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I'm curious how people trying Gothic III rate it for ease of controls, NPC interactions, non-linearity, combat difficulty, and storyline.

Hiho,

I am playing it since 12th of October (Amazon.de was delivering it one day before the official release-date) and I am deeply impressed.
The fights seem to be more realistic and there are more already fightable enemies at the begin of the game.
Although I am playing at lowest detail since my system is old and slow the grafic is far better than in GII. I am sure you will like it! Ah, one thing I am very happy about is that they put back some features from GI which I missed in GII.
In a short tutorial every menu is explained which makes the game easy to use.
NPC seem to be smarter -> They don't colide with walls, they don't sit down next to a chair but on it... Seems that Piranha did a great job!

Now I am curious how the others like this absolutely fabulous Game!

Have to go back to Myrtana. CU Folks
Keltoi

Keltoi, is combat easier to handle than in previous games, or is it just as counter-intuitive?

Do NPCs keep to schedules?

Does news of something you've done slowly travel to other areas?

Do conditions change in the game, without your intereference? Do people leave towns, or die, or or marry, or start new businesses, without your involvement?

fable wrote:Keltoi, is combat easier to handle than in previous games, or is it just as counter-intuitive?

Do NPCs keep to schedules?

Does news of something you've done slowly travel to other areas?

Do conditions change in the game, without your intereference? Do people leave towns, or die, or or marry, or start new businesses, without your involvement?

You really long for that real life simulation, don't you?

Are there any RPGs that include all this? That question shan't be in any way provocating, I'm just curious because I've yet to play such a RPG and I'd really love to. Any of all the great RPGs I've played couldn't provide such a believable game world. Did I miss one?

I don't think it is a matter of real life simulation... Rather, the fact that in so many games the world is entirely static, and all events are dependent on some kind of action by the player character.
This *is* supposed to be roleplaying... and, IMO, a universe that must be touched by your character in order to function just lacks credibility and hinders the immersive process.

I too am interested in the questions Fable asks. While I don't have the system to run Gothic 3 at present, I'm hoping that I will in the next half year, or so, and this is a game I've been eying up as a possible purchase.

As far as other games that have this. While it was quite minor, I do recall that the town criars in BG2 announced news from afar, unrelated to the PC, and the touts in PS:T did much the same. This was a very simple feature, but it was a nice touch.

Hi there,

is combat easier to handle than in previous games

I found combat not difficult in the previous games but this one is different. You have more possibilitys: You can keep a block, you can use a shield, you can fight a short hit out of a block, you can make short, less efficient hits, normal hits or "power hits" which take more time. It only depends on the length of mouse klicks. Sounds difficult but is really easy to learn.

Do NPCs keep to schedules?

Does news of something you've done slowly travel to other areas?

Yes and yes. AND: NPCs are travelling by foot. So you can meet them even if they went out of your sight. Not like in the previous G's where they walk around as long as you follow them but when you use a teleport they were waiting for you already. I guess Piranha did that to prevent them from sticking on a tree or so. But with the new engine they fixed that. More Info was in the Art Book but my english is far to bad to translate the technical terms properly.

Do conditions change in the game, without your intereference? Do people leave towns, or die, or or marry, or start new businesses, without your involvement?

Sorry, I don't know. As I am working, I don't have the time to play all the day so I can't tell you at this moment.

Best wishes
Keltoi

Thank you for the info, Keltoi. I might add this game to my wish list, though what concerns me is the amount of RAM needed for this game. Considering that I only had 512MB RAM, I'm afraid that my computer might not be able to run this game. Dang. Looks like I really need a memory upgrade sooner or later.

Do conditions change in the game, without your intereference? Do people leave towns, or die, or or marry, or start new businesses, without your involvement?

No. Well, mostly no. People do die sometimes, when they are attacked by a monster while taking a stroll etc, but most of the time the world needs your interference to change. It might sound bad, but the story is crafted so that you arrive in a sort of stale-mate situation, so even though most things can only be influenced by the player, it feels natural.

e: Oh .. and 512MB is painfully inadequate. I have 2GB and the game still stutters at medium settings.

