Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Gothic 3 community patch 1.75 released

Nim

Augur
Joined
Oct 22, 2006
Messages
447
Did I mention that merchant inventories are also random, chosen the first time you talk to them ?
:troll:
And there is one weapon recipe that only one specific smith CAN have. Probably the best 1handed weapon, certainly without AB.
:troll:
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
Joined
Aug 27, 2009
Messages
27,792
Lack of hand-placed loot and the emptiness of the world are what really kill the exploration in G3. Once in a while you'll stumble on a quest in the middle of nowhere but nothing particularly interesting. They could have just left out Varant and Nordmar entirely or saved them for expansions or whatever and focused on fleshing out Myrtana. I get that it's a desert and polar-ish region but there's literally nothing in 60% of those areas. It's more obvious in Varant since it's flat desert.
 

Revenant

Guest
I believe there are trade-offs, however: Varant has the best cities in the game (quite fitting for a culture resembling medieval arabs) that are quite well designed even compared to other games than Gothic 3, and Nordmar actually provides serious navigational challenges even when you have all the maps and walkthroughs, which is somewhat a rarity in modern games.
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
Joined
Aug 27, 2009
Messages
27,792
Navigational challenges = tedious and annoying to move around.
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
Joined
Aug 27, 2009
Messages
27,792
Son, I was playing RPGs when you were knee-high to a June bug. Has nothing to do with quest compasses and everything to do with Nordmar being empty and boring and filled with cliffs just to prolong movement for its own sake. If they had bothered to put any interesting content there it would be another story.
 

cvv

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 30, 2013
Messages
18,075
Location
Kingdom of Bohemia
Codex+ Now Streaming!
So I've finally gave it a spin, I thought fuck it, it's only 2 euro on GoG, and my verdict - I have done the whole Myrtana now and it's been neither utter shit nor nowhere near G1/G2 level.

I'm playing with alternative balancing/AI on and I'd recommend against AB but definitely for AAI. With alternative balancing you get the G2Notr experience where you have to really plan your skill point distribution but since nobody is ever gonna replay G3, you might as well go with the fucked up vanilla balancing, get a deluge of points and master all the skills in one playthrough. But the alternative AI is a must otherwise the melee combat is terrible instead of meh. At least with the AAI on there's some mediocre challenge and fun, against humanoid foes that is. Fights against animals are still completely idiotic, either you suffer through endless knockdowns and stunlocks or you just blast them with fireballs in five seconds. (The tragedy of Risen 2 is that PB, after crafting an excellent combat in Risen 1, went back, incredibly, to the idiocy of Gothic 3).

Unfortunately though, I have to admit I'm enjoying it only slightly better than Skyrim which is so fucking similar in so many ways - bad combat, bad writing, general storyline (a country overrun with foreign invaders, you can pick a side, meet/recruit rebel camps in wilderness etc.) Skyrim has more content and better world design but Gothic 3 still has the special PB ambience and style and feels more hardcore and PC as opposed to the lobotomized and consolitized Skyrim.

I'd say PB was way too ambitious here, they basically tried to create with a few people and few millions what Bethesda fucked up with 70 people and 100 million. As a result, it all feels rather empty and spread out too thin but you can definitely see the tremendous potential. Jesus I'd love to play this game as it was envisioned in Pankratz' dreamy head. As it stands now though, and after reading about the emptiness of Varant and Nordmar ITT, I can't decide whether to go on or not. Sigh, such a waste of a game.
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
As it stands now though, and after reading about the emptiness of Varant and Nordmar ITT, I can't decide whether to go on or not. Sigh, such a waste of a game.

Oh, Nordmar isn't empty. There are about a million orcs and skeletons there for you to kill.

With the community patches I found it to be quite ok but lost interest after Nordmar for various reasons.
For one it get's rather repetitive eventually - there are simply too many of the same enemies you are killing over and over. And Nordmar indeed is lacking in story content and quests.
The other reason is that I played a mage. I think that the AB fucks up magic a bit - you are basically forced to keep all the permanent +magic items until after you have managed to level it up far enough normally.
Which however also means that it will take forever until you can take stuff like magic regen, making the combat even more of potion binge-drinking than usual and rather tedious. Most damage spells, esp. AoE simply suck for combat - I think I used about 2 or 3 different spells about 90% of the time since the others would get interrupted almost 100% and even when they work the damage is laughable.
 

LordDenton

Augur
Joined
Mar 18, 2011
Messages
271
Location
USA
As it stands now though, and after reading about the emptiness of Varant and Nordmar ITT, I can't decide whether to go on or not. Sigh, such a waste of a game.
Just go visit them and make your own fucking judgement.
 

