Just to add some quick info on some issues that seem to be a source of confusion for some people:
- Patch 1.7 is supposed to be out before the expansion is released (no guarantee of that though). Contrary to patch 1.6 which was developed with professional support from Spellbound, 1.7 is once again "only" a pure CPT (Community Patch Team) effort.
The CPT has made it clear that they are not planning to add multithreading (dual/multi core CPU support) back in with patch 1.7 (multithreading was removed by Spellbound in patch 1.6). They are also not planning on improving the game's performance in patch 1.7.
Yet they are hinting at some pretty major changes (patch 1.7 will require a restart of the game) without specifying the nature of the changes. Since most major quest bugs have long been fixed by previous community patches, it must be something else that they are addressing in 1.7.
Personally, I hope that they found a way to fix the retarded combat system and maybe even a way to fix collision detection, preventing enemies to come out of the ground or through walls. That'd be great.
- The expansion will be standalone and the developer has not been announced yet. Now if we rule out the (naturally extremely unlikely) possibility that the CPT = the expansion developer then it should be clear that Gothic 3 and the expansion will be like two separate games (meaning that the original G3 game will not benefit from any of the expansion's fixes or anything at all).
Spellbound (who are busy developing G4 with a licensed engine that is most certainly not Genome) helped the CPT on patch 1.6 and not the expansion developer. This tells us that the expansion will not be based on the Genome engine since it would have made more sense for JoWooD to establish contact between the CPT and the expansion dev for patch 1.6 if the expansion would be using Genome as well. Instead they had folks from Spellbound help with patch 1.6. even though the G3 addon should naturally be closer to G3 than to G4.
The one and only logical conclusion here is that the G3 addon is in fact a completely standalone project that will not add/fix/improve the original G3 in any way, shape or form.
- On Gothic (3) marketing: Gothic (1-3) is mainstream over here like the Anno (1602 A.D., 1701 A.D. etc.) or The Settlers series or other typically German brands. For example, JoWooD invited the German gaming press to LARP-like events at medieval castles for G3 presentations, held medieval camps for fans, took care of major media (including TV) coverage and so on. Gothic is a HUGE brand over here. The World of Gothic forums got nearly 2 million(!) posts across the various Gothic subforums (and that's excluding the general any topic chat forum which has another almost 900K posts). The JoWooD Gothic forums display a little over 1.3 million posts in the Gothic section. As you can see: Gothic is pretty damned popular in our small part of the world
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