Gothic 3 - Patch News

And if you look around on the usual (RPG/fansite/official) forums then you will quickly find out that even most Oblivion haters can agree that Bethesda did at least do a pretty good job at polishing the game.
Yes, I bow to no one in my contempt for Oblivion or my Gothic fanboyism but Oblivion’s retail release was rock solid stable next to Gothic 3 retail - fact. Gothic 3 is one of the most bug-ridden POS I’ve ever had the misfortune to install on my hard drive and I’ve been video gaming since Pong.
 
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You obviously didn't play the original release of Daggerfall. I lost count of the number of released patches before it became even remotely playable. Now it's a classic!! :) I think it's version 2.13. It began as version 1.0!!!!
 
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You obviously didn't play the original release of Daggerfall.
I did and, unlike Gothic 3, it didn't crash upon saving the game and corrupt that save game slot in the process. In fairness, there is no comparison between Daggerfall and Gothic 3. Daggerfall was a magnificently ambitious failure, Gothic 1 was a magnificently ambitious success, and Gothic 3 is a magnificent f*@king mess.
 
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I disagree. Despite all the bugs, Gothic 3 is still tremendously fun to play, and few people experienced bugs as serious as you describe. It's only going to get better after the patch.
 
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ad #23:
That´s your opinion. IMHO PB´s assessment is correct, G3 v1.12 is technically stable and most A bugs have been fixed. Of course there are still many smaller bugs and a long list of design issues but almost everybody can finish the game correctly.
 
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Great news! the large size definitely gves away that it will fix more than just regular stuff.

As I understand PB even some little bugs require a gigabyte patch, because the quest data is embedded in the (huge) world data.

Must be a strange database design :)
 
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i got the game. but waiting. i can wait. i've got patience. and world of warcraft. and jade empire.
 
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My "technically stable" game still crashes every couple of hours and has save game corruptions and after a large battle there is about a 25% chance that a large portion of the world disappears, but I can finish the game with the patience I only afford to a Gothic game.
 
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Patches should absolutely be free of charge. But I'm not sure about the supposed fact that "all technical problems are fixed". I've played 1.12 for, I think at least 60 hours or more and have not encountered a single quest-related bug. But there are still weird 3d-related issues with people walking through huge rocks, boars attacking from caves below the character (=attacking, and hitting, through the ground). I guess such issues are unfixable, then.

Maybe these are not technical problems, but world design problems? Maybe some of these rocks or cave walls have not been properly flagged as unpassable and as such will be fixed in the patch.
 
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Perhaps. But I wouldn't have thought rocks would have to be specially flagged to be impenetrable... I hope they fix it, anyway. It's a damn good game.
 
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Great news! the large size definitely gves away that it will fix more than just regular stuff.

Well not neccessarily more in number, just that any change to the world data unfortunately requires a multiple gb file :( My *guess* is that they basically have a baked/compiled landscape, unlike the non-compiled ones for example in Morrowind, that allow you to plug in and out changes to the gameworld practically on the fly.

And yup, I agree - Oblivion was a very polished release. Not perfect by any means, but considering the size, the polish has been good for me, and a boon for third party modders.

You obviously didn't play the original release of Daggerfall. I lost count of the number of released patches before it became even remotely playable. Now it's a classic!! :) I think it's version 2.13. It began as version 1.0!!!!
Oh the fun of corrupting the game install several times. 2.13 is an absolute must for Daggerfall. That said, just like Gothic 3, the fun made it worth the pain, and I would rather have a fun game + bugs, than no game at all.
 
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Perhaps. But I wouldn't have thought rocks would have to be specially flagged to be impenetrable... I hope they fix it, anyway. It's a damn good game.

