how it goes..when in rome. And this will always be my first and main site. Each site has totally different cultures, and this site is devoid of some of the raging lunatics at the codex that make me have to use bad words. I have the utmpost respect for so many people here that getting banned for something as silly as being too much of an idot is not an option. I can get all (or a good chink) of my idiotness out at the codex in spades.

Dhruin and VD are very similar in a lot of regards, and any post where they are both throwing in their opinion is always a good read. If we could only get Dhruin to start making a game too.

Everyone that posts here and there that use the same handle are always on better behavior here. But thats what makes rpwwatch and rpgcodex different and both communities worth belonging to.

Mo, I didn't find your post angry, rather, I found it thoughtful, concerned and logical. There is never a real need for 'strong' language to express your 'strong' opinions. We like to hear those opinions expressed clearly and objectively. PB is certainly not winning any friends or supporters at the moment. JW lost most of theirs years ago!!

My guess:

PB tries to blackmail Jowood a bit by public opinion:

If you don't pay us - you will not get our patch (programmed in our spare time).

roqua said:

Everyone that posts here and there that use the same handle are always on better behavior here. But thats what makes rpwwatch and rpgcodex different and both communities worth belonging to.

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I don't post at the codex but I do troll around and read some of the threads there if I see a topic that interest me. I don't think I would ever become a member there however because it seems to me that most of the people there are more interested in starting fights and posting links to porn, etc, than actually trying to have intelligent discussions about crpg's.

I think that some of the active members are interested in having intelligent discussing on rpgs while also starting fights and linking to porn. There is a lot of intelligent discussion there, its just less civil than here.

But that is why both are worth being members of, it makes no sense to belong to two communities that provide the same exact culture and perspectives. The more perspectives the better.

But I didn't mean to turn this into a thread about sites, just mentioning Moriendor has changed from the dot days.

Thanks for that detailed post, Mo. You should work for a games news site or something...

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.

Hey, Mo working for a gaming news site!! What a wonderful idea!!

Only problem, is then he wouldn't be able to 'express' himself without fear or favour!!

Unless he starts one himself with the slogan "Moriendors news on gaming, from a subjective perspective".

People jumping to conclusions. Typical. The only problem here is the apparent problems between PB and JoWood that they cannot talk about and the fact that they can't disclose any real information about their projects or current activities. The rest is all guess work. They seem to have worked themselves into a nice corner they are having a hard time getting out of.

I still believe in the dedication of the PB team to deliver on their promises and fix the game up with a (free, non-addon) patch, with or without JoWood. And for what it matters, I also believe the game to be fully playable as it is, even if I haven't finished it yet.

Maylander said:

Staves are not bugged, you can block magic attacks with a staff just like melee attacks with a shield.
.

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Not bugged ?!. when a fireball from a goblin hits me it drains all my mana and almost all my life. Not blocking instead gets me a 1/4th of my life damage only...

Maylander said:

Like I've said previously. All games have tons of cut content, PB just made the misstake of not removing the traces.

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Thats why we call them missing skills. Or was it too much to remove the icons..
oh and perhaps not allowing you to actually train them ingame !

Maylander said:

NPCs dying? The current state of the NPCs that travel with you is "overpowered" to say the least. They don't do any damage at all, but they can tank a dozen orcs without much effort. Heal them with "Heal Other" once in a while and there is no way they can die unless you let them fight alone. Their low damage will eventually get them killed..

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And that is fine with you ?! you just touched on my main issue with the game as
I was saying... The balance and the half baked solutions they came up. I never
complained that the game was tough (and I am playing on hard). When an NPC died on me I reload. when I get stunlocked by a wolf I reload... But when I see
an NPC hold off 5 snappers for 5 minutes (each snapper did about 1 hp dmg)
and one snapper one offs me and at the same time I can finish him off (the npc)
in about 10 secs then that just kills my suspension of disbelief and not having
fun anymore means that all the other little things start to stand out...

For me one of the greatest strength of the series was the believability of the
world. things made sense and that made them all the more immersive. They
killed that in G3 in a lot of different ways...

Look I blatantly admit of being a Gothic series fanboy. G1 is perhaps my
favorite game. But I wish to be respected as a customer and this charade of the
last few days does smart a bit after our positive stance and our patience all
these months.

I don't get hit for magic damage when blocking. Maybe you do, but I don't. I block it just like I do attacks, but you need endurance/mana to do so. Also, the ? skill, improved armor and fire magician are not in the game at all, not even trainable. Only poison and improved robes are actually bugged.

Truth be told, G1/2 were better games, but very different. G3 is a huge, freeroaming RPG, and in all such games you'll experience serious balancing issues, due to the fact that it's impossible to properly balance a game where you can finish the main quest after 10 hours or after 100. In one way or another, you'll be more or less powerful compared to your sorroundings. Don't even get me started on Oblivions solution.

It is an issue though, I agree, and I wish I had an answer on how to solve it, but I simply don't. If you make truly non-linear games you'll experience balancing issues, that's one of the prices to pay. 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.

