Wow!

That's my one word review of G3. I've been lucky not having many bugs since I started playing v1.09. Other than complaints about said bugs, I haven't seen a beef thread anywhere about the game itself, unlike the 10-20,000 such threads you see on any of the competition's boards.

The gameplay, combat, quests, the everything about Gothic 3 makes Oblivion and NWN2 look like pasty faced children, trying to smother a nagging cough, standing next to a viking warrior in his prime. This game rocks. When I've played it 3 or 4 times (which is going to take a damn long time by the way), I'll probably get Gothic 2 as well.

Thanks for the mini-review, Screeg. I downloaded the demo and played with it a bit. I wish I had the time to play it, but that game, like NWN2, is going to have to wait until Eschalon is finished.

Do you enjoy the real-time combat in Gothic 3? That was the only thing that really made me question the game...in the demo, you start off in a huge "man against Orc brawl" with lots of clicking and chopping. If the combat doesn't get ridiculous than I'm sure I'd enjoy it.

I like the combat, yes. It took a bit of learning for me, since I don't play FPS games at all. I use a rumblepad I bought for Oblivion earlier this year. With a melee weapon, it's basically 3 or 4 types of swing and block, very straightforward.

Your opponents can get tricky though. I'm finally able to take on an ogre in the game and in one place there are three of them behind a doorway. The only way to get past their huge hammers is to rush in close, but if you rush through the door, they backpedal and then flank you. If you stay in the doorway they just slam you with that hammer. Humanoids also retreat and seek cover if you pick at them with arrows. The AI is not brilliant but these are nice touches.

Another nice touch is that combat vs. faction humans or orcs is all non-lethal by default. I'm sure it makes scripting of all the arena fights a lot simpler.

The game is full of little touches where everyone else did it wrong and when you see Gothic 3 you shake your head at the way it's been done before. Alchemy (and smithing and the other crafts) is a good example.

There are many potions that take multiple ingredients. Instead of the player dragging and dropping components and retorts and alembics, ad nauseum (like in Oblivion), you access an alchemy bench, pick a recipe you've learned from the menu that pops up, and the game tells you what components are needed, what components you have, and how many potions you can brew. It then asks how many you would like, defaulting to the maximum number.

It's a small thing, but dozens of these small things add up to make a truly original RPG. Woo!

Since nothing else is happening here, I'll post a little Gothic tale from last night on the road to Faring, a mountain fortress town:

There was a stretch of road with more wargs than I could handle. Maybe I diversified my skills too much, or maybe I'm just slow, but mid-level opponents still tear me to shreds in groups >3, so I cast Tame Animal on the first one I met and he became my bosom companion, slaying at my side!

It worked well. I would pick at a distant opponent with an arrow, my warg would lunge forward to attack, then I would wade in to help him out.

When I got to Faring I was worried the townspeople would attack me, so I saved outside town. I walked up to a hunter on the outskirts, had a little chat, and everything was cool, so I went a little further and found a bed to sleep in at the back of a little cave in the mountainside. The warg waited outside.

I wondered, Would the spell wear off while I rested? He did not, but when I woke up a guy who had been digging a hole nearby was dead. Strange. My warg was waiting so we headed further into town. When I got there, I was accused of murder! Once you've been fingered in public for a murder, unless you can bribe or talk your way out of it, the whole town turns on you.

Reload.

I decided the warg was too dangerous to bring into town. You dismiss a tamed creature by telling it to go back, the only dialogue option for dealing with them. When the creature returns home it reverts to hostility. When I dismissed him this time however, perhaps because we were too far from his home, he attacked and to my surprise his life bar, which had been ~20%, was now full. I didn't have time to draw my weapon before he tore out my throat.

Reload.

I couldn't target the warg when he was friendly, and you can't talk to companions with your weapon drawn. The solution: I led the warg into the middle of town, dismissed him there, and ran. It took 12 mercenaries and townsfolk and a few dozen crossbow quarrels to take him down. I was not held responsible for the bold beast which had wandered in, and in any case he didn't kill anyone that time.

