Please post any news regarding patch #3 here.

Current staff is about 20 persons - all but of one doing active development (designers, programmers, scripters, artists…).

http://www.pluto13.de/index.php?navtarget=2&lang=en

Originally Posted by SlamDunk
http://www.pluto13.de/index.php?navtarget=2&lang=en

I had 12 or 15 in mind but thought it wasn't right since I couldn't remember where I had seen that number.

I heard somewhere that Bethsoft were something like 100 souls under the roof.

I know it sounds crazy but I really think I've seen it somewhere…
Am I wrong?

Patch 3 has just been released.
It a small (all the other patches are included too) patch to fix the memory leak problem that caused corruption of save files on certain systems.

It appears that with 1.09 a new bug appeared concerning the "tief-unscharfe". I have no idea how to translate the word in english.
So unless you really need it, you might want to consider skipping this mini-patch.

Originally Posted by enodenroH
I heard somewhere, maybe in one of their prelaunch video's… I remember something like 100 souls under the roof.

Uhh, no. 20 is correct.

Tiefenunschärfe = Depth of Field (DoF) - highest postprocessing setting

some players have problems with this setting after patch 1.09.

Wow… I was really expecting more out of patch 3. I suppose now would be a good time to ask if my expectations are realistic. Will there be additional patches and content releases, or will PB simply flatten the major bugs and more on?

Originally Posted by txa1265
I don't know about that - I look at a game like Bloodlines. It sold the worst of all Troika games, in part because the Vampire subject makes it non-mainstream, but also because of Troika's rep for buggy games. So people waited, and heard of bugs including the infamous boat-crash. And Troika died …

Well, my opinion about buggy games is this :

If you know that you're about to sell an unfinished product, don't do it.
Polish it. You'll make followers and not loathers.

I never will be able to finish TOEE because of a recurring bug.
I am bitter towards them… Nonetheless, their game had a little -Je ne sais quoi…
It was fun while it lasted…

Originally Posted by lostnumber
Wow… I was really expecting more out of patch 3. I suppose now would be a good time to ask if my expectations are realistic. Will there be additional patches and content releases, or will PB simply flatten the major bugs and more on?

I thought getting all the major bugs out of Gothic 3 was the priority for most of the guys here. What do you expect? New cities and NPC's every month? If this patch really does fix the memory leak bug, I'm pretty sure a lot of people will be very happy about this because I've seen them going crazy from the crashes and savegame corruptions on these forums. Anyway, I'm sure that this is just an interim patch and that they'll tweak and balance a lot more in upcoming patched. At least, they said they'd look at melee combat and a few other balancing things.

Polishing games is probably very hard because the resources are so limited. Limited resources means more effort put into one feature = less resources for other features or less features.
IMHO a 30-40 hour long, carefully polished RPG would sell better than a 100 hour long raw diamond. But how do want to convince developers to cut things out?

Smartheap was an A-bug and many people especially on the german forums were demanding it cause they had a hard time playing with this bug.
I think it´s only normal that PB fixes the really serious bugs first before even thinking about some extra-content.

Remember they proabably will still have Patch 4 or a more fully developed Patch 3 at or close to US launch.

Isn't actually the patch #3 already out there? (1.09)

Please forgive my selfish whining; I understand the need to abate the major problems before moving on to content and tweaking. As far as deciding what should be kept vs. cut goes I would argue that building upon the “polishing” theory would be best. I don’t have any game design know-how; but from my experience there are some elements to game design that matter much more than others. Obviously first and foremost, having a game that is not technically flawed is paramount to success.

To illustrate, it is widely known that warranty - or in this case warranty like - issues are directly related to future lost sales. In the manufacturing industry it has even been found that $1 in warranty issues can be seen as $24 in future lost sales (Managerial Accounting - Garrison Noreen Brewer ?pg.) Let’s assume that casual gamer Joe buys this game and tosses it because of the bugs, he doesn't know a damn thing about ini tweaking or memory leak issues or even patching for that matter. He just wants to play a game without worrying about fixing it. He is so upset with the game and realizes that there are many other great games to play that he resells Gothic 3 to a game shop for $10 and tells all of his buddies how much the game "sucks man!". We could easily consider this to be a $40 warranty issue, Joe's cost less his profit on the sale. If the trend in the manufacturing industry were mirrored in the PC game industry this sale of a poorly produced G3 presents the publisher with a $960 loss in future sales. Now let’s consider that single sale on a much larger scale. If 1,500 people do the same damn thing that Joe did, we have a new loss of about 1,440,000. The idea of nearly $1.5 mil in future lost sales due to publishing a poorly polished game should get someone's attention.