Celos wrote:No. Well, mostly no. People do die sometimes, when they are attacked by a monster while taking a stroll etc, but most of the time the world needs your interference to change.

Damn. I was hoping for something more innovative--like a world that really didn't revolve around just you. Oh, well.

Oh .. and 512MB is painfully inadequate. I have 2GB and the game still stutters at medium settings.

Sheesh. Well, thanks for the head's up. I appreciate your candor.

Celos wrote: Oh .. and 512MB is painfully inadequate. I have 2GB and the game still stutters at medium settings.

Dang. I get the feeling that this game would surely be a system hog just like Oblivion. I do hope that there will be a Gothic 3 benchmark at hardware sites so that I can get the picture of what to expect when playing this game.

Thanks for the info, Celos.

DesR85 wrote:Dang. I'm get the feeling that this game would surely be a system hog just like Oblivion.

I'm in a similar position. I only have 512mb Has anyone tried running the game on an Intel chipset? I have a feeling I may need to completely upgrade my PC if I want to play it but I'm not willing to do that unless the game is good enough to warrant it. Any opinions on whether its worth saving up for an upgrade or should I just not bother?

[quote="fable]Damn. I was hoping for something more innovative--like a world that really didn't revolve around just you. Oh"]

Yeah, same here. But as I said, it doesn't really feel it does, if that's any consolation.

As for the upgrading and if the game warrants the upgrade, it depends completely on you. I'm a HUGE fan of the series, so my opinion is extremely subjective, but if you enjoyed the previous two, then this one is definately worth it. I wouldn't recommend playing on low settings anyway as the game's graphics deteriorate very quickly when changing settings and on 'low' it looks fairly ugly. Still playable though.
[quote="DesR85]I'm get the feeling that this game would surely be a system hog just like Oblivion.[/quote"]
Oh it is, very much, but don't get me wrong. I'm running an X800XL so that's probably the bottleneck that's causing the hickups on my PC. 1GB is (as I've read) enough to play the game. And you can't escape the occasional stutter, because at some points, the game has to access the harddrive.

Celos wrote: Oh it is, very much, but don't get me wrong. I'm running an X800XL so that's probably the bottleneck that's causing the hickups on my PC. 1GB is (as I've read) enough to play the game. And you can't escape the occasional stutter, because at some points, the game has to access the harddrive.

I doubt it could either be the graphics card or the RAM. I also read from a lot of European gaming reviews that Gothic 3 is CPU-bound just like Oblivion. If that is the case, it means that both Oblivion and Gothic 3 share the same performance issues on all PCs, be they high-end or not.

Heh, just got it today and got our of bed today after two weeks of sickness - heh double positive

Anyway, it runs fine with 1Gb of RAM, my Radeon 9800 and Athlon 64 3000+ with medium settings. Some small stutters but nothing major.

I haven't played all that much but my first impressions is that combat is very nice indeed. As already mentioned, it sounded a bit complicated at first but actually it isn't. This is the only part that I managed to look into after my initial first time with the game and I admit to liking this more than before.

Can't tell you a thing else right now but in a day or two I should have at least half of my facts straight as I'm still off work and feeling better so I can play

running fine in medium with 1GB, R9600XT128 and A64 3000+, note I have 2 ATA 7200rpm HDD in RAID 0 though.

However the game is not as smooth as I like...but still playable. I have to keep the post processing on, since turning it off will cause the screen to flash (very annoying) periodically.

Here's my score (I have played till level 30+ but currently replaying from scratch due to some quest bug) so far:

Performance: 3/10. The game is poorly optimized (I realized so, after applying the medium setting tweak, that my system actually can handle the game at medium, but unplayable even at low setting with the original engine setting). The game is solid stable for me so far, no crash, no corrupt save, no slowdown over long playing. So I give it 3 points for performance.

Control: 7/10. It's employing the common control scheme for FPS/3rdPS games, so it's not bad, inventory can be managed with mouse with ease. Combat control has evolved in to crazy click fest, though.

Story: 7/10. I'm still following the plot, I have a feeling there will be some plot turns and twists after meeting Xardas (I just found him in my last game before I restart), so far, I'm happy with the story.

Music: 5/10. I don't like the music, the one who played games...the main BGM contains some so called "Orchestra Climax" that many times, mislead me as the start of battle music, making me nervous all the time. I hate the composer.

Graphics: 6/10. Don't get me wrong, the graphics of G3 is great, if you got the machine with enough juice to run it at high detail. I could see that even though I'm running in medium. However, they have used some technology at the wrong place. Like the OverBloom (the first level of post processing) is meaningless, no aiding to the fun of game and consuming extra processing cycles that can be used to make the game more smooth. We are forced to enable it (if our hardware can manage it) or else you will have to endure the very annoying screen flashing problem. Besides, the overbloom is killing my eyes when I'm in the snow mountain area.

NPC interaction: good thing is all the NPCs got voice acting. Bad thing is, generic NPCs only spout one or two generic dialogs. There are some funny moments like every body (especially rebels) will assume I'm the good person and reveal their revolution plans to me, even though at one point, I decided to work for the orcs and intend to destroy one of the rebel camps... They just give me all the details so that I can reveal the spy.....

Combat: 0/10. No kidding, I HATE the guy who designed the combat system. If possible, I wanna kidnap him, tie him on a chair next to my computer, and make him watch me engage in battle. Every time I get killed by a wild boar (or whatever beasts) due to the stun bug, I'll stab his lap with a knife. I bet he will have to be amputated after 2 hours of play. Fighting against humanoid is okay, but for wild animals (anything with 4 legs) is hellishly annoying. They tend to back off constantly when you swing your weapon. You advance and it back off, so you guys will be dancing "you don't touch me" cha-cha. If there is nothing blocking the beast, you two will be dancing across the whole world map. I'll bet. However once you stop swinging, it will jump on you and lock you in a stun mode till you die. Oh, by the way, the beast will ignore obstacles like trees and such, only being blocked by rocks and cliffs. The reason for such lousy combat design is, the test players are all playing in god mode, so that the enemies won't hit him!

so far I'll rate the game overall at 6.5/10.

And yes, after getting killed 300+ times while engaged with about 80+ (yes, I do count - I kept the skins) beasts, I'm now playing in god mode, forever. Combat fun has been taken away from me forever (as if the combat is ever fun anyway)

Time for me to update my progress on playing the demo. I just realised that after two hours playing the game, it hanged on my system. Could be either a memory leak or it could be the result of having only 512MB RAM. I suspect the latter, though I'm not so sure. To be honest, this is the first game I've played that stated 512MB RAM as minimum to play ever caused problems on my system. Games like Company of Heroes, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and a few others have not caused any problems whatsoever on my system even though it met the minimum system requirements of 512MB RAM. Sounds like Gothic 3 wasn't optimised properly yet.

About the combat system, it does look a bit like a click fest but it actually isn't, at least to me. No matter how many times you hit that enemy, he will still find a way to penetrate through your flurry of attacks. So, best strategy for me is to run around and unleash a few hits before running around again (As for tougher enemies, I just lead them back to a place where rebels hang out and let them deal with it ).

The loading is kind of slow, to be honest, thanks to my 512MB RAM. Not to mention that I encountered quite a lot of stuttering problems on my part here. As for graphics, it's good, though not optimised properly for performance. Considering that Gothic 3 even have problems running on high-end rigs, this is surprising even to me. I put quite a lot of graphics options to medium and it ran fine for me, though I do encounter some slow downs when engaged in a battle involving a few enemies or when running in a forest.

I'm not going to give a score here as I'm just playing the demo version of the game.

