Gothic 3

by Aspyr

Product Features

• Huge free-roaming, hand-crafted world with no loading times once you are in the game
• All new combat system that allows unprecedented control over melee attacks
• Clear, non-linear objectives within the main story allow the player to influence the outcome of the narrative
• "New Civilizations ¿ Six new civilizations will be included, giving you even more options when planning your domination of the world

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000FJTOL2
• Item Weight: 8 ounces
• Media: DVD-ROM
• Release Date: November 13, 2006
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #22,455 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)

Product Description

Players saved their home island Khorinis from the forces of evil in Gothic and Gothic 2. Now it is time to travel to the realms of the mainland, where invading Orcs have enslaved the human kingdom. There are only a few free humans living in the nearly uninhabitable icy northlands of Nordmar and in the southern desert of Varrant, and a handful of rebels hiding in the mountainous forests of the Middle Realm. Players can choose to join the rebellion and stay true to the deposed human king, serve the Orcish usurpers in their quest to topple the last remaining human stronghold, or choose a path that serves their own ends. Every decision made will have an impact on the game world and tip the balance of power. There is no simple linear story in Gothic 3 - every game will be different and unique, with the player ultimately deciding the fate of humankind.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

178 of 197 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The worst game I have ever played, November 19, 2006

By 

Jesse Rouse (Kenosha, WI) - See all my reviews

= Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Gothic 3 (DVD-ROM)

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.

64 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars One of the holiday season's biggest disappointments, November 23, 2006

By 

Robert Jordan (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

= Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Gothic 3 (DVD-ROM)

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.

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A real BALANCED review, December 8, 2006

By 

Johnson - See all my reviews

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Gothic 3 (DVD-ROM)

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.