Gothic 3

Moby ID: 24456
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Description official descriptions

At the end of Gothic the nameless hero destroyed the Avatar of the god Beliar known as the Sleeper. But although his body was gone, the Sleeper wasn't ready to give up and chose an undead dragon as his new form in the world. So in Gothic II the goal was to defeat his four minions, which he left behind in the mine valley, and the Sleeper himself with the power of the Eye of Innos.

In Gothic 3 the hero and his companions have now reached the mainland of the kingdom of Myrtana. Despite the efforts of the mining colony on Khorinis, the orcs won the war and enslaved the humans that wouldn't acknowledge their rule. There are now three main factions on Myrtana: the rebels who are still loyal to King Rhobar and want to defeat the orcs; the orcs themselves; and the mysterious assassin guild with their own agenda. During the game the player needs to choose which side he is on and help them to fulfill their goal.

To make things even more difficult, all rune magic has disappeared from the land. Only the magic of the ancients still works; but for that the player needs to find the magic scrolls well hidden across the land. The goal is now to find out what happened in Myrtana and find the mysterious wizard Xardas, as there are rumors which say that he's the one who helped the orcs win the war - and some even say that he is the one behind the disappearance of the rune magic.

To do so, the player is free to roam the world from the start (even so it's not wise since many animals will eat the hero for breakfast). The journey begins in a small village the hero helps defend against the orcs; in the north lies the icy region of Nordmar, and in the south there's the desert of Varant, where the assassins chose to live. The game world is significantly larger in this installment and includes three vast regions with several towns and other settlements in each, almost any of which can be accessed and explored at any time. Teleporter stones unique to each location can be found and used to shorten travel times.

The core gameplay is similar to that of the earlier games in the series. Leveling up and learning new skills and talents requires learning points as well as gold needed as payment for the trainers inhabiting the world. Points can be invested to learn new abilities or improve available ones (e.g. fighting with one-handed swords). Since in the previous two games the protagonist has defeated everything from a Bloodfly to an Undead Dragon on the island of Khorinis, in Gothic 3 he starts already as a fully grown hero equipped with a good weapon called Orcslayer. However, tougher foes await him, and many side quests can be undertaken in order to improve his skills as well as his reputation among the competing factions. Unlike the preceding games, there are three difficulty levels available; also, enemies populating the surface are roughly of the same strength regardless of the location, making free-roaming much more feasible than before.

Another difference from the previous games, besides the visual updates, is the new fighting system. More combo attacks are available, and combat is fully controlled by two mouse buttons instead of the old keyboard-based system (though the control scheme can be customized). For the first time in the series it is possible to use shields for better blocking. Additionally, there are more talents to learn, for which a basic skill in the correspondent area needs to be increased: for example, the ability to pick heavy locks requires a thief skill of at least 30, etc.

Spellings

  • Готика 3 - Russian spelling
  • 哥特王朝3 - Chinese spelling (simplified)
  • 救世英豪 3 - Chinese spelling (traditional)

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Credits (Windows version)

437 People (359 developers, 78 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 72% (based on 52 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 69 ratings with 4 reviews)

I am a little bird flying high, but taking a hard fall.

The Good
First of all, I must mention that the graphics of this game are great! Everything looks natural and... well beautiful. Maybe some characters have dumb faces, but that's okay... you can overlook that.

Maybe the best thing in this game is the soundtrack. I never thought I would ever hear such a good soundtrack. I mean... every song this game has to offer is on my winamp playlist, and that says a lot. Most of them have the "repeat" option enabled :D.

The story of the game is okay, nothing new though. You simply go to Myrtana, and as usual, you clean the place of orcs. Wait! There is something. Now, you can join the orcs too. I liked that, even if I never joined the orcs. Maybe someone else did, having enough of the classic "orc hater" hero.

The game also features tons of secondary quests, which will keep you busy until the end of the adventure.

