Hello, I often read these forums and have decided to post for once. My Gothic 3 (german) has arrived yesterday morning and since then I have played it quite extensively.

I quickly noted many things I did NOT like :

The combat has really gotten worse. As it is now, when you fight an enemy you often either win without a scratch or are killed without doing any damage. Often when you are hit you never get the chance to recover and the enemy keeps on hitting you until you are dead. It's the same when you hit first and so most arena combats are rather easy. I have not lost once, regardless of me never skilling anything related to melee. I am a mage.

The game is still really buggy, even after the patch. Sometimes, it crashes and sometimes it crashes during Quicksaving which means you shouldn't rely on that. Somewhat amusing is that if I close Gothic 3 properly I can't restart it without restarting Windows (error while loading). But if it crashes during gameplay I can restart it.

Sometimes the game is inconsistent and in combations with bugs this is not a godd thing. I'll talk about my most frustrating experience in the game :

-I get two Quests from an Orc :
1. Cleanse a Mine from Orcs
2. Bring Miners to the Mine

Now, he gives me no directions at all. Instead, he tells me I should let a Slave show me the way. OTOH he warns me not to take a Slave before I kill the wolves.

First Try : Take the Slave and Quest fails because the Wolves instantly eat him.
Second Try : Go alone. Discovers that the Wolves are not hittable by fireballs (don't connect). Die.
Third Try : Swordfight. Killed three Wolves, still at full health. Then one wolf manages to hit me and I die, before able to recover.
Fourth Try : Swordfight. Doing good. Then attacked by an Wolves from below who has sunk into the ground and is barely visible. Die.

Otherwise, the game mostly looks as good as promised. There are some strange things with the detail levels doing on (looking at the open ocean is aweful).

Atmosphere is very Gothic, Varant (Desert) is very nice as well. I still don't really have a clue what I should do. Complete freedom so far. Unfortunately, I still have no clue what I should really do next. So, I am going around and do some exploring.

Quest Log is a shame. For example I have a Quest to find twelve Goblets (in different cities). Clues are not recorded and NPCs give them only once! Goblets are not visible in Inventory, so I have no clue how many I have. Neither do I know WHICH of them I do have.

Anyway, I still like it. There are many different fractions and they war against each other. You have to decide which to support. The World is large, exploration is rewerded and it's not as random as Oblivion

Otherwise, I don't really know how to skill my character. Hitpoints are now something you have to invest Learning Points in. For Magic you need "Old Knowledge". I still have no idea in which proportions to skill talents like Alchemy, Staff Combat, Fast Learning and things like Mana, Health and Knowledge.

Magic looks nice, but it's still the same old potion guzzling thing. Well at Knowledge 250 I can learn a Talent which lets me regenerate Mana without sleeping. If you have any question, I'll try to answer them. Sorry for any spelling/grammar mistakes.

Let me use this thread for my own first time post and to add some impressions.


The good:

1. It feels very Gothic-esque. If you have played 1 and/or 2 you'll feel at home right away.

2. Combat is more than just button mashing. In fact, if you try button mashing, you're dead in about 0.7 seconds.

3. The world is big and feels alive, i.e. towns getting liberated etc. Also, most of the side quests have a connection to the story and aren't just some random task by some random villager.

4. Voice acting is very good. But then, I'm playing the german version. :p

5. The world looks nice and is fun to explore with all that fancy cliffs and canyons and stuff.


The bad:

1. Like already mentioned, it feels quite unpolished. Lots of little glitches. Most are harmless, like corpses floating in mid-air or an occasional animation problem (which results, among others, in walking over the water  ), but I also managed to get stuck in the world geometry twice. And yes, the longer you play, the slower it gets and eventually it'll crash. Memory leaks ahoi!

2. Performance is generally quite bad. It feels like it's more demanding than Oblivion and Far Cry combined, which is kinda strange because it doesn't look THAT good.

