Gothic 3

[miir]

I had high hopes for this game.

It plays a lot like Oblivion's little brother.
It has an open ended story, very nice graphics, outstanding voice acting and oodles of quests.


Now, I haven't got the fastest system around, but I can play most games (including Oblivion) with video settings turned up around 75% of max.
At medium video settings, this game chugs like fucking molasses. Frequent 1-2 second freezes and very choppy.
Load times are obscene. It takes over 30 seconds to do a quick save. If you reload the game in the exact same spot you saved, it can take upwards to 2 minutes to reload. This is unacceptable in my opinion.

The excessive use of bloom and lens flare made my eyes bleed... really... fucking lens flare in a fantasy RPG?

About the graphics. The landscape and flora/fauna is very nicely detailed. But the character models look terrible. Heads are too small for the bodies. Armor models range from nice looking to embarrasingly bad. there is no consistency.

Pathfinding and AI is another bad spot. A few hours into the game I came to a cave full of goblins and meatbugs. I plowed through them like nothing... until I came to the 2 ogres at the end.
I got my ass handed to me repeatedly. Getting knocked down right off the bat, not being able to fight back or even run away does not make for good gameplay. I had no way of knowing the relative strength of the mobs.. there is no level scaling and no way to guage mob/monster strength.
I ended up standing at max range and plunking the ogres with arrows. They just stood there and died.

Another annoyance is getting stuck on rocks and outcropping in the terrain. Stopping to slide down a 6 inch high rock face might be realistic in someones mind but really fucking annoying when you're trying to run away from wild boars.
And the number of times my character fell halfway through the world was also unacceptable... although seeing my legless torso sliding down a road was kinda amusing.


There is some engaging gameplay to be had if you can look past the plethora of bugs. The faction system and open endedness of the story has some real potential.

But in my opinion, you'd be better off just dusting off Oblivion and playing it through again.

[miir]

Oh, and one other thing.

Turning the ghapics setting down to low makes the game look right fucking awful. The LOD distance is stupidly short and anything beyond it looks like blurry vomit. The threshold or clip pane from acceptable detail to blurry vomit is also very abrupt. It wold have looked better if they just used the pea soup fog from Everquest.
Oddly, the performance isn't even that much better at low settings.

Where Oblivion pops up a little loading area... message, it seems like Gothic 3 actually freezes when it dynamically loads terrain.

[Siji]

I loved Gothic 2, a lot.. I loaded this, got knocked down a few times, found how annoying that was and uninstalled it.

In the time I played it between those two points, I agree with everything stated above. It's definitely not as good as #2.

[miir]

I did some hunting around and there's a fix for the rapid-fire attacks that some animals use... specifically wolves.

I'll post a link to it later when I have time, but if you look around the G3 official forums, it shouldnt be too hard to find.