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The worst game I have ever played

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 166 / 188
Date: November 20, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Let me begin by saying that I greatly enjoyed this game's predecessors, Gothic and Gothic II (and the Night of the Raven). I was very much looking forward to playing this game, and I was incredibly disappointed to discover that this is one of the worst games I have ever seen. Before you write this review off as simply being from someone who is just harping about how it strayed from the previous releases, let me say that I disliked this game not only because it was not like the other Gothics, but mainly because it failed to amount to much on its own merits. I have played through the whole game (after restarting when my game bugged when I was level 27), so I am not just writing this review on my first impression of the game or anything. In brief, this is why I greatly disliked this game:

1. It is INSANELY BUGGY!!! I have never even heard of a game this buggy. Main characters drop under the earth (forever), animals run through rocks (including quest animals), the sun randomly spins around the earth at lightspeed and years pass in seconds, you can fall from any height and live if you simply slide down the cliff, items randomly disappear from your inventory, the game crashed constantly when saving (corrupting both your old and new save), with the new patch it crashed when loading instead, the screen flickers white all the time and burns your retinas, some skills simply do not work, etc. I could go on for ages. One message board made a list of bugs nearly 15 pages long. Many are serious and if they occur you must restart your game.

2. The combat system is horrendous. You simply click as fast as you can to defeat NPCs, and against animals you stand no chance because they attack so fast. I literally destroyed an entire orc city, then went outside and was killed by a single wolf. This is because the animals can "stun lock" you, which means that they keep attacking you so fast that your character cannot respond, so you literally CANNOT DO ANYTHING. It is incredibly annoying and frustrating. While the animals are far too difficult, all NPCs are incredibly easy. I can literally defeat ANY opponent at 1ST LEVEL! No joke! All you do is click as fast as you can and you can stun lock them. It is ridiculously unbalanced.

3. It runs terribly slow. It takes between 25-45 seconds to save, and between THREE TO FIVE MINUTES TO LOAD!!! I can literally make a sandwich and eat it while I wait for it to load, which I need to do all the time because half the time when you fight any animals they stunlock you and you die (this still happened semi-frequently when I finished the game at level 62). It lags like crazy even though I easily meet the game's requirements. Whenever you go into a city it gets even slower that usual, and caves are the worst of all. I would routinely get between 5-15 fps in caves.

4. It looks terrible in many places. There are BRIGHT ORANGE letters above creatures heads telling you what they are. Depending on whether they notice you or not, they are sometimes a horrid light green color instead. Both colors look terribly out of place. Also, the plants that you can pick are EXTREMELY BRIGHT, and are scattered all over the grass. There are so many that I gave up on trying to pick them. They look extremely out of place because they are so tremendously bright compared to everything else. The insides of caves are perhaps the worst. The brightest place in the game is INSIDE A CAVE. For some reason it is extremely bright in caves, even though there is no light source. These are just a few of the many visual failures the game makes. I could go on about how almost no one's armor fits them (their head is partway inside the armor), or how terrible the lions look, etc.

5. There is NO STORYLINE! I am not joking when I say that the entire main storyline could be written on one line of a piece of college rule paper. After the weird ending of Gothic II, you finally meet Xardas and expect him to explain what happened. But no, instead you say hi and he sends you out on a quest without explaining anything. Nor does he explain much before the game ends. You could easily beat the whole game in a couple of hours if you just did the main quests. Unfortunately, the game lists a number of quest in the main quest section of your journal which are not main quests (i.e. the Fire Chalices), which only serves to confuse you further about the non-existent main storyline.

6. There is a complete lack of AI. If you fight multiple enemies at the same time, only one will attack you, and the rest will all stand around waiting for you to finish fighting the first one. It's like a bad kung-fu movie. They also have NO path-finding ability, and constantly get stuck walking into things and usually end up bugging into something and falling out of the world, never to be seen from again. If you stand on top of something and use a ranged attack, your enemies will simply stand below you and wait their turn to be shot.

7. There is an appalling lack of creativity in the quests. Nearly every quest is either (1) Go get a certain item(s) or (2) Go defeat a certain enemy. Out of the perhaps 300 quests you get, about 275 are one of those two. It gets extremely repetitive.

8. Every time you are about to be attacked by something, it starts playing the battle music. You ALWAYS know when someone/something is about to attack you, because about five seconds before they do, this same dramatic song starts playing. I tried to find a way to disable this, but as far as I can tell it is not possible until we get a better understanding of how this game runs. This really takes a lot of fun out of the game, and I have no idea why one earth anyone would want this included.

I am sure I could make a much longer lists, but I think you get the picture. There is very little I liked about this game. I liked the music (though it did not sound very Gothicy, and it did not fit the game in many instances), and I liked the size of the world. It was very big. However, I would much prefer a small, well done world to a huge, unfinished world, and unfortunately the latter is what you get. You can tell the developers ran out of time. There are forests in remote parts of the world which are simply floating above the ground, and caves which have obviously not been textured properly (they are also completely empty).

This game could have been great. The actual result is worse that I possibly could have imagined. I had read some reviews saying that the game was horrible, and I thought people were exaggerating. To my dismay I discovered they were actually being kind to the game. My advise to you would be to stay away from this game. It is not worth either your time or money. It is by far the most frustrating game I have ever played, and I can tell you that if you get it, it is very likely that you will be greatly disappointed with what you receive.

One of the holiday season's biggest disappointments

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 64 / 79
Date: November 23, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Six other reviews so far and three call this a great game? Your character will get stuck on the landscape. Even jumping over a fence you can get caught on the air. Your enemies, on the other hand, seem able to race right through walls and other obsticles to attack you.

I enjoy RPGs that actually let you role play. In Gothic III you can become evil or good enough that you can make some NPC factions try to kill you on sight. That's fine, but in order to finish the game you have to get into their lairs, etc. You aren't allowed to do this because you've built up too much hatred with them, so you can't finish the game!

I also enjoy the feeling of making an RPG character my own and truly unique by leveling up the skills I wish as I go. However, in this game you really can't tell what skills are needed in order to get to the uber-skills you might want to reach in the future.

Horrible voice acting.

A couple of the reviewers have said the graphics are better than Oblivion. I'm not sure how they can tell. To keep Gothic III from crashing you have to lower all the graphics settings significantly.

A major on-line reviewer couldn't even get the game to recognize the presence of his mouse - so he had to run the game keyboard only.

I had huge hopes for this game. I really wanted it to blow Oblivion out of the water. Not only does it fail to do that, it's an utter mess. I hope they put out some major patches to fix the most obvious flaws, but does a game this bad ever become even a good game with patches? I've never seen it.

Don't even buy this game when you see it in the discount bargan bin.

Your mileage may vary...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 26 / 31
Date: November 29, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I think this game is getting a bad rap here on Amazon. I don't doubt it's got a lot of technical problems, but there are a lot of people playing the game and having fun with it. I'm one of them.

In probably 15-20 hours of play I haven't experienced *any* of the major bugs people have complained about. Occasionally (meaning once or twice) the animation of the main character is a bit unpolished but that's been the worst of it. For the most part, the game has worked as advertised for me. I know that a lot of people, and a lot of games publications, are reporting bugs and glitches; perhaps they are configuration-specific.

As for performance, I'm running the game at 1280x1024 with all settings maxed, and it is generally fine. The frame rate drop when I walk into a busy town for the first time, but then picks up again. Personally, I don't think low frame rates make or break an RPG anyway; this isn't a frag-fest. The funny thing is that my system is not cutting edge - Athlon 3800 (single core) with an 256M Nvidea 6800 on AGP 8X! I find it hard to believe that people with Core 2 Duo machines running next-gen PCI-Express video cards are having so much trouble, unless this game actually runs worse on newer hardware?? The only reasonable explanation is that I do have 2G of RAM and a very fast (RAID 0) disk array. The game is probably very disk and RAM intensive because it constantly loading new scenery.

As for that scenery - some people love the graphics and some hate them. It's a different look than the obvious contenter, Oblivion, but I wouldn't say it's better or worse. It's a mixed bag - some elements don't quite work, others are breathtaking. On the whole, I think the graphics are an excellent achievement for a game of it's scope.

The gameplay itself is very addictive, and a lot of fun in my opinion. Yes, the combat *is* flawed, but if you want my opinion, action-based combat doesn't belong in an RPG in the first place. Set the difficulty on easy and work around the click-fest if you prefer, there's still a great RPG to be played here. In some regards gameplay beats Oblivion - it doesn't hold your hand through quests, it doesn't scale enemy levels, and the places, characters and items are more interesting somehow. Even the voice acting is good, with the unfortunate exception of your own character. (The same mistake was made in this game's predecessors - your character has the voice of a buffoon, and emphasizes the wrong words in every sentence.)

Maybe my rating is a little high - I couldn't really say until I'd gotten much further into the game, but I'm willing to bet I'm further along then most of the people who've contributed the 1-stars below. (Not that I blame them, from what I read.)

Maybe part of the problem is shifting expectations in the RPG genre. I'm not saying that an RPG gets a pass on bugs, etc. But I look at these graphics and then read people bashing them, and I think: it was only a few years ago that the last installments of Wizadry (which I did not personally like) were winning awards. Talk about games with a lack of polish! Yes, Oblivion has changed everyone's perspective by delivering a huge open-ended RPG with amazing visuals and enough polish to ship a console version and work... out of the box! And while that's very good news, it's worth considering that a good old-school RPG is still likely to be hidden in a somewhat fussy package.

With all caveats aside, I still don't see what's so awful about Gothic 3. And to make this more ironic, I bought and played Gothic 1 and 2, and HATED them because I thought the UI was too clumsy.

This game does deserve a chance. If you like the genre, I'd recommend buying it from a shop with a good return policy, and seeing if it runs well on your system. I think that has been 90% of the concern for most unsatisfied customers.

A real BALANCED review

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 22 / 26
Date: December 09, 2006
Author: Amazon User

LOAD TIME: First my computer specs, I have an Athlon 4000+ giving me a speed of 2.41 ghz. I have 2 gigs of ram, I have 2 Raptor 75gig HD's, and an EVGA Nvidia 7800GT Card. With that being said, load time for the game is less then a minute, and loading saves is about 15-20 seconds. So bottom line, those who complain of long load times need to update their computer. My last computer took 5 minutes to load Gothic 2.

GAME DETAIL/GRAPHICS: When I first started playing the game, I thought it looked like a train model set, the landscape. That was until I got into the forests, desert, and icelands. Short viewing detail is amazing and gorgeous, its very realistic and has the overall feel that Gothic 1 envirnment gave you. On short distances Gothic beats OBLIVION, on long viewing OBLIVION. Also Oblvion seemed like mostly cut and paste for the caves, dungeons, etc. The forests didn't feel like forests. The makers did say most of the world was not handmade but computer generated. In Gothic, every detail was placed there. The forests feel very real. There are some parts so heavy w/ bushs that you can't even see. You feel like your really walking through thick bushes and can't see past 1 foot. When your walking in the snow, you hear your feet crunching the snow. In the rivers, you see waves and water spashing up from the rocks and fallen limbs in the water. You can see the stones and pebbles on the creek beds.

NPCS: within the towns, they are very much alive. Slaves shoveling, digging, transporting stuff, etc. Others cooking, building, etc. In OBLIVION the NPCS really just stand around or walk, so Gothic wins here. The conversations NPCS have among themselves is consistant with all previous Gothic games. As for AI, dissappointed with their fighting skills. In previous Gothic games, NPCs would tear up the monsters. Here they definately are not strong enough. As for the arena, you can prob beat all of them right away. In Gothic 1, fighting in the arena was out of the question till you got stronger. Oblvion wins on fighting NPCS and NPCs fighting skills.

FIGHTING: Oblivion, as of now, wins on fighting. The fights in oblvion had more control, etc. I don't like the stun lock in Gothic, makes you have to stunlock your enemies to fight them. For example duel wield is a cool fighting style, but I die less using sword and shield and just clicking as fast as I can. If you miss a beat then most monsters kill you in a few hits, esp w/ stun lock. But all the other awesome things about this game make me overlook this.

STORYLINE and QUESTS: Oblivion was hard to finish. The storyline didn't catch me and it seems the entire game was cut and paste the same caves, dungeons and got to be tedious. Gothic 3 you are really apart of the world and the story grabs you. It is much different then previous Gothic games though. To not be dissappointed, you need to view Gothic 3 and having already defeated the evil plaguing the land, the worst is over, and now helping restore order as YOU see fit to the land. There is no archenemy to kill, or dragons about to destroy the world. You defeated the sleeper and the undead dragon. Do you want to free the humans, help the orcs, in the desert world, help them slave more humans or free the slaves there as well. Which god do you want to follow, Beliar, Adanon or Innos. Gothic 3 feels like you already beat the game, and are able to finish things off. There is no urgency of saving the world. But it is very fun nonetheless.

BUGS: On my computer, the worst I've seen is a few floating flowers in the desert. Only a few very times, missed dialogue. Most graphic problems will be based on your computer setup. Although not a bug, NPCs need to be stronger and smarter.

True RPG value: Gothic 3, def is the most free RPG I've played yet. Oblivion even though open, for quests it was either do them or not. Gothic you always have a few options. For example, you can have a quest to hunt down an escaped slave. You can do that and turn him in, or you can help him escape. You can have a quest to kill rebels, or you can help those rebels kill the orcs. Its so open, you'll have a hard time deciding what to do. This is a game you will have to play a few times to experience everything it has to offer. And is has 3 different endings.

What happened to the Gothic we all knew and loved?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 21 / 28
Date: November 22, 2006
Author: Amazon User

1st I would like to say that this does have some fun aspects. Exploration
within a large map. Some quests are fun to finish and you still feel some
sense of accomplishment and reward. The graphics are beautiful if you can
get them to run right.

But, I would also like to say I am sick of game companies dumbing down
their games so the console twitch gamers can play it as well.
The interface is overly simplistic that it takes away from any sort of
meaningful inventory / stats usage.
I have a high end system running Dual SLI cards (AMD FX-60 w/ 2 7800GTX
cards, 2gb fast RAM) I spent hours tweaking the ini files and cache
settings just to get this game to run with mid range settings. Even then
there is still some stuttering and lag (not FPS loss, 100% CPU usage
spikes) Poor Poor POOR programming....

Save games can get corrupted. Horrid clipping into walls by actors. Events
you did not trigger seem to happen anyway (causing you to reload hours back
to correct it). Like the commenter above said, combat is horrid.

Over all, a frustrating game. You want to play it so bad but it just ends
up making you want to cry and shelf it. Maybe after several patches and
when the "new high end" components become affordable, it may be worth
dusting off...

Just another addition to all the other 1 star reviews.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: April 17, 2007
Author: Amazon User

What can I say that has not already been said about this abortion of a release?

I sincerely hope that this company goes bankrupt, as I honestly hate spending my money on a game that, as another reviewer stated, was supposed to be Oblivions match. Simply stated, that is a load of crap. My computer is well above the specs for recommended hardware for this game and I cannot play it for 10 minutes without going into an epileptic seizure.

There are just too many buggs to list. Strange lights flashing, objects dissapearing and reappearing, falling through the world, camera angles sticking are just a fraction of the problems I encountered during the first 5 minutes of playing.

Load times? This is a joke. I have way more graphics intensive programs and this thing takes at least 5 minutes to load. Try to save once. If you are lucky enough not to crash you should go find something else to do for about 10 minutes, perhaps go brush your teeth.

Worst of all, go to the game developers website and look at the suggested tweaks. I dont know about you but when I play a game I want to relax and enjoy it. I certainly dont want to have to input countless lines of code and change advanced settings for hours just to get the thing to run. Even after giving it an honest effort most of the tweaks did nothing to enhance to gameplay anyways.

My advice to anyone interested in buying this awful game is DON'T. Buy Oblivion if you already haven't. This is absolutely the worst game I have ever purchased, and I have had my share of bad ones. This on takes the cake.

A Damn Fine Game that's 'almost' finished.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 16 / 22
Date: December 11, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I've played (played at) the other two Gothic games and found them interesting and immersive. In my opinion this is the best so far....

Yes, the fighting is a little different than what you may be used to, but it is very workable and enjoyable. They could have balanced the animals and NPC's a little better, but once you figure out what works, you'll do just fine.

It is incredibly involving. The world is big, the quests and locations are varied, the skills are fun to use, you are not locked into a linear path, and can go from one town to another without feeling that you are being pushed by the designers to act in a certain way, or chivvied into going to certain places.

The graphics are stunning and work just fine on my machine. Apparently some folks found that it was an issue for them, but it has not been an issue for me. The saves and loads take some time... about 30 seconds rather than 5 or 10 secs like some games manage it.... And it's hard enough to that you'll want to save a lot so that can be irritating.

But saying `it's hard' is not really telling the whole story. Some things are dead simple. If an NPC says some goblins are harassing him, you'll usually find a cave of the critters within 20 or 30 yards. There are not a lot of dead ends - and those that give you trouble can be resolved easily enough on the internet forums.

Some `kill the animal' quests are frustrating but can be ignored or skipped without breaking the game. There are usually about two or three ways to get what you want. You have to figure things out sometimes... I think it's just about perfect in its accessibility.

This is a awfully good game, with a few bugs, but 97 percent playable and fun, and those bugs are really small potatoes as far as my experience is concerned. I would recommend it to another gamer wholeheartedly.

Great game.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 16 / 23
Date: November 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Here's the deal with Gothic 3: The Gothic hero (who can't be named) finds himself in Myrtana, the central continent of Gothic 3. Myrtana used to be the land of the humans, but the orcs have recently overrun most human cities. A Rebel faction is trying to recapture these cities. When Gothic 3 opens, you find yourself in the middle of a fight for one such human city. From then on, you must decide whether to work for the humans or for the orcs in Myrtana.

Once you finish up with the human or orc storylines, however, you're not done. There are still two other continents to explore. Travel to the North to help bring back the ancient magic or explore the desert in the south to try to win the favor of the merchant-people Hashishi.

The storyline is great and deeply involved. There aren't as many quests as in Oblivion, but for me that is a good thing. Oblivion started to feel redundant once I got outside the main storylines (especially when I entered Oblivion itself), and I don't get that feeling in the world of Gothic. Also, Gothic is a lot simpler than Oblivion. There are no super powerful uber godly swords that let you one-hit anything in the game. You'll be forced to use your head to complete quests and objectives (try liberating a city by yourself--yeah). Logistically, it's a great game.

Combat is nice and smooth. It feels very natural with all available weapon types. Skills develop nicely too with the exception of thievery, which I haven't found to be useful at all (beyond lock picking). That means this game is pretty much a no go for sneaky assassin types; you just can't do it. The storyline isn't really internally driven; there are no timed quests that I've experienced, so you don't feel pressured to do anything at any particular time. Myrtana is at war, though, so you do get an internalized sense of urgency. The spell selection is nice too. My only complaint about game mechanics is that if you aren't experienced with the game, your character will be a cookie-cutter fighter. Period. Magic is something you aren't really introduced to; you sort of have to figure it out on your own.

The reason I gave this game four stars instead of five, though, is that the copy protection doesn't play nice with image files. I haven't researched what method it uses or whether there is a special way to copy it, but it's a major pain to not be able to play the game from an image. Keeping the disc in the drive is very annoying.

This game is awesome if you have a good gfx card

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 15 / 23
Date: November 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I am sorry but I have to laugh at all these negative reviews and just say that they all must have crappy gfx cards.

I have all settings maxed out and the game is very nice and smooth. I even have under the minimum requirement cpu but my gfx card is decent even though it is a few years old now. If you don't have a good gfx card this game is very slow/buggy like on my brother's computer. He has to have it set to the lowest gfx settings and it still crawls and is near unplayable. This however is not the case at all if you have a good gfx card.

My system is outdated but is still barely good enough to run this game at high settings. I have an AMD 64 3000 with 1 gig memory and a Nvidia 7800 gfx card but my card is an AGP card so it is way slower than a PCI Express 7800 card.

