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171 of 189 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The worst game I have ever played, November 19, 2006
Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars
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.
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63 of 74 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
One of the holiday season's biggest disappointments, November 23, 2006
Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars
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.
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29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Your mileage may vary..., November 29, 2006
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
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.
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