Gothic 3

Gameplay [9]
Graphics [8]
Sound [9]
Usability [7]
Score [8.5]

Gothic III: a Buggy Masterpiece

For years we’ve been practicing swords and long bows, improving sneaking and armorer skills, mastering alchemy and wizardry, polishing favorite enchanted dragonscale armor and – just in case – keeping awfully heavy but trustworthy two-handed swords razor-sharp and shiny; we’ve traveled there and back, we’ve saved worlds and galaxies; we’ve bribed, adored and intimidated so many NPCs that they’re hardly possible to count. But all this time we’ve been waiting – for the Legend to return. And, at last, in year 2006, a real blessing fell upon all of us faithful RPG fans; our loyalty to the genre has been generously rewarded with the sequels to the three of the greatest role-playing series of all times – ‘The Elder Scrolls’, ‘Neverwinter Nights’ and ‘Gothic’.

Was it the word ‘sequel’ that I used? I was dead wrong: stories like these have no sequels, for they are doors opening into worlds as vast and ancient as our own, and every other episode of the saga is just another chapter of the long-forgotten history of realms far, far away.

Let’s all remember how it was long five years ago, in the final of Gothic II: having defeated the dragons, the nameless protagonist of the series left the island of Khorinis and, along with his friends and allies, sailed to the central region of the continental part of the kingdom of Myrtana. However, things aren’t much better there: the country is overrun by Orcs, human race crushed and enslaved. The magic barrier is back – it shields the capital city of Vengard; King Rhobar the Second is missing (actually he is in the besieged capital); the only ‘free’ territories are the snowy northlands of Nordmar and deserts of Varrant. That’s where the story begins – with the Protagonist a.k.a. the Nameless Hero, who is no more a green rookie – like in Gothic II – but quite a tough guy, alongside with Diego, Milten, Gorn and Lester entering the village of Ardea just to find themselves in the midst of the fight between the Orcs and the natives. This is the point where we take control of the protagonist, thus getting a perfect opportunity to see whether there are any changes to the Gothic’s infamous combat system.

Such an opening may scare the ‘newcomers’ – those unfamiliar with the previous games of the series, away as, traditionally to Piranha Bytes, there is no ‘tutorial’ line in the start menu and no ‘boot camp’ preceding the actual gameplay; still it makes the latter a good deal more ‘true-to-life’. Besides, tutorials may be pretty annoying, especially when you are replaying (and the point of Gothic’s or TES’ replayability is hardly arguable) – can’t help shivers running down my spine every time I remember Oblivion’s starting dungeon. Moreover, though it’s quite possible to play Gothic starting with Episode 3, but that’s not a very good thing to do – as you’re going to miss lots of things and the game is going to feel like some kind of a deja-vu – ‘he says he knows me, so I’m supposed to know him, but I have no idea where we could have met’. Myrtana is full of NPCs from previous episodes – from Diego and Lester accompanying you on the way from Khorinis to the continent, to Xardas the necromancer, who now is the Orcs’ mastermind. And it’s up to you to find out what made him become an enemy of the state.

Back to the combat: the very first glimpse of the gameplay says that G3’s combat system is still far from perfect. It’s been improved and modified, but you still need some time to get used to its peculiarities: it was my second attempt that I finally managed to eliminate an orkish threat in Ardea – of course, another reason for that was terrific game lagging, but this very particular point will be discussed later on. Anyway, be ready that quite often combat will be a fight for your life no matter how many enemies are there against you, as its result may sometimes be unpredictable – you can beat the whole platoon of Orcs and then get killed by a boar in the nearest forest. However, some consider it ‘not a bug, but a feature’ – no wise hunter would run into a wild boar’s lair with a scimitar or a bastard sword, but he would hunt it down from distance with a bow, which may sound quite a reasonable argument. At the same time the system gives a green light to munchkining – the IGN.com’s team says they managed to slaughter the whole town simply swooshing the sword.

The ‘coupe de gras’ is still there – that is, if the fight was initiated by the player, the defeated foe doesn’t die but is knocked down instead. It’s up to the player to decide his further destiny – either to let live (in the meantime the defeated opponent would recover consciousness), or to deliver a final blow, thus getting rid of the rival once and for ever. This act of violence, spectacular as it is, turns out to be a serious blow to a hero’s reputation (more of this particular element of gameplay later), so think twice. The same is true for the protagonist, as in the course of the battle he may be stunned and disarmed. It is quite possible that you would make him stand up to continue the fight – in theory. In practice, fighting with no weapon and with hit points next to nothing appears quite a challenging task. But if you were attacked and got through, dead would be dead all right – no resurrection, no finishing off. Amen.

With Orcs defeated, there is more time to look around and explore all corners of the interface. The character and inventory screens became more handy and convenient but still no concept of weight or inventory capacity is present. This particular last feature looks a bit strange taking into consideration the overall tendency to realism. The journal is also far from convenience, offering records of conversations instead of quests descriptions. This makes defining exact quest goals quite a problem.