The Bad
That would be all the good things. First of all, Gothic 3 tries to overtake any "enemy" it finds. But unfortunately, Gothic 3's "warfare" requires lots of "ammunition" and it seems Piranha Bytes had no more. Creating something without having the required elements from the "recipe" will ultimately result in a big "crash!". Gothic 3 was made like that. A huge game, that ultimately falls under its own weight.

First of all, I must tell the reader about the new actors, PB used for the voice recording. Maybe that wouldn't have been such a bad thing after all, if the voices didn't sound stupid. Wait... sorry about that. The voices sound REALLY stupid. The nameless hero, once had one of the best voices I've ever listened to in a game. A voice full of sarcasm and stuff, and any dialogue with the hero was a delight. Some of them were really funny, because the hero used to say lots of jokes. Now, our nameless hero has the voice of a brainless brute. No more jokes, only taunts. Yay! (may some say. I didn't)

The game will drain all your PC's strength. The Graphical engine is badly done and the game will lag a lot even on high-end PC's, but of course if played on maximum details.

There are a lot of bugs and glitches in the game. Oh yeah... I almost forgot. There are bugs that cause crashes. Even with the latest patches, most of them were not fixed.

Usually, while roaming some woods, you get attacked by some beasts. Cool. Crash them all! Yeah, you crash them, but after that you find out that you finished a quest you haven't even started. What the...??!

The game takes a lot of time for loading/saving/ quitting. That is annoying. Really. Even if you can roam trough all Myrtana/Varant/Nordmar without a single loading screen, waiting 5 minutes for first loading is REALLY annoying.

The Bottom Line
First of all, the game is okay, and it's worth to play it. It offers more than 20 hours of gameplay and fun. Even if most of the secondary quests are all the same. But, after some time, you get annoyed of anything you liked in the game... and you begin to feel sorry for playing it.

Windows · by Hypercake (1310) · 2008

The poor man's Oblivion

The Good
First off, I did not touch this game until the Community Patches were available and mature, so my review is based on the modified gameplay, not the original. I got the game to run under Windows 7 64-bit, but it required finding and updating the DRM driver. There were plenty of doom and gloom reviews when it originally arrived in late 2006, but after four years of bug fixing and number tweaking, it's a rather enjoyable, playable game. Parallels to Oblivion can obviously be drawn, much like comparisons between Gothic 2 and Morrowind.

The world of Gothic 3 is much bigger than 2. You can spend days, or even weeks, immersed in the forests of Myrtana, and then realize you have a whole snow-capped mountain range and barren desert to traverse as well. Teleport stones are a blessing in this game -- they're the first thing to find in any new city.

The storyline of the game is dependent on whom you side with. Rebels, orcs, nomads, desert traders, northern clans, rangers.. there is a lot of diplomacy and treachery to be had in this game. Hope you like quests, because there are several hundred of them in Gothic 3. Sure, there are a few shopping and extermination quests, but there really is a wide variety for what the game can do.

The day/night cycle is great; this game is a real treat with HDR and shadows. Lots of ambient sound effects, and a nice, dynamic orchestral soundtrack to back it up.

The Bad
Maybe it's just Win7-64, but the game is very RAM hungry. 2 GB was not enough, had to upgrade to 4, and even then it ate all it could. Lots of HD reading, but that's the consequence of turning detail up to max.

While I appreciate keeping the content focused, I miss a few things. There is little lore in the game, just a background story on the three gods and their factions while you read a few lecterns. Ironic that the towns are full of bookshelves when there are so few books and scrolls. Also, no flying or riding, just a lot of walking and running (and a little bit of swimming, but not underwater). Creatures don't fly either; there are a couple dragons but confined to caves.

Magic doesn't have the attention in Gothic 3 that it deserves. You meet few mages in the game, mostly toward the very end. Spells are fewer than Gothic 2, and not competitive with a sword and bow until much later.

For such a well populated world, there sure are very few women.. all the NPCs are male. There is an enormous amount of spoken dialogue (not at once.. just amongst many NPCs), and not a great variety of actors to speak it. Granted, the game was developed in Germany..

