Gothic 3 - Retrospective Review

sHuRuLuNi looks back at Gothic 3:

Gothic 3 - Uneducated Review - 13 years later

A review of an RPG Legend, which was shunned at release, but with the help of the community turned into a jewel. Check my Uneducated Review of this Retro Masterpiece!

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More information.

I agree with virtually all of what he said. G3 highly under rated and unappreciated. The only part I didn't like was the snowy region, largely because of the climate. I don't like the cold and snow; same with Skyrim's cold areas. I'm a forest and desert guy.
I usually play sort of a stealth/ranger type using bows and ranged weapons, so G3 and Skyrim were great fun for me with that build. Once I got going, I was lethal.

For its time an attractive game, thoroughly involving with decisions which had consequences and really seemed to matter.
I go back to it every few years and play through it again.
The main region was great, the snow region a bit confusing and the desert region, though evocative and beautiful, rather too much of a walking simulator at times.
Agree with virtually all the vid creator has to say; always nice to hear from someone with passion for a game such as this, particularly as it was so maligned at its launch.
If you haven't played it yet then download the Community Patch and give it a go!

Gothic 1 and 2 are up there between my most beloved games of all times. Second Gothic might even be my most replayed game, although cant say it for sure. With this history I was EXTREMELY HYPED for third game.

I played it on day one and my Gothic fanboyism was so strong it allowed me disregard the poor technical state, empty parts of too large world and other clear signs of unfinished product. This sentiment was not endless and hour by hour this unpleasant feeling "this is not the Gothic game I was hoping for" was growing on me. Untill today I remember the moment, when after epic journey of many hours I finally located Xardas.
And he said something like two sentences to me. I was extremely disappointed at that moment. After that, although I finished the game I was not surprised there were just few rows of text instead of outro.

Although the game improved massively since then, especially thanks to community patches and mods, this disappointment and bad feeling remains in me when thinking about Gothic 3. So, yeah ... my few cents ...

Andrew23 said:

I played it on day one and my Gothic fanboyism was so strong it allowed me disregard the poor technical state, empty parts of too large world and other clear signs of unfinished product.

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Gothic 1 & 2 were largely panned by the American online and print press (and when I say online press, what I mean is college dropouts with poor writing skills and an inability to focus on anything for more than a few minutes).

Remembering back, I too was put off by the first Gothic game because of the wonky keyboard controls. My first son was born at this time, my patience and energy were constantly taxed.

Right around the time G2 came out, I decided to give G1 a real chance. Within a few hours I discovered two things. First, the keyboard controls for G1 though counter intuitive, are quite brilliant actually. Second, I reaffirmed that the American online press is to be considered dubious at best.

If I had to compress my thoughts into a few pithy sentences as to why I believe those two games are so good it would be these: The game is hard. The game rewards exploration. Getting good gear and becoming powerful isn't quick, but as you grow in power, it is very satisfying. Many quest objectives aren't clear when you get them, they make you think, explore, and talk to a lot of NPCs before you understand what exactly it is you are to do.

Yep, the graphics aren't great. The controls aren't great (well, they are but you have to be the type of person to stick with something for more than a few minutes before passing judgement), the game is hard and slow to reward. On the other hand, there have been plenty of AAA games with huge teams spending 10s of millions with incredible graphics and animation that essentially make cRPGs which auto-play themselves and declare you "super-awesome-unstoppable-hero" within the first 3 minutes.

This retrospective actually made me reinstall G3 and play for a little while today. Unfortunately, it only confirmed what I already knew - that it's still a very flawed game that no amount of patching will ever fully fix.

While the game runs decently (there's finally no stuttering or hitching after all these years!), the combat is still terrible imo. There's no sense of impact whatsoever during melee combat, and you can still win by simply spamming the fast attack. NPCs still can't do any significant damage to enemies, so you have to pretty much kill eveything yourself during the group battles.

Also, the view distance for entities, objects, and foliage is still very limited even when set to the highest levels.

It's not a bad game, but I don't think it's a very good one either, and this is coming from a Piranha Bytes fanboy.

It just has the distinction of being the worse of the three Gothic games. Then again, the worse Piranha Bytes game is head and shoulders above most other so-called triple A products. In and of itself, the game is playable and fun, but when you compare it to the previous games in the series, it just fails.

TheMadGamer said:

Remembering back, I too was put off by the first Gothic game because of the wonky keyboard controls. My first son was born at this time, my patience and energy were constantly taxed.

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Not sure how it was in other countries, but here, being neighbours to Germany, the game release was very anticipated. At DE it was released months before and it was success, so we had quite a lot of previews and I bought it on day 1, already hyped, actually.

Because of that I already knew that developer attempted new combat gameplay mechanism. Gaining levels in combat was supposed to impact how you really handle weapons in game. In reality it wasnt nearly as huge thing as it was in my imagination before release, but I actually expected that at beginning my combat skills will suck and I have to level it. That probably helped overcome initial surprise about weird controls.

I suppose people didnt properly study manuals already in 2001 .

from another forum

Andrew23 said:

Not sure how it was in other countries, but here, being neighbours to Germany, the game release was very anticipated. At DE it was released months before and it was success, so we had quite a lot of previews and I bought it on day 1, already hyped, actually.

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My introduction to G1 was the polar opposite from you. I lived in CA at the time. Walked into my local CompUSA (a popular computer store back then) and saw the box on the shelf. Picked up the box, read everything and decided to buy it right then and there never having heard of it prior.

A few days later I installed the game and tried it out. I remember having a heck of a time with the controls and was constantly pulled away to take care of baby and whatnot. Had it not been for baby I probably would have pushed through the first attempt and discovered I loved the game but I ended up forgetting about the game until I started hearing about G2. It was then that I decided to try G1 out again and the rest is history.

Andrew23 said:

Because of that I already knew that developer attempted new combat gameplay mechanism. Gaining levels in combat was supposed to impact how you really handle weapons in game. In reality it wasnt nearly as huge thing as it was in my imagination before release, but I actually expected that at beginning my combat skills will suck and I have to level it. That probably helped overcome initial surprise about weird controls. I suppose people didnt properly study manuals already in 2001 .

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I'm a big fan of games that really force you to scrounge and struggle. For that reason, I find the early stages of CRPGs to be fun because everything matters. I'm very much a fan of mechanics where as you gain levels and increase skills your abilities improve (but suck when you first start out). This kind of thing doesn't scare me off, I embrace it actually. Though combat in G1 and G2 is a bit wonky, you really do notice the improvement as you increase your skills, animations become smoother, you hit harder, and so on.

And by the way, of course I read the game manual. It's a sin not to. I miss game manuals in these modern times where there usually isn't one.

Back then I fixed together with OC-Burner the famous Save-Game-bug by enabling the LAA-flag in the Gothic3.exe and the depending dlls.