That sounds really cool, screeg! I love when games come to life simply by the rules of the system, not because of scripts. Maybe Santa will bring me this for me for Christmas... Please feel free to post more of your adventures! I'm going to play the remainder of the Gothic 3 demo this weekend.

If I may share my experiences with combat in the game...I've been doing quests in all 3 areas of the game, I'm now around lv45+ maybe even more, I don't really pay attention to it, since I rarely need any new spell or skill since mana regen+basic nukes. When I started playing only the 1.07 patch was available and close combat and armors weren't "balanced" in that yet. So I chose to be a mage, with a little "light cheat" I ran down to the desert to learn the Mana regen skill, and then at around lv23-24 I became unstoppable. With the 250 arcane knowledge needed for the Mana regen, nuke spells killed monsters in 1-3 shots, 3 being the harder monsters, elite orcs, shadowbeasts, but I can kill trolls and basically anything before they get to me. Anything! Actually there are a few monsters who cast nukes at me (shamans, some very high lvl undead in the deserts), those may actually hit me, but not archers, you can strafe out of the arrow's way.
In close combat I can still kill my enemies if I really need to, like in arenas, where only melee is allowed: the simple "Spear" has no STR or figthing skill prerequisite (but I could just buy a mage staff if I really wanted to) has great range but low-ish damage, but in close combat, every enemy (and the player as well) gets interrupted when hit, so with fast attacks or even simple damaging attack spams I can push them at walls eventually and kill them before they could swing once. Basically you stunlock them the same way wolves and wild animals stunlock you. I know they fixed enemy stunlock by modifying the AI, but I'm not sure if they also fixed this with the player, i don't fight much in melee any more.
So I would not call combat fun at all, it's totally unbalanced and exploitable. But for me it's actually fun to play an unstoppable spellcaster, the game is huge enough so even with combat being too easy, there's still lots of things to do and explore in the world. I often think that it would be just a nuisance to stop and fight all those millions of monsters toe-to-toe and would stop me from enjoying the game. (there's a horrible amount of monsters in the desert and in Nordmar, they even removed the majority of them in Nordmar in 1.09 cause you could barely move because of them)

Since you asked! I'll just point out two things for now:

1) Ambient animations, there are a bajillion of them (at my last count). During the day there are people roasting meat, hammering boards, sawing tree trunks, digging holes, moving stones, stirring pots, sweeping porches, mixing potions, mining ore and occasionally just talking. And it's not just one guy who does his one thing all day either. And most folks sleep at night, making finding a free bed difficult sometimes.

The blacksmith works for a living. He goes to the forge, heats a blade, hammers it on the anvil, then takes it to the whetstone for sharpening. This stuff is all interactive. If you click on the whetstone and have learned the skill you can sharpen your own weapons. Click on the anvil and if you have a hammer, blueprint and materials, you can make your own weapons.

I felt like sitting down at the old campfire with some mercenaries and lo-and-behold you can roast your own raw meat to increase its healing properties. I was in a used-up mine and spotted a skull on the ground, sitting propped upright on a stick. I pulled out my shovel and discovered a hidden cache of treasure.

2) You can kill anyone. But beware. If you're denounced as a murderer and a town turns on you, you can't get anything done there, ever. You can kiss those 20+ quests you have waiting (and there are that many typically) goodbye.

That old standby strategy Draw the monster into town and let the guards kill it can backfire. Everyone gets into these melees and if an important NPC bites it, tough. This game has consequences and zero hand-holding.

****
As for the combat, I guess I'll say something about that too: I've read that mages get overpowered (as they do in many games), but I'm playing a fighter type this first time around and I spread my points around and find the combat continually challenging. The way it works is if an opponent gets a solid hit in, you go down on the ground and are in for some serious chewing. If there's more than one around, it could all be over. It keeps me on my toes.