Gnidrologist

CONDUCTOR
Joined
Aug 30, 2005
Messages
20,856
Location
is cold
Varant was slightly better as it had couple of cities with quests n shit and i think you can avoid most of the desert/ruins if you want. In Nordmar there is one settlement with very few quests, which you will have to navigate to first via incredibly contrived pathways of cliffs and plateaus with a lot of mandatory backtracking. Also paths are easy to confuse with one another so unless you have good spatial sense you could be wondering back and forth for hours there. It's basically like a dungeon under open sky instead of open ended world. And it's filled with things that want to kill you.
There's also Xardas. God, what had they done to him? :negative:
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
Patron
Joined
May 13, 2009
Messages
27,091
Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
On my only playthrough of Gothic 3 I finished most of Myrtana, then went to Nordmar and finally gave up about halfway through Varant. It was all just too much.

There ain't a patch in the world, official, unofficial, community or otherwise that can fix the bloated beast that is Gothic 3.
 

the_shadow

Arcane
Joined
Dec 30, 2011
Messages
1,179
While Gothic 3 is nowhere near as good as Gothic 2, I'd still recommend it. You'll enjoy it for a while, but probably won't have the fortitude to finish it. In fact, Gothic 3 reminds me of Morrowind, just with (slightly) more engaging combat.
 

subotaiy

Cipher
Joined
Aug 8, 2012
Messages
522
Location
Romania
Varant is not that bad, I remember that it has its own 2 competing factions (water mages and the royalists, who give you access both to dual wield and mana regen). Also liked the oriental setting, especially the soundtrack.
 

Cadmus

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2013
Messages
4,264
I gotta agree with everything here. I liked Myrtana for the beautiful scenery, ok combat, ok quests but near the end it started getting awfully repetitive and bland, thanks to the loot system and the save the city quests. Then I went to the sand area and when I found out Id probably be doing the same thing I gave up.

Loot system overhaul and decreased backtracking and overall compression of the game could make it great, in my opinion.
 

cvv

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 30, 2013
Messages
18,075
Location
Kingdom of Bohemia
Codex+ Now Streaming!
Ok, Nordmar is done and incredibly, I sorrta enjoyed it. Although I s'pose it's mainly because I like everything northern and Viking and such and the ambience of this place was fucking great. Plus for a 2006 game it looks absolutely gorgeous.

Great moment - when I killed the white wolf the druid said now his fate is complete, he can now go and die. And he just started walking. Out of curiosity I followed him. It was a slow midnight walk under a beaming moon, the snow crunching under my feet. The old cot wasn't much of a company, everytime I tried to talk to him he snapped "Don't bother me". Fine for me. I was enjoying the quiet walk among the already massacred wildlife. And then suddenly, out of the blue, a snow shadowbeast leaped from the bushes and those two started duking it out. I thought it was a bit unfair since the old druid didn't have his sword since I took it from him when I beat him up for the druid stone. Well, he was swinging a goblin cudgel he found on the way but still. I put a few fireballs in the beast. I got a completed ghost quest and a unique skin. And the old druid, instead of dying, as promised, just leaned against a tree and started eating a soup. I left him be. I was sure when he runs out of soup this far in the north, he will freeze to death anyway. So everything will be as predestined.

Really for some reason, the Nordmar part grew on me. I liked the labyrinthine pathways and the general mood of the place. Of course the number of enemies was completely idiotic, packs of 8 wolves, groups of 4 sabretooths, dozens of skeletons and orcs in each tomb and camp. It must be an absolute nightmare for fighters. I think if I was a melee char, I would've given up half way through the first tomb, regardless of how much I liked the place otherwise.

Mage is definitely the way to go in this game, even though the first Myrtana part is slow and trudgy because you're weak and constantly out of mana. But later parts with a mage, that's where this game starts coming into it's own. Now it's off to Varant and I'm hyped because I like sunny deserts as well :)
 

Revenant

Guest
The above post tempted me to start Gothic 3 for the umpteenth time. Fuck the haters! This is a great game!
 

the_shadow

Arcane
Joined
Dec 30, 2011
Messages
1,179
Mages are supreme in Gothic 3 once you get the mana regeneration skill. With decent arcane knowledge skill, you can just spam fireballs. You don't even have to aim, since they are heat-seeking.
 

Lord Andre

Arcane
Joined
Apr 11, 2011
Messages
3,716
Location
Gypsystan
Sequence chests where anything remotely useful is at the end, together with trololol you helped the nomads you can kiss master dual wield goodbye, killed it for me.
 

Revenant

Guest
I don't really understand people whining about sequential chests. All they do is prevent the player from reading the walkthrough and going right away for the ph4t l00t, instead encouraging exploration of the game world.
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
Mages are supreme in Gothic 3 once you get the mana regeneration skill. With decent arcane knowledge skill, you can just spam fireballs. You don't even have to aim, since they are heat-seeking.