Maylander, you seem to have changed your tone over the course of the thread, which is good. I think that most people will agree that Gothic 3 was released in a state that we'd call 'shameful'.

By the time it hit the US it was just 'somewhat buggy', and now it is 'decent, but not very polished'. What that actually means varies by person. Most hardcore gamers can play it and enjoy it despite admitting to warts. Myself, I really like it but it is still one patch away from where I'd recommend it to non-hardcore folks. That is my disappointment.

Aside from all the other bugs, I think PB's biggest mistake was their complete failure to optimize the game for machines with 1 GB of RAM. For a long time, 1GB was the standard amount of memory that came with new PCs, and it was the most common memory configuration at the time of G3's release.
The first warning flag I came across was when I saw 1.5GB of RAM listed under recommended system requirements. Who the heck has 1.5GB in their machine anyway? Of course, we all know about the stutterfest that ensues when you try to play the game on 1 gig (even with the latest patch).

The performance of the engine (given enough memory) actually isn't that bad. On an older system (Athlon 64 3000 1.8GHz, Nvidia 6600GT) I was getting over 20fps at medium settings and it felt quite smooth WHEN it wasn't swapping from the
page file. Every time I saw my disk access light blink, the fps would drop to 2, then after a couple of seconds it would go back up to 20+. The stuttering was far too frequent to make the game enjoyable. Upgrading to 2GB solves the problem, but every other game I had on my computer at the time ran just fine on 1GB of memory without ever eating into the page file. Should the customer really be expected to shell out another $100 in addition to the price of the game just to be able to play Gothic 3 (not to speak of the various issues certain motherboards have with 4 memory modules)? I imagine a lot of people just mistakenly assumed their CPU or Graphics Card was too slow and uninstalled the game.

Two Worlds is a good counter example. Reality Pump is also a relatively small developer that developed its own engine from scratch. Unlike G3 and Oblivion they didn't even use Speedtree, but developed their own in house tools for generating vegetation. Sure, TW has some clipping errors and collision detection problems as well, but as has been copiously reported, the game runs smoothly even on older systems with minimal memory, and load times are virtually non-existent compared to G3.

Sorry for the off topic rant, but since we're into G3 bashing, I had to get that off my chest.

Maylander said:

And another thing, people do not fall through the world anymore, nor do they die easily.

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Could you please tell my copy of Gothic 3 this? I have several people (and animals) that are underground in my current, fully patched game. I can't complete several quests because of this. Of course a patch won't even help this now.

JonNik said:

But when I see an NPC hold off 5 snappers for 5 minutes (each snapper did about 1 hp dmg) and one snapper one offs me and at the same time I can finish him off (the npc) in about 10 secs then that just kills my suspension of disbelief and not having fun anymore means that all the other little things start to stand out...

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Yeah, that's just laughable. It's like when they fight each other they use nerf swords or something. It leads to weird, contrived tactics for the PC, too.

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".

Lets hope PB can keep their word and release it. In my experience they have been pretty good at doing so. They just take an *incredibly* long time to do it (Maybe through no fault of their own. *cough* JoWood *cough*).

Maylander said:

Truth be told, G1/2 were better games, but very different. G3 is a huge, freeroaming RPG, and in all such games you'll experience serious balancing issues, due to the fact that it's impossible to properly balance a game where you can finish the main quest after 10 hours or after 100. In one way or another, you'll be more or less powerful compared to your sorroundings. Don't even get me started on Oblivions solution.

It is an issue though, I agree, and I wish I had an answer on how to solve it, but I simply don't. If you make truly non-linear games you'll experience balancing issues, that's one of the prices to pay. 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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And yet Morrowind managed this quite fine.

Originally Posted by CrazyIvan (Johann Ertl)
http://forum.jowood.de/showpost.php?p=2069542&postcount=3433

Werte Fans, Spieler, Forenleser,

natürlich haben auch wir die Spekulationen und Gerüchte gelesen, die eine Einstellung des Patch-Supportes für Gothic 3 in den Raum stellen. Wir wollen hier unmissverständlich klar stellen, dass dies soweit es JoWooD angeht natürlich nur pure Spekulation ist und wir ein solches "Canceln des Supports" bzw. "Verzicht auf weitere Patch(es)" weder planen, noch ohne Konsequenzen in Kauf nehmen würden.

Wir bitten um Verständnis, dass während laufender Verhandlungen zwischen zweier Unternehmen keine der Firmen über deren Verlauf öffentlich sprechen kann / darf, aber dies sollte natürlich nichts mit dem Patch für Gothic 3 zu tun haben.

Im Gegenteil, wir werden alles daran setzen dass endlich wieder qualitativ höchstmögliche und natürlich kostenlose Patches für euch zur Verfügung stehen.
Euer JoWooD Team

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1.) Jowood wants the patch
2.) The patch is a subject of negotiations between Jowood and PB

My conclusion / speculation:
PB uses the patch as leverage against Jowood to get money.
Maybe the patch is finished already !