I get really annoyed by the time needed to make swing attacks, drink potions, and use spells/items. I realize it can be considered more realistic, but any attempt to use items near enemies will get the hero sent airborne in a screaming ragdoll death. Then you get to wait for your saved game to load..



The Bottom Line
Gothic 3 is about as non-linear as an RPG can get while having some sense of purpose and an ending in sight. You play the nameless hero, shipwrecked on a new continent with all your former friends. Gothic 3 sticks with the basics. No classes, alignment, elves, dwarves, fairies, or princesses.. Just you, the occasional ally, and a gigantic mass of land, filled with a few factions of humans and a whole lot of orcs, among some other wildlife. The Community Patch team did a pretty good job of bringing the Gothic 3 experience a little more in line with 1 and 2. That apparently changed with Gothic 4: Arcania, so it looks like I'll be trying Piranha Bytes' "Risen" instead.

Windows · by Andy Voss (1861) · 2011

I don't want to leave

The Good
Gothic 3 is the final installment of the original Gothic saga, and by far the most ambitious one. The German developers clearly tried their best to achieve the monumental goal of creating the biggest and baddest modern RPG.

The game world is much bigger than that of the second game. The difference in size is also much more significant than it was between the second and the first installments. The world of Gothic 3 consists of three countries, each complete with several cities and villages of various sizes. You'll easily lose yourself in this vastness.

Gothic 3 is non-linear. You are free to go wherever you like right from the beginning. The enemies are pretty much the same everywhere - easy and tough enemies are mixed, and the game doesn't impose restrictions on your exploration process. The gorgeous world is open to you, all you have to do is explore.

You may compare this game to Elder Scrolls, but in fact Gothic 3 does the whole "do whatever you want" thing better. It deliberately recreates open RPGs of the past, where you couldn't tell the main quest from optional ones and actually had to explore in order to complete the game. There are no convenient quest sorting or magical map-hopping that takes you to any location. Teleporters are there to spare the tedium of backtracking, but you'll have to discover the location first. There are no gimmicks like scaling enemies or any other artificial stuff (well, except the bottomless inventory) that makes the game seem too neatly tailored for your needs, too catering to the player's laziness.

If you have enough patience to play until you are able to branch the storyline, you'll be rewarded with some standard good/evil/not sure of the answer decisions. Helping the orcs or the hashishin, siding with Xardas or becoming the Chosen of Beliar - there are all kinds of twists late in the story, and you can decide which one of them you want to happen. Also, the conflict shown in Gothic 3 is of gigantic proportions. Liberating entire cities from orcs, seeing them flee to the sounds of fanfare, seeing the human slaves applaud to you, returning to the same city several days later to see how peaceful it has become - this is fun on epic scale.

Right from the get-go, you are presented with selectable difficulty level, a feature I really missed in the two previous installments. I liked the challenge they offered, but I prefer to decide myself how challenging I want my games to be.

Graphically and musically, Gothic 3 is outstanding. You could probably find games with technically better graphics that were released at the same time; but in all Gothic games, there is a certain warmth to the graphics, something that unmistakeably proves that they were created with love. No matter where you go and what you look at - the game is beautiful.

Gothic 3 has a typical medieval-sounding orchestral "movie" music. I absolutely love this style and I think nothing fits a grand epic free-roaming RPG better than this. The main theme with its characteristic motives is instantly recognizable and has a huge impact, comparable to the theme of Lord of the Rings movies. The soundtrack is rich and is full of sensual beauty, almost like in Mahler's music or in the grandfather of all movie music, Arnold Schoenberg's Gurre Lieder. By the way: go listen to it if you like epic movie soundtracks - that's the best of the kind, written when there were no movies at all. Like a colleague of mine said: "it's more Wagner than Wagner" - very similar to Wagner, only better.

The graphics and the music of Gothic 3 are so magically atmospheric and so sensual that I felt almost drunk when I was playing the game. The size and the beauty of the world called me back whenever I exited the game. I found myself circling around the same area and just nearly physically enjoying the alternate life in a virtual world.

