Gamespot gets around to playing Gothic 3
Gamespot gets around to playing Gothic 3
Review - posted by suibhne on Tue 5 December 2006, 19:33:14
Tags: Gothic III; Piranha BytesGamespot decided to weigh in on subversive Old European import Gothic 3. With a rating of 7.6, the review lauds the game's "substantial, open-ended role-playing experience". To whet your appetite:
Gothic 3 makes some real improvements over the previous games. For instance, though you're still expected to progress through most of the game by taking quests that are kept in a less-than-organized journal, the overall quest structure is much better defined and more cohesive. You'll find yourself taking on fewer long-term quests that require travel to many different areas and more short-term, local quests whenever you enter a new area. Though they're sometimes a bit shallow and often require you to kill a certain number of monsters or retrieve certain items, these shorter-term quests are much easier to keep track of, and they're designed to keep you moving throughout the game's vast world in a logical progression--one that can actually affect how the world is laid out.But if things are so great, you ask, what accounts for the 7.6 rating? The reviewer's primary criticisms are steep performance demands, funky polygon clipping, and sub-par pathfinding for companions and enemies - and the review wraps up by lamenting Gothic 3's poor luck at being released in the same year as Oblivion, which (apparently) exhibits none of these dire problems.
To Gamespot's credit, this is one of the more balanced Gothic 3 reviews to hit the IntarWeb NorteAmericano. The inescapable problem is that, in my dozens of hours in Oblivion, I repeatedly encountered each of these glitches now laid at the feet of Gothic 3. So really, I can't tell you why Gamespot gave Gothic 3 a 7.6 in the context of its other RPG reviews - and I suspect Gamespot can't, either.
Gothic 3 makes some real improvements over the previous games. For instance, though you're still expected to progress through most of the game by taking quests that are kept in a less-than-organized journal, the overall quest structure is much better defined and more cohesive. You'll find yourself taking on fewer long-term quests that require travel to many different areas and more short-term, local quests whenever you enter a new area. Though they're sometimes a bit shallow and often require you to kill a certain number of monsters or retrieve certain items, these shorter-term quests are much easier to keep track of, and they're designed to keep you moving throughout the game's vast world in a logical progression--one that can actually affect how the world is laid out.
To Gamespot's credit, this is one of the more balanced Gothic 3 reviews to hit the IntarWeb NorteAmericano. The inescapable problem is that, in my dozens of hours in Oblivion, I repeatedly encountered each of these glitches now laid at the feet of Gothic 3. So really, I can't tell you why Gamespot gave Gothic 3 a 7.6 in the context of its other RPG reviews - and I suspect Gamespot can't, either.
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