In yet another “Reccomend an RPG” another thread, Captain_C mentions something about Gothic 3 being the best of the Gothic line of games, with all the kinks worked out.
Yeah… let’s just say I remember when this game finally arrived. I was pretty excited. In fact, I was eager. But, having those niggling doubts from, say, being burned several times by idiot developers or publishers screwing things up, I waited. And I DID NOT LIKE what what I saw. The game was a buggy, useless disaster. Even the demo was horribly unfun to play, with loose uncontrollable “controls” and a messy interface and terrible animation and - well, it sucked. And reviews were merciless. Heck, the Publisher (who owned the rights) actually fired the Developer with the a kind variant on “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, you warthog-faced inspid little coke-heads”.
OK, they said “We’re going in a different direction.” But it means the same thing.
Anyway, did someone patch the bejeezus out of that bad boy? Is it now playable? And what about The Witcher? Can I actually play that game and do something with it’s re-released version. The original’s load times finally got to me, although the spotty dialogue and bad inventory didn’t help. I liked the game as a whole, and it was arguably the most original game to come out in a long while.
Don’t anything about Gothic 3 other than the reviews were indeed terrible.
As for the Witcher, the re-released version addresses your concerns at least. The English dialogue has been completely re-recorded and re-written. It actually makes sense now. The inventory has been improved, and the loading times have been improved as well.
Performance is slightly better than it was before, but I’m still not impressed with my performance on what is a high mid-range rig: Quad core 6600 at 3.2 Ghz 4 Gigs of RAM and an Nvidia 9800 GX2.
I have the re-release; I never did play the original, so I have no comment. I still find it kind-of unpolished, but nonetheless I applaud the studio for the effort; they try to do their best with a technology that is at least 5 years old (NWN 2 engine is so much better than NWN 1).
I think one of the biggest complaints was potion brewing. It’s easier now, but in a sense dumb down that all you have to do is to pick flowers after flowers…
They also have the adventure builder for the re-release. It’s lots more limited than NWN 1’s, but at least if you are a creative 3d modeler you can create your own rooms.
Well, there is a community released patch for Gothic 3 that cleared up many of the bugs.
That being said, I think I may have misrepresented my opinion of the game in the other thread. I enjoyed Gothic 1 the most of the three games. However, I also remember the learning curve. I spent about 12 hours getting killed by wolves before I even figured out how to pick up items and fight back effectively. Once past the learning curve, Gothic 1 is by far a great hard-core RPG. If not for my sheer stubbornness, however, I would have probably given up in disgust and not played through the entire trilogy.
Based on that idea, I think it is best that someone play the third game first. There are a few bugs left, yes, but the controls are MUCH more forgiving and the combat is not quite as impossible. I’d hate for someone to miss out on the great storyline and depth of these games just because of the poor controls of the first game. (Which, I might add, are amazingly good controls for combat ONCE you figure them out. The problem lies in the fact that the controls are completely different from every other game of that type, so you arne’t used to it. It’s like learning to use a keyboard again for the first time)
I’d recommend starting on Gothic 2, as that was the least-buggy of the trilogy and had decent controls, except that half the fun of that game was exploring the destroyed world of the valley from Gothic 1. Alot of the ‘shine’ from this would be lost if you haven’t played the first game first.
I also have a fairly old computer (AMD 2500+ and a radeon 9800pro video card) so I assumed the long load times in Gothic 3 were a result of that. From hearing others comments, apparently that is not the case.
You can download content/fixes which upgrade the normal game to the Enhanced Edition; but the Enhanced Edition has soundtracks (and believe me, the music of the game is good), a “making of the game” DVD and a small novella containing the story used for the opening cutscene, as well as a full-size map of the game world AND all subtitles and voice-overs in all European languages - so if you can’t stand the English voices, you could switch to others and play with English subs on.
I agree with you there. I also have a Q6600 (not overclocked, yet), 2gb performance ram and an ATI HD4870. With the settings on high, 16xAF and (I think) no AA I still have low framerate in places, most notably the Trade Quarter in chapter 3.
Still, I believe the Enhanced Edition resolved most of the problems with the original game.
Ah. I played Gothic 1 & 2, and really enjoyed them. Although not Night of the Raven. But I tried Gothic 3 and it was a mess. Can you point me to this patch?
Page has all the patches. Looks like 1.6 is the newest version. Still doesn’t fix all of them (loading and saving games takes longer than it should IMO, and I fell through the world once in the 30 hours I played)
If that’s it then I’d avoid it altogether. I played The Witcher out of the box, and it was awful. Confusing menus, boring combat. My machine meets the requirements, but it had the longest loading screens I’d seen this century. After patching it up it was…still pretty much exactly the same. YMMV, of course.
I am not sure about your mileage, but it’s more interesting than the standard NWN, but of course, it’s a bit barebone compared to Diablo-style games. Combat is more of an arcade sequence than stats-crunch