I know that this is an over simplification of a very complex industry and production/distribution process. I know that there are many ways to cover up a bomb, and that the figures stated above are purely speculation. Nevertheless, selling low quality products is never a good idea; nobody needs a degree or business experience to know that. When combining this warranty idea with the knowledge of how this series came to be what it is it becomes clear that the “polishing” theory is by all means a solid foundation for producing and publishing a game. Gothic 1 was much smaller, but as far as I am concerned it was much more fun. I’ve said it once and I say it again; if Gothic 3 took the place of Gothic 1 the series’ popularity would be nothing like it is today.

Personally, I think that valve is on to something with steam. I think that parallel development coupled with episodic content release is the future of PC gaming. Bypassing publishers has a great potential to increase the bottom line. Furthermore, the sale of episodic content is a great means for providing production capital to be used for the next big hit, and for keeping the market interested in a product line.

There, that's easier on the eyes.

I just ordered Gothic 3 and am expecting it any day now. I'd like to download all the patches for it now (before the game is here) so I can just install them immediately after I install the game without spending a lot of time downloading them first. Anyway, do I need to download all three (there are currently three of them, right?) of the currently released patches or only the latest patch? I'll rephrase the question: does the latest patch include all the patches before it or is it completely different, only meant to be installed after all previous patches have been installed?

Usually this information is provided at the site that hosts the patch, but I don't see it anywhere so that's why I'm asking here. Thanks!

Your selfish-whining is forgiveable, your lack of paragraphs less so

It's a careful balance between sales lost due to buggy reputation and sales lost due to missing an important shopping period or through falling behind the competition.

Take Morrowind as an example. Daggerfall (the second game in the series) was buggier than a bug-invested bug thing. And I mean really badly buggy - far worse than any Gothic game. However, one of the key design changes for Morrowind was a completely new design process that Todd brought in specifically to address the issue. TES could have lived or died due to the state of polish in the next release. Morrowind took an age to develop, and it was delayed repeatedly. But when it came out it was a vast improvement on the previous games.

Of course it still had bugs, but the reputation for buggy games was more or less dispelled in just one release. Oblivion isn't perfect, but the sales on day one showed the confidence that people had in the polish of the product (and to my eyes, it's still very polished). The difference wasn't that Oblivion was delayed repeatedly (it had some delays, but nothing outside of expectations), but that it was worked from the start with a careful design procedure to minimise bug problems.

Gothic games don't seem to have nailed that aspect yet - I would guess it takes a very fundamental change in the design process of games that smaller studios can't implement easily (they might be used to their way of designing games). However, they are showing that they can address the most important issues very quickly. No matter how much internal bug testing you do, you can never catch everything. The save bug is a major problem for a lot of people and it would cause more upset if the fix was held up just to wait for more things to be included in a patch to make it seem like a meatier patch.

Finally I do agree that the cash flow of episodic (or subscription based) games makes things far easier for developers and publishers alike.

Originally Posted by SirDeity
I just ordered Gothic 3 and am expecting it any day now. I'd like to download all the patches for it now (before the game is here) so I can just install them immediately after I install the game without spending a lot of time downloading them first. Anyway, do I need to download all three (there are currently three of them, right?) of the currently released patches or only the latest patch? I'll rephrase the question: does the latest patch include all the patches before it or is it completely different, only meant to be installed after all previous patches have been installed?

Usually this information is provided at the site that hosts the patch, but I don't see it anywhere so that's why I'm asking here. Thanks!

It should include them all, but there were some mutterings on other forums that it didn't (may have been based on a beta patch, I'm not sure).

To be certain, download+apply patch 2 (which definitely *does* include patch 1 as well) and then apply patch 3.

Originally Posted by kalniel
Your selfish-whining is forgiveable, your lack of paragraphs less so

Sad but true … at least he uses case an punctuation …

Originally Posted by kalniel
To be certain, download+apply patch 2 (which definitely *does* include patch 1 as well) and then apply patch 3.

Patch #2 is patch v1.08 and patch #3 is v1.09, correct?

(I wish I could read in german )

Correct, sorry for not being clearer!

I'm pretty sure 1.09 will include 1.08 (which definitely includes 1.07) though.

Thats right, you only need 1.09, it includes all the previous fixes.

I think a major trend toward quantity at the expense of quality is exacerbating the problem with buggy releases, especially in the case of smaller development houses like PB. It seems a major selling point strategy of cRPG's these days is the content volume, touted in # of quests, square miles of world, and hours it would take to play through it all. While these are useful measurements of a games breadth, they seem to be more and more important in communicating the value the consumer should expect to get from purchasing the game. Obviously, this approach is serioulsy flawed. As I'm sure many would agree, I'd trade 600 quests that have very little variety or memorable characteristics for 100 well designed, interesting and challenging quests any day. Likewise, I'd be willing to give up a few square miles of world for more fleshed out NPC's and more impressive monster AI.