Let's also get the bug issue out of the way. I don't want to argue with all those people who complained about bugs. I played the game on a shiny new computer, with the (then) latest patch installed. So I have no idea how the fully unpatched version plays like (I tried it only on an older computer, which was incapable of handling it). If everyone say it was terribly buggy, it probably was. But I can't force myself to write long essays about the evils of capitalism and how unforgivable it is to sell a game that is so buggy. I bought it, I downloaded the latest patch, I played it on a good computer, it wasn't so buggy any more - that's a fact. Frankly, if I had a choice between buggy games I enjoy and perfectly smoothly running games I don't enjoy, I'd choose the first. If you say: "but I couldn't enjoy the game precisely because it was so buggy!", I can only answer - download the patch. Yes, the game shouldn't have shipped this way. It should have been bug-free from the beginning. But what's the point of saying that? If there is a way to enjoy the game after all, why to prevent this enjoyment from ourselves? It's like not enjoying a second meal in a restaurant after the waiter has spilled the first one over our clothes.

The Bad
The bugs were, however, so serious that some people could barely play the game properly when it was out. The awful combat was an even more serious issue. Only the latest balancing patch corrected most of its glaring flaws. The clumsiness of combat, the absolute reliance on attack moves, the weird and downright idiotic behavior of opponents - for some inexplicable reason enemies would not surround you, allowing you to slaughter them one-by-one - were close to ruin the game for many people. Humanoid (human and orc) opponents were underpowered beyond belief. During my first playthrough I was killed several times by some lizard without even being able to strike at it just after raiding an orc camp and single-handedly eliminating a dozen of orcish warriors armed with huge axes. Wild beasts had the infuriating habit of going backwards all the time. When they were biting, they did it several times, and so rapidly that they could easily kill the player character just because he had absolutely no time to react. They also paid no attention to your levels and the armor you wore.

In short, combat was an unbelievable mess. It was so bad, in fact, that even the latest patch couldn't make it fully satisfying. Still, it's heaps better than the sorry state it was released in, to the point of making Gothic 3 feel like a different game. So, once again - download the patch.

I feel they could have invested more into designing the game world. It has little personality and at times resembles too much those copy-pasted, identical locations of older free-roaming RPG. The cities don't really feel alive. Neither do the characters. I'm sure the rushed release is to blame, just like with Ultima IX.

Most quests are yawn-inducing. "Hey, my friend here needs 243 pieces of raw meet, 21 stews, 7 tusks of demonic skeleton mages, and 14 nose hairs. Bring it to him and your reputation will increase by one point!". In every city, you'll have to do those stupid quests, working on your reputation. What reputation, what the hell, this world needs liberating, I want my fellow human rebels to take arms and to help me fight the orcs! Why should I, a hero who defeated dragons in the previous game, humiliate myself and do moronic tasks? Didn't I liberate a village in the tutorial? So what are you waiting for? Hey, in Oblivion I was just a nobody, a prisoner, and yet since the emperor trusted me, I could go and find friends and defeat evil without the need to collect toad mushrooms for rebel cooks.

And what's with the bottomless inventory? Come on. Sure, it beats the stupid ubiquitous "you can carry 5 super-heavy shields but 10 potions is the limit" system most other modern games use, but everyone know that the best way to limit inventory capacity is by weight.

The Bottom Line
Gothic 3 went through some difficult times when it was prematurely released. With all patches applied, however, it turned out to be a satisfying and engrossing open-ended RPG. If you are willing to forgive the rough edges, you'll find the closest modern-day equivalent to non-linear role-playing games of yore.

