Arcania - Name Change

ortucis said:

Either way, it was ten times better than Morrowind/Oblivion crap

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ROFL. But it's cool, i know it's april 1

ortucis said:

I played Gothic 3 unpatched without a single bug people are always bitching about.

Either way, it was ten times better than Morrowind/Oblivion crap I had to sit through before so G3 is cool in my book. As for G4, seen the developer videos, looked pretty much like Gothic 3 with minor tweaks (and the visuals looked like ass in comparison to Risen, but that could just be the video compression).

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You know we hard alot of this before it was released....then after...noone said that, you sir, are an individual.

ortucis said:

I played Gothic 3 unpatched without a single bug people are always bitching about..

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JDR13 said:

That is what we refer to as "bullshit".

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Well, saying the game was bug free is maybe taking it a bit too far - but I can see where this guy is coming from. I too played G3 at release time, with only the official first patch, and I too actually enjoyed it quite a lot.

And besides quite poor performance in general and very long load times I also didn't experience the really bad stuff like corrupt save games etc.

I agree that it was a better game than Oblivion, even in its original form.

The issue for Jowood, IMO, is that no matter how they attempted to distance themselves from the Gothic name (most likely due to all the Gothic 3 mess) people still refer to it as Gothic 4. As someone said earlier might as well cash in on the name.

As for the slowness of release my conjecture is Jowood is either making sure the game is polished on release or they have some real quality control issues that they can't seem to rectify.

* I was lucky playing Gothic 3 because I was so late discovering this series that I had access to the latest patches especially the community one. I reallty enjoyed G3 but I thought the Nordmor region was a pain due to poor path finding. You could get lost easily.

JDR13 said:

That is what we refer to as "bullshit".

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I also have a word for posts like yours (tis forbidden, cannot utter here).

Anyways, there are a lot of gamers who tend to hardly notice small issues in most games. Just cause you spend time online reading about every small issue (mountain/molehill.. etc. etc.) on developer forums, it doesn't mean there aren't 20 others who never came across those problems (or never cared cause they were having fun anyway).

Reminds me of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Same thing, finished game without patch (I got it with my ATI card) then logged in online one day to developer forums to discover that my favorite game apparently not only had game breaking bugs but unofficial patches that fixed.. well, a lot of "balance issues" ("ooh I am getting my ass handed out to me, game is definitely not balanced right.. PATCH IT GUYS").

G3 had issue. OK I was exaggerating when I said I didn't face any issue at all. It crashed for me a few times in my 50+ hr playtime. But official patch was more than enough to fix such issues for me. The community patches are pointless for me and so are the comments calling this game buggiest game ever.

Lemme guess, you probably had bugs and issues with Risen as well? Hawhawhaw, bullshit statement hawhaw.

Yep…. I guess all those Thousands of people reporting the same bugs were just imagining them...

Not everybody experiences necessarily the same amount of bugs.

Yes, we have very strict customs and quarantine regulations about what can be brought into the country, so we have fewer bugs here than elswhere!!

JDR13 said:

Yep…. I guess all those Thousands of people reporting the same bugs were just imagining them…

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Only to add an experience: I played G3 with the release patch and had no bugs.

Some of the reported "bugs" were performance issues by the way, depending strongly on your hardware.

So I support the view that most of the "bugs" were issues some people had, others hadn't. Other things were design issues (e. g. the week melee fighting with harmless orks and deadly animals) rather than bugs.

So my take is:
The community patches changed a game with problems at release into a good game, but for me this was less related to bugs but to game play improvements.

Anyway all of this is not related to this "ArcaniA" thing.

bkrueger said:

Some of the reported "bugs" were performance issues by the way, depending strongly on your hardware.

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Hardware didn't make much of a difference with Gothic 3. I had a Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM, and a Geforce 8800 GTS, all of which were considered high end at the time, and it still ran terribly. The people who didn't experience any problems were a small minority.

I had very few issues. And yes, I had a high end PC.

Maylander said:

I had very few issues. And yes, I had a high end PC.

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If only that were always the case...

G3 also played great for me, one of the most beautiful gaming scenery experiences i've had to date. G3 was an epic saga, you could take your time or progress at your own pace. The storyline is retained intact through the variuos patches, therefore i had no need for patches above 1.12 which ran smooth as silk. Patch 1.7 however, was a worse experience - loading time *increased* - day and night cycles were *eratic* - opponents *queued* - amongst other glitches.
No, if G3 ran great on my machine yet failed on others one must query the reason, my gaming pc is a 'barebones' set-up with minimalist processes running, no antivirus, no internet, nothing but the game. I can only speculate that there are some weird and complicated pc set-up out there. I had no complaints running G3.
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On-topic

GhanBuriGhan asked earlier > Wasn't it originally already "Gothic 4" and then changed to "a gothic tale"?

I think it went something like this…..

1. Gothic 4
2. Gothic 4: Genesis
3. Gothic 4: Arcania
4. Arcania: A Gothic Tale
5. Arcania: Gothic 4

About Bugs in Gothic 3 : Could this be a international market thing ? I guess that the interntional version more or less had patches already included, didn't it ? In stark contrast to the oriinal German-language version, then.

If this guess is true, then the most pople saying that "there is no bug" could only be people from the international market.

On the whole I'd agree that most annoyances I had were design and balancing related rather than bugs per se.

G3 was well above average in bugcount for me, even including 1.12. In spite of this the game was pretty playable as I was lucky to avoid most of the worst issues (had maybe one crash per 5h of gameplay, and no corrupt savegames). The crash frequency increased when I shifted to fireballing every enemy in the endgame, but that was probably a performance issue (lightning was taxing on my hardware). I had an average rig for the time.

It had one world class bug though. Falling into the Void. I've not seen that amount of monsters and player character falling through the ground since Daggerfall! Feck, I once had King Rhobar fall through the ground and landing at the bottom of the barrier around Vengard (found him by teleporting in Marvin mode).). I wish I had taken some screenshots.