I found mage gameplay a bit boring. Not enough interesting (useful) spells - fireball is one of the first you get and you will keep using it probably until the end- and too much potion drinking until you finally learn mana regen.
 

cvv

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 30, 2013
Messages
18,075
Location
Kingdom of Bohemia
Codex+ Now Streaming!
I don't really understand people whining about sequential chests. All they do is prevent the player from reading the walkthrough and going right away for the ph4t l00t, instead encouraging exploration of the game world.

Personally I don't mind the system at all. I guess in a Gothic game, where you can kill a Dragon Snapper at lvl1 with a kitchen knife if you know exactly what to do, it sort of makes sense. I vastly prefer hand placed loot too but it must be guarded by uncheesable mobs and I'm not sure that is feasible in a Gothic game.

I found mage gameplay a bit boring. Not enough interesting (useful) spells - fireball is one of the first you get and you will keep using it probably until the end- and too much potion drinking until you finally learn mana regen.

That is definitely true, magic is probably the weakest point of all PB games. In G3 it really boils down to spamming fireballs and ice lances (very useful too). Everything else is either redundant (Banish Evil), impractical due to long casting times (the Wave spells) or a gimmick (Bloodlust). How awesome would the mage gameplay be with some practical AoEs or spells like Slow, Teleport, Drain Life, Mass Poison...that sort of stuff. Instead you just run in a orc camp, blast off a few fireballs, run away for 20 seconds, chug some pots, go back, rinse and repeat. But I guess to fight those hordes of orcs and undead with a melee char would be even more frustrating.

But the reason I started to like this game is the fact that PB is absolutely great at atmosphere and here they got me again, eventually. G3, I gotta say, has the best atmosphere and ambience of all PB games. Skyrim is the only RPG that can compete openworld-wise but as for atmosphere, it's like a Disneyland castle next to a real castle. Even Risen 1, which is an excellent game in its own right, is a decline compared to the Gothic series. I can only imagine what G3 could've been with a Dark Souls combat and Skyrim budget. Probably my second most favourite RPG ever.
 

throwaway

Cipher
Joined
Dec 17, 2013
Messages
492
While not entirely different the best spell in a patched up game, contrary to the popular perception, is actually Ice explosion. Sure it's not much but it provides SOME magic progression rather than the fireball-exclusive path, ie none.
 

Lord Andre

Arcane
Joined
Apr 11, 2011
Messages
3,716
Location
Gypsystan
I don't really understand people whining about sequential chests. All they do is prevent the player from reading the walkthrough and going right away for the ph4t l00t, instead encouraging exploration of the game world.

First of all I'm not whining, I'm saying it's shit.

Second I don't need to be prevented or encouraged to do anything. I'll play the game however I feel like because it's just me and my computer and none of us cares.
I don't need walkthrough-drm, don't need save-scum-drm, don't need long-trips-back to-vendor-drm, don't need to be told how to enjoy a game.

Third the sequence is poorly balanced as you will always find stuff that is worse than what you currently have. The only way the sequence is not lagging behind your current gear is if you checked a location guide before hand or you are on your third replay and know where everything is.

It's not good design, it's just something they did to cut time and push the shit out the door to meet release date. Just like the unfinished dead-end factions.
 

Raapys

Arcane
Joined
Jun 7, 2007
Messages
4,960
Have to agree on the atmosphere part. The mix of world design(i.e. terrain/buildings), graphics style and music makes Gothic 3 one of the most atmospheric RPGs out there. PB really knew their stuff, before the rising began.
 

Revenant

Guest
First of all I'm not whining, I'm saying it's shit.
Considering the amount of times sequential chests in this game have been bashed on these forums, any further complaining about them really qualifies as whining.

Second I don't need to be prevented or encouraged to do anything. I'll play the game however I feel like because it's just me and my computer and none of us cares.
I don't need walkthrough-drm, don't need save-scum-drm, don't need long-trips-back to-vendor-drm, don't need to be told how to enjoy a game.
Sure, let's provide the player with a button that instant wins the game when clicked. Oh wait, that has already been done. The awesome button (tm). The whole point of playing a single player game is to overcome obstacles that have been designed to block player's advance.

Third the sequence is poorly balanced as you will always find stuff that is worse than what you currently have. The only way the sequence is not lagging behind your current gear is if you checked a location guide before hand or you are on your third replay and know where everything is.
It's not that loot has been placed at a reasonable pacing in Gothic games at any time. "Let's go get the Dragonslicer in chapter 1 trololo". Having to locate all those chests can be a fun game within a game in and of itself.

It's not good design, it's just something they did to cut time and push the shit out the door to meet release date. Just like the unfinished dead-end factions.
I don't really see how sequential chests are any faster to make than regular hand placed loot. They could have just dumped the best items in single chests as much as development time is concerned.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom