Gothic 3

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by _BuRjaCi_


My adivce is to wait a few months, play the games that you are interested in and then go buy G3 once its stabilised or even once the expansion pack gets published.

Except it's going to be a while until I have some free gaming time and tbh I'll probably have forgotten about this by then.

[Standup]

bump....

Hi _BuRjaCi_,

I see that there's been a couple of patches. Is it in a playable form yet? Or shall I go back to 1997 and BGTutu ?

Or should I start Gothic One again and refresh the story line in my mind for when 3 is ready.

[Skanky Burns]

I'm playing Gothic 2 at the moment and enjoying it.
Not that that has a great deal to do with the thread currently.

[Standup]

Well it would be good to see Gothic get a bit more recognition so I don't think the few (about two I think) Gothic fans we have here will complain if this turns into a general Gothic thread.

[_BuRjaCi_]

Originally posted by Standup
bump....

Hi _BuRjaCi_,

I see that there's been a couple of patches. Is it in a playable form yet? Or shall I go back to 1997 and BGTutu ?

Or should I start Gothic One again and refresh the story line in my mind for when 3 is ready.

Well, patch 1.12 makes NPC actualy usefull and improves the quest log. If you have a strong PC the game is quite good now (on easy). But you could wait for the next patch where it is rumored that the combat system will be reworked.

If you are planing to wait and need an oldie, I suggest BG2 or NWN.

[_BuRjaCi_]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
I'm playing Gothic 2 at the moment and enjoying it.
Not that that has a great deal to do with the thread currently.

Don't forget; the first playthrough only provides 1/2 of the experience (1/3 with the expansion).

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
I'm playing Gothic 2 at the moment and enjoying it.
Not that that has a great deal to do with the thread currently.

Why break your usual posting habits?

[Quillan]

I went and ordered this last week, and got it in yesterday. After a night of playing, I'm enjoying the game (no real bugs as I installed the 1.12 patch before ever starting), but this has got to be the worst documentation of any game I've ever seen. The manual doesn't tell you how to do half the things you need to do! I wound up getting a disease in combat with a lizard down in the cave system in Reddock, and had no idea. All I could tell is that my stamina bar was a sickly gray instead of bright yellow, and it didn't recover nearly as fast as it used to. There was nothing I could find that would tell me what was causing it (Morrowind and Oblivion both had icons that would tell you what the effect was and what was causing it), and I had to experiment with cure poisons and cure weakness before I found out what the problem was.

Combat can be really weird; a review I read said that you can win almost all fight by simply spamming the left mouse button, and that's true. Also, the foes seem to obey the Martial Arts Rules of Combat: only 1 opponent will attack you at a time; the rest wait until you're finished with the first.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Quillan

Combat can be really weird; a review I read said that you can win almost all fight by simply spamming the left mouse button, and that's true. Also, the foes seem to obey the Martial Arts Rules of Combat: only 1 opponent will attack you at a time; the rest wait until you're finished with the first.

[Skanky Burns]

Weird, if true that is a drastic change from Gothic 2. Not only do they gang-attack you, but they will seek to attack you from behind where even the lowliest mosquito-type animal is deadly.

[Quillan]

I suppose it could be due to a bug, but if so, I'm not the only one who has experienced it. The review in question (GameSpot, I think) mentioned it. In all fairness, I have been attacked by multiple opponents a couple of times, but only in circumstances where the course of the battle took me right next to the second opponent. Basically they don't close on me; once I engage the first in melee the others just stand there. Now, any of them with bows still shoot at me, but the ones with melee weapons out just stand around. Once the first one dies, then another will close and we repeat.

I have found one thing Gothic definitely does better than the Elder Scrolls games: rain doesn't fall straight through solid objects! This was a minor thing that irritated the hell out of me in both Morrowind and Oblivion! It would be raining, I'd go into a tunnel, and rain would be falling right through the overhead cover. Gothic doesn't have separate zones unlike Oblivion. All buildings and caves are open rather than having a door you have to activate to enter. I walked into a farmhouse during a rain shower and the rain didn't fall through the roof. Apparently they actually implemented collision detection for the falling rain.