Wow, sounds like it's actually playable on your system. My system also has 512 MB RAM and it's unplayable even on low settings (graphic card GeForce 6800GT 256 MB, AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 2.0Ghz). Ashen also says it runs fine on his system. Why is it so slow on mine ? My computer runs all the other games fine, even Oblivion.

The music is awesome. I can't believe you don't like the music.
Also, combat is OK. Not the greatest way of implementing mob AI, but it could have been so much more worse. Also, the boar stun is removed in 1.08.

Basically, doing the "can't catch me" cha-cha as you so eloquently put it, is pretty much why people are nagging on the game all the time. What they don't realize is that the game isn't meant to be a click-fest. If you just exercise a little patience and strike at the right time, you don't waste any endurance at all, get some good damage and are free to strike again almost immediately. If you just click frantically, mobs will back away and then pounce on you, which will end in death. Also, when you click a lot, you'll do a few strikes after finishing clicking, which can also lead to some very violent deaths (another mob attacks and you aren't free to defend yourself).

Try it in god mode a few times. Just strike when the animal is trying to attack and figure out which is the right attack to use (right-mouse for fast, left for more damage). It makes the combat a lot more fun.

Fighting humans/humanoids is way too easy though. I just don't even bother using any tactics when fighting orcs. I just run in the middle of a camp and start twirling my blades. They'll die pretty quick.

C-K'R[PhoEniX] wrote:Wow, sounds like it's actually playable on your system. My system also has 512 MB RAM and it's unplayable even on low settings (graphic card GeForce 6800GT 256 MB, AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 2.0Ghz). Ashen also says it runs fine on his system. Why is it so slow on mine ? My computer runs all the other games fine, even Oblivion.

What I did was to switch post processing all the way to off. Shadows go to low and the rest of the settings I set to medium. I can't believe that I have to select custom in order to bring up another menu to adjust the additional graphics options. Can't Piranha Bytes at least put both the graphics bar (the one with high, medium, low and custom) and the additional graphics options within the same page? At least players won't overlook the additional graphics options when they want to do further tweaks. I almost missed it the first time I played the Gothic 3 demo.

Oh, I almost forgot something. I was looking around at different places about my problem and found that it has something to do with saving the game. From what I read at the World of Gothic forum, the players mentioned that if you save the game, a memory leak will occur up till a point that it will freeze your game. I think that is most likely what is causing my game to freeze up.

Celos wrote: Basically, doing the "can't catch me" cha-cha as you so eloquently put it, is pretty much why people are nagging on the game all the time. What they don't realize is that the game isn't meant to be a click-fest. If you just exercise a little patience and strike at the right time, you don't waste any endurance at all, get some good damage and are free to strike again almost immediately. If you just click frantically, mobs will back away and then pounce on you, which will end in death. Also, when you click a lot, you'll do a few strikes after finishing clicking, which can also lead to some very violent deaths (another mob attacks and you aren't free to defend yourself).

I found that out as well. Maybe I'd better change my fighting tactics. Never jumped around a lot as this guy jump unnaturally high for a game character (no game character I know ever jumped as high as this unnamed hero, with the exception of Mario and Luigi).

Celos wrote:The music is awesome. I can't believe you don't like the music.
(...snipped...)
Try it in god mode a few times. Just strike when the animal is trying to attack and figure out which is the right attack to use (right-mouse for fast, left for more damage). It makes the combat a lot more fun.

Fighting humans/humanoids is way too easy though. I just don't even bother using any tactics when fighting orcs. I just run in the middle of a camp and start twirling my blades. They'll die pretty quick.

Well, good for you that you like the music. I don't really hate the music, but just think that the composer/writer(?) did not really considered the possible of mix up with a battle music (or triggering a false alarm of battle)

as for the battle timing, yeah, I noticed that too while in god mode. I may consider releasing from god mode once I mastered the timing. Another bad example of test players relying on god mode to do their job. Using god mode is the reason they didn't catch the stun bug.

Humanoids are really too easy. With Orc Slayer and a Bastard Sword (I had 216 STR), almost all orcs died in 1 hit.

Will check the new patch.