Patch, what patch?

Corwin's Pitch Fork attacks are a weekly occurance for him. *sweet innocent grin*

I'm a North American gamer and the boards I frequent generally love the Gothic series. However Gothic 3 really has only two things going against it and they are really huge. The game basically requires way to steep system requirements and the game is too buggy. As a self admitted Gothicfanboy, I upgraded my system and deal with the almost daily crashes. And I still love this game. But asking someone new to the series to deal with this is not reasonable.

If you want to broaden the fan base you at least have to come out with a game that most gamers can run on their rig. And I believe PB went way farther than they had to, graphic wise, to win over new gamers. Additionally games can have some bugs when they come out without too much flack, but there shouldn't be any doubt this game could have stayed in the oven a bit longer. Heck, I was expecting a March 2007 release. Could you imagine if the game would have been released relatively bug free, the typical rating would have been somewhere in the 90s.

To me this is the Gothic series in a nut shell: I was exploring the backwoods of Silden and tried to find a mountain route into Monastery. After jumping up some hills and taking a chance on a very shaky cliff ledge I ended up in a high altitude meadow. It was late night and off in the near distance I can make out the ruins of a castle. After taking only two or three steps I found some Kings Sorrell. There were other herbs but no monsters or animals. But it was still scary as the castle had no bed and I had to do my exploring in the dark.

Now, anyone who's played a Gothic game knows the sense of exhilaration you get when you come across such a location. It's just like you beat a boss in some video game. It's a total sense of accomplishment that you just can't find in any other RPG. Oblivion came close, but that's it, they came close. The Oblivion living world is no better than Gothic "2". (BTW, I love the ES series and loved Oblivion)

The N/A audience is demanding for it hard core products, while the higher selling casual games typically get a big pass.

I am much more forgiving for bugs and performance problems, maybe because I rarely have a top-end computer (unless I just bought one, which I just don't do every year). I also haven't found that many bugs yet, but I trust you guys that they are there. Actually, I'm sort of relieved that most of the complaints are technical, as that means that the content must be okay then. On the other hand, a lot of people are tripping over that as well.

Well, okay. The US audience does want this type of game then. There must be another reason that it does so much better in Europe.

Originally Posted by Thaurin
I am much more forgiving for bugs and performance problems, maybe because I rarely have a top-end computer (unless I just bought one, which I just don't do every year).

Think about it:
- Gothic series in general has had craptastic marketing here.
- Perceived as 'hardcore' and relatively user-unfriendly (certainly n00b unfriendly)
- Gothic 3 got best press of the series, but came out same week as Wii and PS3.
- European release was given as much attention as marketing, so bugginess and poor performance was well known.
- Very small population has the required computer and uses it for RPG.