User Reviews (1 - 11 of 54)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

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.

Incredible story with incredible gameplay

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 14 / 23
Date: November 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I played Gothic 2 a couple of years ago the whole way through. The gameplay was great, and made me want more right away. When Gothic 3 came out, I was more than excited. The game is not only great to play and addicting in a sense, but also easy to pick up on. One of my friends was able to start his own new game without ever playing and pick up on the controls and feel for the game almost right away.

The game is easy to warm up to, and with great features like graphics, voice acting, and a classic storyline, Gothic 3 should definitely be an addition to your library if you're an RPG fan. I have played many games like World of Warcraft, Neverwinter Nights 1/2, Guild Wars, Oblivion, the Final Fantasies and such, and Gothic stills can hold its own in many areas. The fact that it is so free roaming and that the environment and outcome of the game responds to everything you do is incredible. Simply killing one wrong person in the game can alter the storyline. The ability to free roam and quest without being pulled along through very restricted areas, like in Guild Wars, is one of the number one drawing factors for myself.

Gothic 3 has many great features that I might not even have discovered yet. I am about 1/2 of the way or so into the game now, and I'm learning new things about it everytime I start it up. Gothic 3 is simply unique and I guess you're just going to have to try it for yourself. Good luck, and have fun!

Good Game by too hungry on system resources

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 10 / 14
Date: November 18, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Great graphics and a good story line following on from Gothic 2. Lots of ways to develop you character and follow the story line through BUT wouldn't suggest it for anyone that doesn't have a top spec machine. My machine meets all the requirements and easily plays similar games (e.g. Elder Scrolls Oblivion) but struggles a lot with Gothic 3. So my experince is of a slow loading and very laggy game on 3.2GHz, 1Gb Ram, 256 Graphics... even when I've set some of the detail of the Graphics lower). It's prone to crash every so often as well. So I'll put the game into storage and play it again when my technology has caught up.

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.

Do not buy this game yet

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 24
Date: November 20, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game was released way too early obviously - I have 2 computers and on my main computer it was unplayable - it was so choppy moving around and it froze alot of times - I even updated my video card and tried everything but that did nothing - when I put the game on high quality not only was it very choppy it turned all the animals into black boxes as well.

On my other computer I couldnt even play it I got a video card error and forced to restart and my computer told me it recovered from a serious error.

I would wait on this game until their are patches that fix this unplayable game - I seriously can't understand how video game companies release games full of bugs that need to be fixed - I feel very bad for the people who don't have an online connection and can't download the patches needed to play it. Next time don't release a game unless it's ready to play!

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...

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.

Don't bother.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 16
Date: November 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing computer games for a longggg time and this one takes the cake as far as disappointments go. The last games I remember this bad and poorly put together/prereleased were Ultima IX, and Pagan. Take note Gothic programmers, they made a lot of money and put out some very good games before they lost their minds and wasted everyone's time and money. This is only number 3 and I doubt there will be a Gothic 4 after this, planning on Gothic Online next are you? I will not go into everything wrong as most of the other reviewers have covered it well; needless to say, my computer is fine and runs Oblivion with no problems with all graphical options maxed. The main thing is the load and same times, I felt like I was back and the mid 80's waiting for my C64 to start up (I said I've been around a while). It's not just bad, and horrific, it's like watching cable TV, a 1 hour show and 35 minuets of commercials only here you watch they same load screen again, and again, and again. It enough to make you avoid anything that might kill you because you have to "quick (LONG) load" again, that is if you haven't already fallen into some void to the middle of the earth and feel like "nowhere man". If your like me and enjoyed the challenge of the monsters is Gothic II, forget it with Gothic 3, just left click until everything is dead, don't bother blocking, monster and NPC's can't even gang up on you properly with your "super left click of destruction", occasionally you do get killed and get to load again, OHHH fun, think I'll scrub the commode while I wait.
Shame on me for breaking my own rule of ordering before I saw any other users reviews, but I took a chance as I thought that the people who make Gothic II which I thought was one of the best role playing games ever made would follow suit and put out another superior game. Boy, was I wrong. Don't buy it, don't copy it, (which is wrong anyway, and really wrong here) it's not worth wasting a blank DVD. Run away.

Where is the guru?

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 10
Date: November 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Yes, that's what it says in the box on my screen -- as Gothic 3 crashes. I'd like to know where he is myself, and if I find him, he's in big trouble.

