Gothic 3

[Lemur]

Hi Husar, yes, I autopatched it to the latest version. I hadn't read up on the bugs, so I wasn't aware that I was experiencing two known issues. And yeppers, my gaming rig has 2 gigs of ram, so I fit the profile nicely.

I guess I'll put it back on the shelf and see how it looks in a few months with some more patches.

[Husar]

Hi Husar, yes, I autopatched it to the latest version. I hadn't read up on the bugs, so I wasn't aware that I was experiencing two known issues. And yeppers, my gaming rig has 2 gigs of ram, so I fit the profile nicely.

I guess I'll put it back on the shelf and see how it looks in a few months with some more patches.

Heh, the weird thing is that the bugs are mostly supposed to be fixed already, for example the ambient-soundbug(ambient sounds starting repeatedly again and again, resulting in a machine-gun sound) was supposedly fixed with the last patch, but it's still there. The memory bug that appears when you quicksave was supposedly fixed as well, but I still don't use quicksave, the best thing seems to be to use three usual savegames and rotate them. For the next patch they wanted to improve the balancing a bit(rework the whole fighting maybe) IIRC, but I'M quite curious as to how that turns out, the biggest annoyance so far was that I couldn't finish the quest that is mandatory in order to be able to learn how to make ore-only weapons(or whatever the best weapons are called in the english version), simply because I finished part of that quest accidentally before I even got the sub-quest(well, it doesn't count as completed).
The thing that bugs me a bit by now is that they always need a whole lot of time to fix some ten bugs or so and some of the fixes are not really working for everyone etc. If you compare that to the Medieval 2 bugfix lists, TW gamers have to be quite happy people(luckily, I play both ).

[Bob the Insane]

I finally picked this up...

Now I enjoyed Gothic 2 though I never finished it, the endless fighting got to me in the end and unfortunately Gothic 3 coincided with Oblivion. I tried the Gothic 3 demo when it was released but was not impressed and found it awkward...

Well I was rooting around for an RPG. I had tried mods to make Oblivion more interesting and all but was still looking for something new. I saw this again, saw the patches and community updates and thought well it can't be that bad so i got it...

Wow, OMFG, etc... this is fantastic...

I have a reasonably beefy machine (dualcore extreme, 2GB RAM, 8800GTX, etc) so can run it in all it's graphical splender (and even used the nvidia control panel to force a higer level of AA).

What can I say, this is a sweet game. Don't judge it just by the demo, the starting area is pretty undeveloped, there are some much more interesting castles settlements to follow... The world is smaller tham oblivion but I this it is more interestingly designed and the way the different factions are not painted black and white (as far as good/evil is concerned) is great.
While overall the tha game is not that open ended, you have pretty definate goals but it feels open. Feels like you are doing want you want to ...

What can I say... If you are in the market for an RPG (which is unashamably directed towards conflict rather than peaceful resolution) then i would give this a go...

[Husar]

Have you tried the latest community patches?
Since Piranha Bytes and JoWood split upo there won't be any official patches, instead JoWood workes with some guys from the community who were going to try it anyway and now release community patches to fix broken quests, make unlearnable perks available etc.(oh and the latestchangelog says "- Censoring of nude women removed.", whatever that means ) You can read the changelog here and get the patch from here though I'd advise to read the readme if there is one, haven't tried the community patches myself so far but I think I'll do that some time.

[Bob the Insane]

I have used the community patches and they seem to help (they appears to mainly fix broken quests)...

I have revisied my opinion a little now that I have reach the northern area where combat is feeling a bit more of a grind (can't go ten paces without running into some preditor or others). The over all impression from the boards and the game experience so far is that the middle area Mrytana is better finished that the others but it is still fun.

Overall still having a good time...

[Tran]

I'd like to know more about this "community patch". How large is it?

Also,

Since Piranha Bytes and JoWood split upo

I know this is slight off-topic, but what the...?

[Husar]

Well, Piranha Bytes are the developers of Gothic since day 1, JoWood was the publisher at least here in Europe. Lately they had some disagreements about how to go on etc and canceled their relations. Now JoWood owns the rights to the Gothic series apparently, so they will make Gothic 4(and apparently they want to make it more mainstream). Piranha Bytes can make a new game but they can't call it Gothic anymore. I think it's similar to the Operation Flashpoint story where Codemasters will bring OFP2 while Armed Assault is the new game from Bohemia Interactive, the developer.

But the problem with Gothic 3 is that the game was quite buggy and there was (at least they said there was) a patch in the works which was meant to redo a lot of things, fix some bugs etc, they even spoke about redoing the combat system. But since the two companies split up, there will be no more official patch and some community members went and tried to fix what they could fix themselves. Then JoWood went and contacted some of them about forming an unofficial team under the lead of the JoWood community manager. They also wanted to provide the team with some tools and source code and probably money to fix bugs. The result of this seem to be these community patches.

And they're rather small I think, few MBs only.