The Gothic’s system of character-development is worth mentioning, as nothing of a kind has ever been used in any other role-playing game. You traditionally can change neither your character’s basic stats, nor his appearance; and, you won’t increase your longsword skill by fighting with this very kind of weapons. Actually, you will increase no skill of yours by that. It goes just as follows: you level up and earn the so-called ‘Learning Points’ (LPs), but to use these you need help of a qualified trainer, so to learn lockpicking you should find somebody who’s proficient at that. And (just like in TES) be ready to complete a quest to win a ‘trainer’s’ confidence. And, yes, there’s no level cap, so you can increase your character’s skills as much as humanly possible.

And in the game like this it may be both easy and hard: Gothic 3 offers the player a gameplay with practically no limits. As you wander across the country, you’re going to encounter lots of NPCs and factions and it’s up to the player to decide which side to take. Orcs are not such as ultimate evil as it might seem, as well as the King is far from being ‘good’ – come to think of it, it was him who ordered to shield the Khorinis penal colony away with the Barrier. The life of ordinary peasants and townsmen hasn’t changed much – they just continue to work, no matter who rules the country. Want to join the resistance – you’re welcome, but be ready to confront such powerful opponents as Orcs. Want to join these – it’s OK, just find a way to win authority among them. You may choose to assist the Varrant hashishin in slaying Rhobar the Second or you may go to Vengard yourself and get to the king through the orkish siege. The choice is all yours – and, depending on it, the story has three different endings. But keep in mind, that in the game with no auto-balance you can easily travel into some beast of level way higher than yours and… you know what that means.

Here comes the aforementioned point of reputation. The protagonist’s standing with each of the factions depends on his rep, which can be increased by performing quests and tasks. For example, to join the Orcs the protagonist should have a reputation of a tough warrior – this can be won by performing in the Arena. While increasing with one faction, the standing with the other decreases – help the partisans raise rebellions in the cities and make no mistake, the Orcs won’t miss you. And be sure, they won’t miss the opportunity – traditionally to the series, NPCs create a truly alive environment: they wander around, eat, sleep, work in the field, sell and buy, read and talk. Even though AI is not flawless.

The system of this kind was previously introduced in the Fable: the Lost Chapters and Oblivion; however there it bore no obvious consequences for the hero.
Such a huge gameplay requires a huge world to travel. And there it is, with three climatic zones ranging from snow wastes to equatorial deserts. The visualization is just great: many say that no better forests ever existed in any other game. The Piranhas native Genome Engine supports all kinds of modern graphic features, including HDR, Pixel Shaders 3.0 and DOF (for Depth of Field) – this particular feature makes distant elements of the landscape look blurred. Traditionally there are no loading screens between zones – all textures are uploaded dynamically. The landscapes and locations are hand-made and pre-designed, no random generation was used. This creates a gorgeous view, which is still far from Oblivion’s grandeur, but looks a way more alive – especially if to mention that there’s no auto-balance. But all this asks for an unreasonably high price – the game requires 2 gigabytes of RAM to run smoothly. While it is quite possible to run it on middle-end PCs (I tested it on my Athlon XP 2000+/512 RAM/GeForce 6600 GT 128), lags would be just awful. For comparison, Oblivion’s performance on this very particular machine with HDR, full water reflections, a good deal of mods and plug-ins installed but with no grass, canopy and self shadows was quite playable, while G3’s loading time was about 5 or 7 minutes and Ardea fight bore some resemblance to a slide show.

All this can be summarized by the phrase I came across on one of the forums: ‘If only Gothic 3 had Oblivion’s optimization…’ which is sad but true – not all the lags are caused by slow hardware. The engine is not well-optimized and is still buggy. But this is no developers’ fault – let’s just remember how long and painful was Piranhas’ search for publishers with Gothic 1 and 2 and the Night of the Raven add-on; a tremendous creative potential of the Piranha Bytes team is constrained by simple lack of funds.

Gothic 3 is a certain hit and a must for all role-players, no matter whether you played previous episodes or not. The concept of an unconstrained open-ended 3D gameplay in a huge world, has finally got an appropriate graphic representation; with the 3rd episode the world of Gothic finally came to life in its full grandeur. However, if you want to see it the way it was conceived, be sure you can afford a massive upgrade of your hardware. Ah, yes, and there is soundtrack! Hard drive space permitting, unpack it and add to your playlists collection – it’s just magnificent!

The Gamespy.com crew gives Gothic 3 a ‘poor’ rank, qualifying it as ‘a complete miss’ for ‘massive number of bugs, lousy combat system, poor art design, poor interface, lousy dialogue and voiceovers and generic storyline’. This is the lowest ranking among other web-wide game sites – at last those mentioned on Gothic 3 page in Wikipedia. Our opinion is different – Gothic 3 is a masterpiece. A buggy one, but still a masterpiece.