Windows · by Unicorn Lynx (181780) · 2014

[ View all 4 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
How where the previous Gothics? Indra was here (20756) Apr 7, 2008

Trivia

Bugs

At release, Gothic 3 still contained a lot of bugs. Even three official updates did not solve all problems. A community member from the official Gothic 3 board of the publisher's forum, Hans Trapp, made the first unofficial (fan-made) bug fix. His so called "Fire Chalice Bugfix" fixes an unresolvable main quest. It was released on June 7, 2007 and started a huge wave of fan-made bug fixes, which ended in the semi-official "Community Patch" which was supported by publisher JoWooD Productions Software AG.

The previous Gothic 3 gold master was called back because of the amount of bugs that were still present. On Sept. 26, 2006, JoWooD Productions Software AG let the public know that the new gold master for Gothic 3 was officially finished and in production:

Liezen, Österreich, 26th of September 2006; Thousands of fans have been shocked after the message: “Gothic 3 is not gold anymore”. Rumours about delays, current situation of development and quality problems circulated trough the community and fans became much more nervous each day. JoWooD Productions, Deep Silver and Piranha Bytes attach great importance to on a very good quality which suits the expectations of the fans. Due to this reason the version has been optimized till the last second. Now it’s done: Gothic 3 is ready and in production. The game will be released on the 13th of October.

Game engine

The graphics engine used in the game is called GENOME and was developed by Piranha Bytes. Gothic 3 is the first game to use this engine.

PC Powerplay

The German magazine PC Powerplay gave the game an unenthusiastic review of 67%, mostly because of the bugs, and used the headline "Why Gothic 3 is a huge disappointment" on their cover. According to their own account in issue 12/2006, they received an angry phone call by JoWooD's marketing director (shortly before the magazine's distribution) in which he threatened to withdraw all advertisements and to convince all other companies of the gaming industry to do the same. Later JoWooD's lawyer threatened to take out a restraining order to stop the distribution of the magazine unless they blacken out the headlines of the cover. Later the threats were driven back to a compensation lawsuit. The German online magazine 4players.de, which awarded 68%, reported of a similar reaction after their review.

References to the game

The game was parodied in two episodes of Die Redaktion (The Editorial Team), a monthly comedy video produced by the German gaming magazine GameStar. They were published on the DVD of issue 12/2006 and 01/2007 respectively. The first one is an indirect parody about the many bugs in the game.

Awards

  • 4Players
    • 2006 – Most Buggiest Game of the Year
    • 2006 – Biggest Disappointment of the Year
    • 2006 – #3 Best Voice-Acting of the Year
  • GameSpy
    • 2006 – Biggest Disappointment of the Year (PC)
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • February 01, 2007 - Best PC Game in 2006 (Readers' Vote)
    • February 01, 2007 - Best German PC Game in 2006 (Readers' Vote)
    • February 01, 2007 - Best PC RPG in 2006 (Readers' Vote)

Information also contributed by AHO and Sicarius.

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Related Sites +

  • 3D Gamers - Gothic 3 Downloads
    Get patches, screenshots, trailers and more for Gothic 3.
  • Community Patch Team
    The website of the semi-official community patch team. Which consist of community members of the Publisher's (JoWood) officials board. Here you can find the current Updates for Gothic 3 made by the community members.
  • Gothic 3
    Official Homepage
  • Gothic 3
    JoWood Productions' product page
  • Gothic 3 Cheats
    on Cheat Code Central
  • Gothic 3 FAQS
    Walkthroughs and FAQ files for the game
  • Gothic 3 Game Guide
    Game Pressure's guide includes maps, information about NPCs and specific help on each quest and location.
  • Gothic3.net
    Another comprehensive site about the game, in German and English.
  • Gothic@RPGDot
    Keep up with news, get maps & cheats, opinions and more on this Gothic site, devoted to the series.
  • GothicÂł Interactive Map [G3iMap]
    Gothic 3 Interactive Map is an interactive atlas tool for Gothic 3.
  • UHS Hint File - Gothic 3
    Comprehensive solution and strategy guide set up in question and answer format.
  • World of Gothic
    Another Gothic site available in German & English.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 24456
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Sicarius.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Indra was here, Jeanne, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, AHO.

Game added October 14, 2006. Last modified March 23, 2024.