Gothic 3 review

Here we go, my first game review ever, but everybody has to start somewhere. I know there’s a lot of Gothic 3 reviews out there on the internet and it’s a year old game, but I also think I’ve got something new to say about it.

Gothic 2 is one of my favourite role-playing games and Gothic 1 is in my top twenty, so I expected a lot from the third sequel. Now after I’ve finished it I can say that Gothic 3 isn’t as good as I’ve expected, but it’s a good game and it’s worth playing.

Story

Gothic 2 ended with hero sailing on a ship to Myrtana with his friends after he saved the island of Khorinis from the menace of dragons and orcs. Upon his arrival to Myrtana he finds out that the country has been conquered by orcs thanks to the help of Xardas. King’s castle barely holds out behind a magic barrier surrounding the capital city and there’s also handful a rebels hiding in the woods and caves, not much else is left from the kingdom. Orcs seem to be searching for something in digs around Myrtana and ancient ruins in the southern desert inhabited by mysterious hashishins…

If you don’t know who the hell is Xardas and what did you do on Khorinis, you won’t get much wiser during the game, as it doesn’t explain past events at all and throws you right into the middle of things. This isn’t very user friendly approach to newcomers, a small recap at the beginning (what happened so far, who is who) would be nice. I have one more problem with the story – it has inadequate presentation. It’s kinda difficult to get a bigger picture on what’s going on. Even the most important people (Xardas, king Rhobar, your friends) talk to you just a little bit even when there’s lot to say. For example, king Rhobar threw you into prison back in Gothic 1 – when you meet him, you get over it in about two sentences, then he gives you some quests. Dialogues with old friends were a disappointment for me, they were too brief and sterile, in "tell me about this city and give me some quest" style.

Graphics and sound

Gothic 3 has one of the best graphic presentations in RPG ever, just look at the pictures around. However, it’s also one of the slowest RPGs ever, and graphics can easily get ugly if you scale down resolution and range of sight. It seemed to me that the game actually should be faster, that the engine is not optimalized, and I guess that the game stutters even on the high-level PCs. On my relatively fast computer (Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 2GB RAM, Radeon x1950 Pro 512 MB) the FPS was decent on a high resolution (1024x768) and details, with occasional stuttering.

Soundtrack is excellent, recorded by live orchestra and ethnic bands, it’s as professional as any soundtrack for a Hollywood A movie. Sounds are decent, except for moaning of people when they get hit, it sounds like they aren’t fighting, but f... :)

Gameplay

Main quest is basically just an excuse to explore the land and do a whole lot of side quests. For example, your first task is to find Xardas and you know he’s built a tower somewhere in the north, but you can’t go north yet because the country is full of beasts and you need to be stronger to beat them. So you start doing quests, get experience, get more quests because virtually everyone you meet gives you another quest, gotta finish some because your log is a mess… and several days later you’re stronger and not a step closer to the north. Finally you arrive to the border town and find out that to be allowed to go to further you have to get some reputation with orcs first by doing quests for inhabitants of town... This system is cool, it creates a non-linear, free-roaming gameplay. Problem is that quests get quite repetitive after time, most of them are simple go-there-kill-that variety.

There are several factions in the game: rebels, orcs, hashishins, nordmarians, rangers and nomads. The faction system gives you much more freedom then in previous Gothics – you can side with more than one faction at the same time and your deeds have only effect on your reputation, you can still do quests for another factions. It’s common that rebels tell you to liberate a town occupied by orcs, but before you do it, you can do all the quests for the orcs in that town to get some experience. You can actually get enough reputation to talk to their leader, who wants you to annihilate rebel camp nearby, where you originally came from. Or you can do it the other way around, go to orcs first and then to rebel camp as an orcs mercenary.

Levelling

Levelling system is almost the same as in previous Gothics. When you level up, you get ten learning points (but not extra life points anymore), which you can spent on raising attributes and learning new skills. You can either pray on altar or find a teacher, who will train you for a certain amount of gold. Only few teachers in game can teach you high-level skills and you have to get high reputation within their faction first. Experience really makes a difference, at the start you have hard time to slay even the weakest monster, later in the game you’re cutting through packs of beasts and single-handedly slaying whole camps of orcs.

Levelling is generally easier than in previous Gothics, where you were really missing learning points spent in wrong skills. In Gothic 3 I learned quite a lot of useless skills, but still got enough experience to learn what I needed, and actually I finished the game with about 70 extra learning points which I didn’t need to spent because my character was strong enough.

