Here are my 5 reasons why Gothic 3 was a fail.
Recently, I have tried to replay Gothic 3 after installing the latest community patch, but the game is still unplayable, quality-wise.
Here are the points that demonstrate that Gothic 3 was a fail:
1. The graphics and the technical problems.
I’ve played Gothic 3 during the years, with 3 or 4 video cards, and even with these GPU upgrades, the game had the same issue with far landscape textures.
The water texture is missing, you get to see only a small portion of it.
The mountains and the hills are suffering from the same things, they get normal textures only when you get closer to them.
It feels like you play a broken game and it really hurts the game’s immersion.
Besides these, the game still gets stuck every few seconds, and has frame-rate drops every once in a while, even on a very powerful PC with 8 gigabytes of RAM.
2. Lack of story, main quests and motivation for the player.
An open world game is nice if the towns and all the places wouldn’t look artificial.
You can play the game for 40 hours just wandering around and doing side-quests.
And then you get a lack of motivation to continue, because you don’t know what exactly to do, why you do all these side-quests, and why you gain level and improve your character.
The main quest is very hidden and doesn’t feel important at all for the player.
3. The melee combat system.
It’s terrible.
It looks artificial, doesn’t have any sense of realism, challenge or logic.
You just keep clicking (attacking), and besides alternating left and right click, there is nothing to do.
In some cases, you die with the feeling that you didn’t do any mistake.
Even the combat system from Gothic 1 was better.
You knew that when you get better, learn to use the weapons / gain strength, you will perform excellent vs. weak enemies and feel really powerful.
This feeling is missing in Gothic 3.
Even if your character is high level, you will not feel powerful.
4. Weapons, armor and loot.
They are totally missing.
In Gothic 3 you get to loot all kind of useless weapons, rings and items.
There are tons of items like these.
I remember that when I played the game for the first time, during about 40 hours, I only got two or three weapons.
And at least the first 30 hours I played with that Flame sword that you get early in the game.
That’s not fun at all and it generates the feeling of lack of progression and character development.
Chest loots are terrible.
You know that you won’t get anything powerful except thrash loot that is only good to sell in order to generate gold.
5. The music and voice acting.
Some will say that the music was epic.
I say that it’s really annoying and is far away from the epic music from Gothic 1 and 2.
Not to say that it becomes very frustrating that the music changes every time you get into a fight.
The fighting music is beyond terrible.
The sounds of the orcs that are fighting is ruining any sense of realism and overall ruins the immersion.
The conclusion for 5 reasons why Gothic 3 was a fail
I think the game was unfinished, Piranha Bytes didn’t had time to finish the game, fix the bugs, balance it well.
Even the sound and the music was not finished.