For all you negative posters, it is time to upgrade your card and I would have to say most of your view points are an issue of your gfx card not being fast enough and not with this awesome game. When I first bought Oblivion I could not play it at all, totally unplayable with my crappy gfx card so I upgraded my card and was able to play just fine. I suggest you do the same for this game if you are having problems.

This is by far the best game I have played and blows Oblivion out of the water in every catagory. My character is level 35 and I have explored about 60% of the game content at this point. I have never played a game that made me feel like I was in the world as much as this game does. I have never once got stuck in the world or on terrian or seen any of the bugs that others with crappy gfx cards have reported.

The only bugs I have ran into is a display bug on a potion that says it increases endurance when it really increases life force and I do sometimes have to save/quit the game and reboot my machine because the screen will bog down (probably a slow memory leak) but other than that minor problem which I am sure will be patched soon, this game is near perfect and the most fun I have ever had in RPG games. I have played near everyone since Ultima 3 on the Amiga computer as well.

Bottomline is that if you have a good gfx card this game is the best ever, if not it will be very hard to play it if at all.

Severly flawed game- don't waste your money

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: March 24, 2007
Author: Amazon User

First and foremost, I have to warn you that Gothic 3 is the buggiest (broken, really) game I've seen in years. The number of bugs is despicable, but even worse than that is just how severe the bugs are. If you have all the latest patches, you will still have a broken game. The game stutters, flashes, and freezes on even the best systems. The game has a memory leak and will crash every few hours. Save games can become corupt. Entire sections of the game world vanish upon loading some save games, and the only way to fix it is to delete all saves and start over- and hope to get lucky enough not to have it happen again. Characters and enemies can get stcuk on edges of rocks and inside walls. Important characters will "run away" and vanish from the game world, taking important quest items with them, leaving you unable to finish the game wihtout cheating (assuming you know what happened, and don't wander around forever being "stuck" and wondering what to do next). I could go on with this for pages, but I'll stop here for the sake of anyone reading this- I'll just end by saying there are scores of bugs beyond this that can make your playing experience miserable and even break your game entirely.

If you go ahead and fight through the bugs, then you will still be playing a very poor game. The combat system is miserable. When you gte hit, you are "stunned" for a moment and it takes time to recover. Beasts (all non-humanoids) are unblockable and undodgeable and will sometimes attack so quickly as you become stun-locked and unable to do anything but watch as the beast eats away all your health- there is just no stopping it sometimes. You own attacks will pass straight through through the enemies doing nothing about one in every four or five swings if you are on level ground. On a slope, this problem becomes far worse [another bug]. And some monsters seem to have such small "hit boxes" that your weapon will fail to make contact about 90% of the time, even when standing right on top of them.

This game also has one of the worst magic systems I've seen in any RPG in a very long time. If you want to be a mage, you will have to act as a very gimped fighter while building up your magic knowledge for at least the first 20 or 30 levels- assuming all your learning points go to this cause. It takes that long to even begin to be able to put your weapon away and use magic reliably. Even then, you will still have to resort to melee combat about 80% of the time- due to such a low amount of mana and no real way of recovering mana in combat. It takes an absurd amount of time to drink a potion and recover mana and just isn't a feasible option for combat situations. There are very few spells in the game, and of the spells that do exist, most will be unavailable to you- which one are will depend on your choices. At least one spell is listed in your spell book which doesn't even exist without cheating you obtain it.

The story is almost nonexistant. Orcs took over the land of humans, and some rebels are fighting to gain back independance. That is 60% of the story in those two sentences. The voice acting is aweful- you will have to listen to the same monotonous tone throughout the game with no variations in speech at all. The music always plays (there is no option to turn it off), and there is only two songs- one that plays by default and another that plays during battle- and they both get very boring very quickly.

There are only two good things I can say about this game: 1) The graphics are fairly nice. They aren't the best graphics out there right now (especially considering the unusually high system requirements for the game), but it's still fairly good. 2) It is fun to choose sides between the orcs and humans and kill off the other group. But neither of these things make up for the extreme headaches the game will cause you.

The game is incomplete, broken, and hopelessly flawed beyond repair. I strongly urge you not to waste your money- you will be disappointed if you do.

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