The lack of documentation still irritates me. Everything I do is done blind. Neither the manual nor the data screens in the game adequately explain what the various "skills" do, so I have no idea what's good and what's not. I've ended up wasted a number of "learning points" just in two days of playing and a fair amount of money on things I couldn't use or things that just weren't worth what I spent on it. To make matters worse, the same poor documentation apparently extends to the fan sites for the game! Nothing I have found has any details at all. Even the ones that purport to be quest guides can't or won't give you good information. Perhaps I've just been spoiled by the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages and the amount of detail they provide. I can hit www.uesp.net and find anything and everything I'd ever want to know about the games, from quest walkthroughs to details on every piece of equipment in the game to guides and suggestions on how to build and advance the character.

On the whole though, even through the frustrations, I'm having fun with it. My gut call at this point is that Oblivion is a better game, but I've only had it two days and I can't make an objective judgement yet.

[Grumbold]

I tried Gothic 1 and 2 when they hit budget but the control scheme was hellish. If G3 has a more standard approach it may be worth a try for me but the lack of documentation sounds very offputting.

I find it ironic people talking about Gothic being realistic about animal behaviour. Yes a boar would be a very dangerous opponent, as would a pack of wolves. The trouble is that attacking humans is not normal behaviour for either. Almost all wild animals would have to be starving, feverish or otherwise provoked to be hostile. A group of hostile mature boars teaming up on a single person is pure fantasy.

The bait and flee tactics described in an earlier post are also a standard bit of MMORPG combat tactics for managing monster "aggro" and no more logical in this game than any other. Humans are so slow compared to most animals that running is futile and fatal because it triggers the hunting instinct. Much better to climb a tree, stand and fight or do the unexpected. A handful of beaters with big sticks or banging pots and pans are normally enough to drive game away from them toward the people equipped to do the hunting. If the animals were typically hostile they'd just eat the beaters!

[Quillan]

The control scheme is pretty easy in this one, and the keys can be remapped where you want them. It uses WASD to move, hotkeys 1-0 for quick selection of items in combat, and some keyboard shortcuts to the inventory menu/maps/quest log and such. Camera control is done by the mouse, left and right buttons control attack and defense, and the center wheel can be clicked to draw/sheath weapons and rolled to zoom in and out.

[Quillan]

It actually gets better, or worse depending on your point of view. The main plot line (can't call it a quest) has multiple possible paths, because it's really a struggle for dominance between three factions: the invading orcs, the humans, and the hashishin. According to a couple of things I've read, completing any of the endings will require you doing quests for all three of the factions. The problem is, if you do too much for one faction you'll make an enemy out of their opposing faction, at which point the members will attack you on sight and you won't be able to do any of their quests. The design of the game thus allows you to play yourself into a position where you cannot finish the game. I'm glad I discovered this now, at the beginning where I can be careful not to overly annoy the orcs or the humans, rather than 2-3 weeks from now when I've got a hundred hours of play time invested and would have to start all over.

[_BuRjaCi_]

Originally posted by Grumbold

I find it ironic people talking about Gothic being realistic about animal behaviour. Yes a boar would be a very dangerous opponent, as would a pack of wolves. The trouble is that attacking humans is not normal behaviour for either. Almost all wild animals would have to be starving, feverish or otherwise provoked to be hostile. A group of hostile mature boars teaming up on a single person is pure fantasy.

Well, actualy it would have beeen realistic a few centuries ago, before we killed off all the animals that don't fear humans, but Gothic is in an early medival setting, right after a big war which presumably left a lot of corpses wich the animals where all to happy to glutton up and may have gotten a taste for human flesh.


There is nothing special about humans, we are animals, we just happen to be precived as dangerus animals but if that isn't the case, there is no reason why a wolf wounld not try to kill a human.

P.S. Quillian, the game has three possible endings and it is imposibble to lose respect which I find silly, but you are right, it's just a trick of identifying which are important or begginers quests and which are not.

And if any stuff isn't clear you can simply log on a gothic fan site and post your question. The game truly does have a silly little non-informative manual, but that isn't a problem for someone who's played G2 or G1, where the concepts where explained in-game.