Plenty of bugs in this released-too-early game, and despite what defenders of the game say, they are not all graphics related. Examples: you meet an NPC, and his dialogue is silent (you can't hear it); you select a line of dialogue -- your character speaks a different line of dialogue; no matter what you do, your character can't lock onto the attacking animal -- you clobber a friendly NPC instead or you can't do anything; game crashes; and then there are the graphics related problems -- stuck in solid objects, animals and orcs stuck in walls, point of view spins wildly and you end up looking upwards from INSIDE your character.

Balance is a huge problem. There seems to be no NPC capable of defeating any animal. The mighter hunter of Faren can't deal with a single lurker; Rathgar the mighty warrior can't handle a single wolf. YOU can't handle animals -- the stun lock problem has already been discussed. On the other hand, huge armies of orcs are no problem at all, because you fight them one at a time as you lock on to them, while the others pretty much wait their turn. The problem of locking on to the attacking animal or NPC means that you hit a friendly; and then the friendlies attack you. More amusing, even the friendlies have a problem locking on correctly and then they end up killing each other. After Gotha was all solved, Gorn was killed by orcs when wolves attacked; guess he hit an orc instead of a wolf, oh well. Hope I won't need him for anything else.

And as has been mentioned elsewhere, save and load are iiinnncccrrrreeeddddiiiiibbbbbllllllyyyy slow. You have to play with a good book in your hand or while watching TV, because you'll be saving and loading often.

Many of the quests are either dumb or dumbed down, which takes a lot of fun out of the game. There's nothing puzzling and there is no moment when it is at all unclear what you are supposed to do. Makes things a little tedious.

Combat involves left clicking as fast as you can, or finding a spot to plug arrows into animals and NPCs that obligingly return to exactly the same spot so you can shoot them again. The great horrible demon of Gotha that decimated an entire town of paladins can be killed by a level one player by shooting arrows into him as he stands in the entryway to the castle.

However, the graphics are pretty and the game world is large, which is nice for exploring. I haven't had the corrupted save games problem that others have mentioned, thank Inos. And I keep playing the thing, so I suppose I must be getting some entertainment value of it. But the problems involved keep it from being one of those engrossing games where you get lost for hours. It's more something to do for a half an hour while taking a break from cleaning the kitchen. Too bad.

Better than Elder Scrolls: Oblivion! Best RPG of 2006!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 21
Date: November 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I am so shocked by all the other bad reviews this game has recieved on Amazon.

Once I started playing Gothic 3,.. I can't go back to Oblivion. It's just so much more fun!

Yes,.. it does crash because of bugs. (It's happened five times to me in the past two weeks.) It needs a patch, but I'm sure one will show up soon.

Othar than that,.. I have no complaints.

There are no load times except for when the game first loads! The open free-roaming game world streams off of your hard-drive and requires a top-of-the-line game PC to run effectively. It's great to not see any load screens in the game.
The graphics are as good if not slightly better than the graphics in Oblivion. The landscape and foliage and water all look realistic and natural. The character and creature animations are definitely better than Oblivion. The movements are much more fluid and life-like.

You may not be able to create your own character's appearance,... but you can completely customize the skills and abilities.

Gothic 3 doesn't hold your hand like Oblivion. You don't have a big arrow pointing out the solution to every problem. When someone gives you a quest it's up to you to find out how to get to where you need to go and what to do. There's actually an element of exploration since there isn't always a marker pointing exacly where you objective is. It's truly non-linear.
The story starts as the Orcs have overthrown the human kingdom and are now taking human slaves. Some human "rebel fighters" are trying to strike back and re-take the kingdom. It's totally up to you how the story goes. You could help the rebels,.. or become a mercenary for the now ruling Orcs,.. or whatever you want. You have actual conversation choices with NPC's as opposed to the simple keyword clicking of Oblivion.
You can make your own weapons, your own food, your own potions (with alchemy).

Yes, I've played Gothic 2,.. and Gothic 3 is better in every way.

The combat is waaaay better than the combat in Gothic 2 and is slightly better than the combat in Oblivion. Yes,.. if you just do nothing but click then the enemies will dodge,.. you need to learn to parry and move around the enemies defenses.

The voice acting may be kinda' cheesy,.. and it needs a patch to fix the crashes,.. but otherwise Gothic 3 is an Oblivion-killer if your PC exceeds the minimum requirements. (the bugginess and voice acting is why I give it four stars instead of five.)

Sadly,.. as you can see from the other reviews,.. Gothic 3 is destined to be an underrated, underdog game that won't get the success it deserves.

Review Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next 

Actions