When a game fails due to premature release, it often drags a system that wasn’t worth a hoot in the first place down with it. Gothic 3 defies the latter odds, packing all the components of an outstanding, often astonishing freeform roleplaying game...which makes it doubly heartbreaking, then, that Piranha Bytes felt compelled to launch it in such a problematic, buggy state.

Man a la Myrtana

Welcome back, man-with-no-name. You’ve survived imprisonment (Gothic), battles with deadly undead monsters (Gothic 2), and finally hopped off the island setting of the prior two games, only to find the mainland kingdom of Myrtana overrun by orcs who’ve enslaved most of the human populace. As a freelance mercenary, you can explore the entire continent at your leisure and optionally side with your human kin, buddy up to the orcs, or disavow both factions. Yeah, sure, you’re probably saying...just some arbitrary decision and a pat on the back, right? Not quite. To lessen that sense of sliding down plot chutes, Gothic 3 gauges your standing with various factions and locations in accordance with what you do and for whom as you traipse around Myrtana’s forests, deserts, and snowy highlands.

You’ll eventually make lasting changes to the continent itself. Say you side with the humans, for instance, in which case you’ll have to liberate cities from orc rule, after which NPC rebels scattered throughout the region will actually move in and set up shop. And when fixed story events do occur, they’re cumulatively justified, as opposed to handholding “directives” with only nominal relationship to your character’s actions. It’s hardly the stuff of a George R. R. Martin novel, but we’re at least talking good and evil on a more abstruse Ultima scale, with none of the cosmic black and white nonsense you’re forced to swallow in other RPGs.

Fetch and Fight

As usual, you’ll have to level up attributes like strength, thieving, mana and more alongside skills like fighting, magic and alchemy. You’ll do this by battling creatures, improving relations with NPCs and ultimately completing quests. Most of those quests involve turning errand-boy for the usual cast of do-gooders and ne’er-do-wells, but what distinguishes Gothic 3 from its peers is the design teams’ fastidious attention to personalized details. Instead of merely following schedules, for instance, Gothic 3’s NPCs actually do things, like stirring bubbling kettles, jawing around campfires, smoking, drinking, hammering swords on anvils, and frankly behaving more like real people with jobs and social roles than other games, where NPCs seem like glorified signposts.

It’s a concept extended to non-humans as well. At night, wilderness creatures stop roaming to lie under rocks or crouch in grassy areas and sleep, leading to plenty of “oh crap” moments, say if you stumble into a herd of snoozing scavengers or bloodflies after dark. And the creatures are more often than not static encounters: clear an area in Myrtana and you won’t return later to find some ridiculously overpowered wolf or wild boar waiting to pounce.

Arts and Crafts

We’ve read for months just how mind-blowing Oblivion is, so here’s something--Gothic 3 may be even better. After you’ve played Oblivion for a dozen hours, I dare you not to notice how Bethesda’s magnum opus starts frittering away depth for breadth. Oblivion may be visually jaw-dropping and gi-normous, but once you’ve scoped a few of its dungeons, churches, taverns, guilds, forests, and hellish alternate dimensions, you’ve pretty much done them all.

Gothic 3 on the other hand maintains a handcrafted distinctness that’s stitched into every last inch of its capacious go-anywhere game spaces, from the overhanging pine-draped cliff tops sheltering decrepit strongholds, to the vast honeycombed grottoes concealing an ostensible ecology of subterranean critters. Imagine a more deliberate, less random version of Oblivion without the beautiful but often empty-headed characters and look-alike locations and you’re glimpsing Gothic 3.

Alas, a glimpse is often all you’ll get between the frequent crashes, plot snaps, and occasionally funky interface foibles, a situation only somewhat corrected by recent patching. Even then, the designers have miles to go before they sleep, and because early buzz is everything on this side of the pond, those miles end up marking off the distance between “home run” and “woulda-shoulda-coulda.”

Roach Playing Game

For starters, the game has a tendency to crash when loading or saving games, which is arguably the worst sort of bug a game can have, and you’ll sometimes have to contend with quests that can’t be finished because the game won’t acknowledge their completion. Lovely. NPCs occasionally stick next to crates, jerk spasmodically in place, or tumble through objects, and for some inexplicable reason looking into the sun conjures a “lens flare” effect that’s as disruptive as it is anachronistic. (It even shows up in caves, which might be fine if “x-ray vision” were on your list of character skills.) And whether you’re playing on a top notch system or not, the terrain processing system is so bungled that you’ll intermittently suffer 10 second hangs waiting for new topographical features to load. Doh.

But it’s combat that really gets sand in your shorts, premised as it is on an all-or-nothing system with only minor deviation as you level. Using the left and right mouse buttons in combination with different keystrokes, you can punch or swing your weapon, parry, fling spells, fire missile weapons, and carry off finishing blows. Unfortunately the entire melee framework seems to pivot around two approaches: attacks and fast backups. Engage an enemy, any enemy, and they’ll either lunge or step back...and keep stepping back to the extent you can mad-click them right off the edges of cliffs, buildings, ledges, bridges, and so on. So much for tactics.

Wait For It

Disappointed hardly describes what I felt playing Gothic 3. It’s a glorious mess of an RPG with incredible potential, but released much too soon, and therefore bound for the bargain bins. The best we can hope for is a serious patch and perhaps thereafter an expansion pack to give it a second lease. It certainly deserves one.

Article by: Matt Peckham
Video produced by: Michael Benson