3. Yeah, Gothic games have always been hard and I remember cursing Gothic 2 a lot, but getting my level 10 fighters ass whooped five time in a row by a lonely common wolf is just wrong. Combat is HARD, especially against enemies that don't use weapons (mostly animals). You can't block their blows and they are really fast. One single mistake and you're as good as dead.

4. The quest log is a bit weak. I certainly don't want a hud build into my helmet that guides me throug the quest like I'm on auto pilot, but a LITTLE more information wouldn't hurt. As it is, the log only lists the town where you got the quest and a record of the converstation that led to it.

5. Graphics are mostly neat, but yes, the LOD system causes some hideous shit in the distance. Especially with the water.

Bearing in mind I haven't got far:

The world/atmosphere is well implemented, the people I have met so far (rebel fighters) are believable and I like the music. The game seems open ended, there are 7 (I think) factions and it seems unlikely that their goals align such that you can be friends with them all. There is a very high stag concentration amoungst the deer, roughly 100% I would say.

I concur with Ammar regarding combat, vs 1 human opponent it is easy to win (trivially, as opposed to how it is 'easy' for me to win in mount & blade now that I am good at it). Multiple opponents generally involves a good deal of running away for example one early quest has you killing some boar, all well and good except they killed me several times untill I found a helpful spot on the map where they couldn't get to me (instead standing around until they died, I hope this AI is only for animals). Potion drinking takes time, making it a bad idea in combat.

The character system also is open ended, on leveling you gain learning points which are used to upgrade the PC. These upgrades can only be purchased at trainers and have two types, atributes: strength, hunting, ancient knowledge, smithing, thieving, alchemy, hit points, mana, endurance. Most of the atributes have 'skills' associated with them, which may open up new weapon types, potion types for alchemy, allow you to smith ore weapons, regenerate mana, take skins from killed animals. There is also negotiating but this only refers to trade. These skills require you to meet a prerequsite in the parent attribute. There are also spells/blueprints/recipes. The blueprints (smithing)/recipies (alchemy) require components + facilities.

The game is a big resource hog, though I get roughly 30fps with most things turned up on my shiny pc (once the surroundings are loaded). The world is only seemless if you don't like running far, or turning around, maybe if I turn the graphics down. Obviously it looks good, I would say that the starting village is better than Oblivions towns though O has an edge in forest regions. Saving/loading takes a while, still, this adds extra value to the characters life . The game also takes ages to quit, I probably need more ram (have 1gb currently which is listed as the minimum requirement.)

   
Same impression here. I think thats known as juggling in some 2D-fighting games. Gothic 1/2 combat was a dynamic affair of blocking, dodging and all that. All the combat in Gothic 3 so far for me was either backing up from an enemy in a "combo" frenzy waiting till i could get a hit in to start my own combo frenzy (or until i got stuck on something and got chewed) or swinging away at an enemy backing up until a hit connected. Blocking is rather useless in that situation. Also, no more directional button combos, all you need to do for the good ol left-right-left is click a mouse button repeatedly.

That way i clicked the entire orc population of Kap Dun to death. With the help of some quicksaving and some Paladin named Wenzel, supposedly a great fighter, but infact nothing more than a punching bag serving as a distraction so i didnt get mobbed as bad. And why? Because the NPCs regulary get locked up in the "one man swings, one man backs up cha cha cha" dance (Not to mention they got shit on animals which basically do the same but with Arcanum Mutt machinegun attack frequency). After i died on one of the tries i watched him doin this with a guy who was unarmed because i took his sword after i won against him in the arena. The guy swung his fists mightily, Wenzel kept on hopping backwards cowardly and all the orcs who had ganked me before stood there watching retardedly, what fun.