Combat

There are three means of fighting in world of Gothic: close-range weapons, long-range weapons and magic. I can’t say much about magic, my character was half-figher, half-archer. Originally I wanted to be just a figher, but later I also developed archer skills later because close-range combat was often very flustrating. After you get some experience, decent weapon and armor, you can beat a couple of orcs, but you can’t beat a single wild boar! There are several styles of attack available: fast, medium, strong... but only thing that usually works is non-stop fast attack done by furious mouse-clicking. Winning a fight over group of enemies is usually more a matter of luck than skill, and often you have to „heroically“ flee from battle for a while to heal yourself. Other people can join your party; they are useless as fighters, but very useful as a „shield“ – most of attacks concentrate on them and you can attack opponents from behind and can pick them one at a time, which is effective, but not exactly the way of warrior as I would imagine. Long-range combat is a great addition to close-range combat, you can choose between bows and crossbows. Bows are faster, but do less damage. You can use several special kinds of arrows: fire arrows, knock-down arrows and poisoned arrows, although the last ones are very rare. Combined with high endurance (so you can sprint for a long time), archery is the best option for outdoor fighting– if you don’t kill an opponent until he comes to you, just run away a bit and fire another couple of arrows.

I can’t really say much about a magic: mages use magical staves instead of conventional weapons, you can study several different kinds of magic because each faction has its specific spells (Innos offers basic attack and defense spells, Beliar has lots of summoning spells, druids specialize in transformation magic...), and generally you’ll be quite weak at the beginning, but become very strong near the end of the game.

Each way of combat has its basic attribute - strength for combat, hunting for archery and ancient knowledge for magic - and related set of skills which require various levels of given attribute. For example, you can’t become master swordfighter until your strength isn’t at least 200. Except combat skills you can study smithing, thieving, alchemy and few extra skills like endurance in sprint or resistance to fire and ice.

Myrtana Broadsword Massacre

Some people like to let off steam in RPG. Then you can read a posts in gaming forums like this one: “I went to one town and killed everyone, then I annihilated second town, then another… AHAHAHAHAHA!” Well, if you are into this kind of virtual misbehaviour (to put it mildy), look no further, because in Gothic 3 it’s actually part of storyline. Near the end of the game you have to hack’n’slash cities full of orcs and people, where there’s you alone or with a small party against tens of enemies – I usually lost count of the humans/orcs going against me, but it could be easily over hundred in some cities. So, if you like to cause mayhem in RPG and even get rewarded for it, look no further. Personally I got the impression from it that developers were running out of time and so instead of proper endings they just used what they have to conlude the game somehow, but that’s just my opinion. What is and what should never be

From Gothic 1 you could feel that you didn’t just played the game, you “lived” the game. Unfortunately, this feeling is lost in Gothic 3. In my opinion this time Piranha Bytes “byted” larger piece that they could chew. They wanted to make their most grandiose game for a conclusion of the trilogy, the biggest world, and not just medieval age and orcs, let’s put in desert wasteland with hashishins praying to Beliar and frozen wastes of the north with barbarians… and before you knew it, the world has become too large and producer screams into your phone to finish the game ASAP, so let’s just take what we made so far and wrap it up. The game is obviously rushed, especially the second half. Piranha Bytes deserved more time and patience from their publisher after the success of Gothic 2.

Even with latest official patch, this game is still very bugged, you cannot even learn some skills (to make poisons, for example). Or you spend lots of time and effort to learn forging of pure ore weapons to find out that this skill is practically useless, because there’s no pure ore nor recipes available. You can get one of the best swords early in the game (self-forged and sharpened broadsword) and there’s not much motivation to search for even better sword because you don’t really need it and in time it would take to find it you can finish all three game endings. Either make better weapons more easily accessible or make the game harder, dammit!

Conclusion

All in all, Gothic is a good game with lots of rough edges. It seems like the it was rushed and released several months ahead – unballanced gameplay elements, many bugs, unoptimalized engine. On the other hand, Gothic 3 offers vast, beautiful and atmospheric world with lots of quests to do (if somewhat repetitive), cities and nations to conquer and treasures to find. It’s really nice just to roam around the outdoors and discover new landscapes, settlements, caves… and there’s always something to do, nearly everybody has some quest for you.

If you’re a fan of Gothic series, then you’ll like Gothic 3, but probably not as much as Gothic 1 and 2. If you’re new to Gothic, I’d suggest start with Gothic 2, it’s simply better than Gothic 3 and you don’t need high-end computer to run it on highest resolution and details.