Last night:

I had enlisted a human follower who was of the orc faction. He comments once in a while on visiting important people or places but mostly he's there for the combat. Followers generally shoot at what you're shooting at, swing at what you're swinging at, or just defend themselves.

I came to an orc controlled city and wandered into a treasure vault. No one was around so I decided to risk scooping up a pile of gold.

Unfortunately, my erstwhile companion shouted out an alarm and attacked me! He didn't seem to think stealing from the orc treasury was cool. I ran past him, thinking maybe if I got him back outside he would cool off.

An orc shouted "An intruder!" and by the time I got to the street about 20 orc NPCs had their axes out and were staring straight at me. I waited a moment, no weapon drawn, evaluating my dwindling chances. Then an arrow hit me in the back and killed me in one shot.

I'm going to have to let the follower go.

As much as I like what I have seen in this game so far, I have to say the combat is terrible. The enemy AI is non existant. Basically, once I got to level 12 or 13 I would just repeatedly left click on an enemy and move towards them until they are dead, and they never even hit me.

Its so bad I have decided to stop playing for a few months in hopes a patch will address this.

That said, I agree with most of what screeg said, its a very good game and game world, I just find it way too easy to kill pretty much anything.

I stopped playing when I got to the Castle with the Demon who basically wiped out the entire garrision of paladins and used the same tactic on him and he never even hit me.......

I had roughly the same experience as Saxon. I'm a huge fan of the first two (Still play them) but the 3rd was a bit messy. I play gothic 3 off and on now, but I don't care for the dumbed-down combat. (dumbed down when you compare it to the previous 2 gothics, anyway)

I remember fighting that Demon with Gorn in the castle. I was so scared when I saw it, I debated backing out. Though, sadly, all I had to do was rush it and keep tapping the weak attack, and he fell after about 20 hits. Not very scary, I'd say.

Right now I'm level 37, cleared out the king's castle of orcs, and have got to a point where nothing (not even 3 black trolls) can stop me. Though it's fun to tromp around unchallenged...for a bit, it gets boring. I upped the difficulty, but all it seems to do is give things more HP, thus making combat take longer.

The problem is the AI. I can swing and everything in a 50 foot radius jumps back, so I can tackle groups of 12+ orcs and never get hit as long as I don't stop swinging.

Gothic 3 suffers from the same problms as other modern rpgs- to much action and not enough role playing.

Yep this is pretty much why I stopped playing and am waiting for a patch. The dev team says they won't over haul the whole combat system but will make some minor changes. So, I hope it helps.

Amen brother. It's all about pushing the graphical extreme and having lots of action (probably because lots of combat doesn't take much to create once the engine is built).

I would be thrilled if a company used a ten year old graphics engine (Baldur's gate) and created a bunch of new RPG's if they had actual role playing and deep storylines.

I often wonder why so many companies do action\rpgs, but sadly they must sell well and the deep involved old school RPG's must take longer to make and not sell quite as well.

This makes me worry about the future of the genre.

Doesn't anyone want to make a franchse setting like the Ultima's again? Wouldn't a series like that make good money? Granted, not an easy task to make something that brilliant.

Gothic ii was already too much for me. I did like Geneforge 4 for windows though. Gothic III would eat my brain.

Well, going on 4 months now without another patch, even though they say they are working on one.

Of course they said they are going to release one big patch at the same time they release an expantion, but they are going to release the patch piece of it for free via a download.

There has been very little communication on the patch over the last few months.

This irritates me because its another game that was release in an unfinished state and having to finish it with an expansion is unacceptable to me.

I have actually got to the point where I dont buy games until reading reviews and if they are buggy I wait at least 6 months to buy them.

Unfortunatley the internet has made it much too easy for developers to release patches via Download which I think makes them realize they can easily patch it and release it before its done.

A shame, because I think could be a pretty good game if it every works correctly.