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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.

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...

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!

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.

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.

If it actually worked, it would be great

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: January 31, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This could be a great game if it worked. I'm willing to put up with its balkiness, but what really frosts me is that it crashes regularly (say, once every hour or so of play). The mildest of the crashes necessitate my turning off the computer entirely and restarting it and the game. (This usually requires CTRL-ALT-Delete.) Then there are the crashes that won't allow me to restart but require me to literally unplug the computer to get out of the game. Finally, there are the crashes that necessitate my uninstalling and reinstalling the game itself. (Fortunately, the most recent save files still work.) Technical support is no help; Aspyr is the helpless victim of JoWood, which apparently has not seen fit yet to fix the American version. (I'm not sure what the status is of the German version.) The only help they offer (besides a refund or exchange) is a list of several hundred user suggestions about different things to try with the .ini file. Perhaps someday it will come out in a version that actually runs; when that occurs, I will recommend it highly. Until then, you had better keep your receipt if you buy it.
Apart from these problems, I enjoy playing the game. My low rating comes because in my view the game does not come up to the minimum technical requirement any game should have -- namely, to be relatively free of bugs before release. I think lawyers would say that the game does not provide the basic "warrant of merchantability".

shiny frisbee

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: February 06, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I cannot get this to work. I have installed this on two newer machines which well exceed the minimum requirements. One has an ATI card and one has nVidia. The installers and drivers are all up to date. When I buy a game, I expect to put it in my DVD drive and play it. This game requires you to have moderately advanced computer knowledge even to start the game, which I have yet to experience. If you enjoy becoming frustrated, then this is the game for you.

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.

If you like punching your computer screen in frustration then buy this title!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: May 14, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Before I bought this I did some reading up on the product and so I waited for it to go on sale. I bought for $20 and brought it home. Within a few hours I was already flipping out in frustration with the game. Not only was it slow and jittery but the commands are so unrefined and thought out that I was amazed that this is actually for sale. I think the people who did the testing on the product were the same batch of testers in the film Grandma's Boy. This half baked title from Piranha should win them the embarrassment merit badge. Here are some of my complaints:
1) The load times are terribly slow and I got a lot of house work done waiting in between saves.
2) German is in place of English in some cases
3) Conflicting information is given at times to complete quests.
4) Items such as carts, sacks, or rocks are in the way of ore and other materials.
5!) The character can really only walk or fight on a clean surface. If there is a rock, brick or minor curvature to the landscape (such as the side of a tunnel) he will slide and therefore can't fight, guard, and even go to a menu.
6) I have never sworn so much in my life over anything due to the frustrations of the game.
7) The ideas are so unoriginal. It is a mix between TES III Morrowind and Fable with none of the good parts of either.
8) you have to make a concerted effort to kill a orc or human by "targeting" the knocked out body and hold in the right then left mouse buttons which really does not work. You will just get killed trying to do this in a big fight.
9) You can't really choose to target anything it is whatever is kinda infront of you. After an enemy is knocked out you go to the next one and sometimes that is a friendly... not good; press load and go do the laundry.
10) the character will fall through the world and will engage characters in conversation although they are in another building or floor.
11) You can't withdraw your weapon while being hit and if you get caught in a flurry of hits just press F9 and go do some more laundry.
12) Sometimes the character while in battle will slide on a little rock and sheath the weapon and then look at the fool pounding him into oblivion... and I can go on

Don't buy this game! If you like something more for adults and want a game that pulls you in and much more refined buy Oblivion. If you want something that is more cute and fun then play Fable. If you want an excuse to kick your dog then buy Gothic 3 and look for my ad for this on Ebay in the "weird things" section.

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