I really really wanna like the game and i really really hope the stuff to come blows my lid off to make up for the combat which in my humble opinion got mutilated to something which could be described as "arse". Tier 2 of 3 in Swordmanship doesnt make any difference to tier 1 except for damage as far as i can tell, opposed to the other games where the skill accounted not only for new combos but how well you could execute them and your chance for a crit. Seems all the drones screaming WAH WHA COMBAT SYSTEM SUCKS AND IM SO WEAK CHEATZ? got their way. Ill keep on playing in hope my eyes open and i magically see what i didnt see before and all is happy and well but atm my enthusiasm is somewhat dimmed :/

As an fyi this was in response to this post:

Well, I got my Collector's Edition of G3 yesterday morning. I've been
hesitant to post much about it yet because I have not had a lot of
tíme to
experiment and I am afraid of being too negative since my initial
impressions were underwhelming. But here are some early and rather
general
thoughts:

- On my P4 3.0Ghz HT, 1 GB RAM, X700 with 256 MB, I cannot play the
game
sufficiently well even on the medium settings, and the medium settings
look
much worse than Oblivion (the environment doesn't look good at all on
medium settings). On low details, the game looks at least five years
old.
G2 on maximum settings looks *heaps* better than G3 on medium, on the
same
machine. The engine that G3 uses is either not optimised or it is a
resource hog. Oblivion looks better than G3, and has significantly
lower
reqs. People who have very high-end machines and cards report that it
looks
fantastic, though still doesn't seem to justify the very high
requirements.
Do not assume that if Oblivion runs well on your machine, Gothic 3 will

also run well on your box.

- The combat system is FPS-oriented now. That makes it a lot more
twitchy,
which is a double-edged blade. On one hand, it now uses standard
controls
(ASDW, mouse buttons to hit/parry, mouse to pick up/move/use stuff,
etc.),
but it also makes the expierience more arcade-like and heavy on the
wrists.
It's clearly faster-paced than G2 and especially G1.

- The voice acting is as poor as it was in G1 and G2. Note here that I
play
the German version, so this doesn't necessarily apply to the English
version. Music and environmental sounds are high quality, though. The
soundtrack CD that comes with the CE is a treasure. Sound isn't
flawless,
though. Notably, the "readying the sword" sound is completely missing.

- Models of NPCs look strange, Diego has a tiny little head (think
"shrunken head" here), everyone walks unrealistically and a bit "stick
up
the ass"-like, It all seems a bit artificial, and the environemnt
doesn't
seem as lush as in Oblivion -- but that can be said about the older
Gothics
also. What is nicely done is the weapon handling and the combat
animations.

- Story-wise I'm not far enough into the game to really say anything
worthwhile, much less without spoiling the introduction. But I'll say
that
I have not been overwhelmed with the dialog options so far and that I
had
my first "wtf?!" story-related moment fifteen minutes into the game
when I
encountered a situation that absolutely didn't seem to go with the
story.

- Character development (learning points, attributes, trainers, etc)
and
inventory management (categories, unlimited room no weight
restrictions)
are the same as in the other Gothics. Magic works a little different
now
since rune magic has vanished (part of the story). Interaction with
NPCs
and shopkeepers (trading and balanacing the value with gold) is the
same
also.

Okay, I realise that this sounds a bit negative. So, let me say that
this
game definitely seems to have promise and potential, but it seems
unfinished as of today (now, that's a surprise!). It's not as
unfinished as
Dungeon Lords was (did the actually fix this? I lost track and interest

some time ag), but you will already notice the lack of polish and
fine-tuning after a few minutes into the game. It is also a hardware
hog.
Unless you have a very high-end computer, you are not very likely to
fully
enjoy Gothic 3. I was afraid of that, but I thought I could handle
lower
settings. Truth be told, this engine does not scale down very well, and
you
do need more than 1 GB of RAM.

I guess what I'm getting at is that Gothic 3 will probably a fantastic
game
in a year or so, when the broad audience has more advanced machines and

when many patches have been released. Right now, I would recommend it
only
to a small number of people, not to everyone.

I'll spend some more time with the game on the weekend and see if I can

tweak the performance in the INI files. I am not overly hopeful,
though,
and I'm looking forward to NWN2. Also, a second patch has already been
announced. The first one was released yesterday, a day before the
official
release date. 60 MB large and it only addressed minor issues (wild
boars
being impossibly hard, to name one of these important issues that were
fixed).