I'm not an expert, but I think games still do this to help with pathing. Some objects might be better off if NPC's can just clip through it, while in other places it might help if a normal flat piece of ground cannot be walked through by an NPC. I can imagine that a fully functional world in which all NPC's can determine their path purely based on geometry would be very complex and prone to bugs. Not that pathing issues don't exist now. :)

As for Oblivion, I recently updated it to 1.2 and the last time I played it was with 1 GB; now with 2 GB. I have to credit Bethesda, compared to Gothic 3, loading times are really fast, quick load finished in about a second and performance is pretty stable. No crashes on exit so far, neither! Plus, I don't feel its world is as empty as some people say. The quest design is in general pretty good, too.
 
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As I understand PB even some little bugs require a gigabyte patch, because the quest data is embedded in the (huge) world data.

Must be a strange database design :)
very very badly done and i cannot think of one good reason why a company that has made two very good games and technically solid for a small team would make such a bad design decision
however its been about time someone from PB told something and so far it looks like they have not even decided how they will repair the whole thing
my guess is still the datadisk
 
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ad #23:
That´s your opinion. IIMHO PB´s assessment is correct, G3 v1.12 is technically stable and most A bugs have been fixed.
Even if that is the case (and I in no way accept it is) how does that negated the fact the retail release of Gothic 3 was completely buggy dreck? In fairness to PB their patches were very prompt, but that doesn't excuse the awfulness of the release product.
 
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Even if that is the case (and I in no way accept it is)
You don´t have to accept this. PB / JoWooD have a different perspective. You see a sample of 1, they observe statistic effects in a sample of 500k. It´s quite possible that you are part of the group which still has technical problems. I guess they interpret their tech support numbers in a way that the game is "stable enough" to patiently work on the next patch.

how does that negated the fact the retail release of Gothic 3 was completely buggy dreck?
This is not a fact. Nobody would deny that it was buggy. You don´t like the game? Others do. Want to start a discussion about taste? ;)

In fairness to PB their patches were very prompt, but that doesn't excuse the awfulness of the release product.
Not even PB disputed that G3 was in bad shape on release day. They posted their perspective on why this happened and the reasons for certain design decisions in the German part of the WoG forum a short time after release.
 
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The problem Gorath, is that they only posted in the German forum!! There's a few (hundred) thousand English speakers, who didn't get to read that!! PB 'owed' it to the English speakers to address them as well. It should NOT be the responsibility of sites like ours to do this for them!! Fortunately, other than the dual core issue which was quickly addressed I've had no issues with the game other than one quest NPC disappearing. Probably the world ate him!! :)
 
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The problem Gorath, is that they only posted in the German forum!! There's a few (hundred) thousand English speakers, who didn't get to read that!! PB 'owed' it to the English speakers to address them as well. It should NOT be the responsibility of sites like ours to do this for them!!

This the exact opposite of people of non-English-speaking countries who might feel about devs telling things only in English and only to angle-saxon readers.

I recently filled out the newsletter form for the official Genesis site. At first I was surprised that it didn't accept my "Umlaut" ä I have within my second name, but then I wasn't. That'y typically for English-speaking countries. Some forms even *require* the data of the state or privince, but do have *only* US states/privinces in a drop-down list, as if there were no countries with no states and provinces outside the US at all.

For TOEE, there was developed a patch ONLY for the US version of the game. For no other country at all. And Infogrames/Atari is even a European company !

In my rather cynical opinion, I'd say that this is a good learning lesson for americans to see how american companies often negkect Europeans.

A "Clash Of Cultures" ?
 
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I'm not excusing the faults on the English side, and I have screamed at the stupid America only drop down menus, BUT, let's remember one important fact; English is the dominant language and there are more English speakers who BUY games than for any other language. Not catering for those is sheer foolishness!!
 
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This is what I partly meant with the "clash of cultures".

There are still a *lot* of Chinese people out there, what about therm ? Shouldn't we produce for and keep in contact with them, too ?

Sorry, but i don't like this. I mean the opinion "we are dominant, so you have to do things for us." That's what i read from your comment.

I do know I'm quite extreme with my opinions / points of view, but I think that I must try to look at them to see what might come out of it.

If I don't look at extreme standpoints, then I won't ever know what could happen in extreme cases - generally speaking. Same goes for swithichng the point of view towards the opposite side.
 
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