Review Gothic 3 vs Oblivion at Gamers Europe

[Rosh]

That was an issue? How about, I dont know, pressing pause before opening the inventory?

D00fles!

Quoted for pricelessness.

 

[franc kaos]

Oblivion: The Emperors new clothes.
Neverwinter Night 2: Baldurs Gate 1
Gothic 3: Aladdin (diamond in the rough).

the way the game doesn’t pause when you open the inventory...

Priceless...

 

[TheGreatGodPan]

I haven't played Gothic 3, but in Gothic 2 other people could jump well enough to attack me when there were physical obstacles in the way.

 

[Claw]

Well yeah, in Gothic 2 NPCs could jump and climb pretty well. In Gothic 3 - not so much.

 

[Limorkil]

Any game with three after its name fills me with a certain confidence. If a game has had two previous instalments then to warrant a third must mean it is worthy. This applies to many games, the really popular ones shoot past three towards ten and higher.

Few RPG titles go past 2. I can think of Wizardry, Ultima and Might&Magic. And with RPGs you could have no confidence that the sequel would be any better than the one before. This smacks of a reviewer used to playing action/sports games, where the main improvement in the game is the graphics and the actual gameplay does not change much.

Most of us will remember the good old days when games tended to stop when they got to three, using names for subsequent sequels. Street Fighter, Double Dragon and Mario are all fine examples.

I guess these titles add weight to my point above. Great RPGs all of them.

Gothic 3 follows on from its RPG predecessors with the nameless hero heading to Myrtana having beaten the Sleeper and the Undead Dragon. Fans of the two previous games will be pleased to see some old faces like Diego, Gorn, Milten, Lee and Xardas. As the story unfolds, the nameless hero is forced to choose between the marauding Orcs who have enslaved the human populace and the humans who seem to be having chronic bad luck.

Note the negative implication that the player is "forced". The extreme lunacy of Oblivion where you can be the head of all guilds at once, and you can commit anti-faction acts without any real negative implications and barely a reaction from the NPCs, is clearly not a negative to the reviewer. So No Choices No Consequences is obviously the mantra.

Gothic 3 is a good game. It sets out to be a sequel to what is by now a long running series and it achieves just that. Long term fans are not disappointed here but are there enough juicy pieces of eye candy to bring in new players? It would be foolhardy to assume that a game with a ‘roast meat’ feature could accomplish this.

Not sure I follow this particular logic. Are we saying that new players will not like to roast meat? In Oblivion people only ever eat raw meat. If you enter all the houses in the Imperial City there is raw meat sat out on plates in nearly every house. Personally, I would think that the option to cook the meat would actually be a plus.

Certainly, Gothic 3 has the best water effects I have ever seen in an opening cutscene - so good in fact that I thought I was watching real-time footage. This causes expectations to skyrocket. It also makes the wait seem worthwhile, mostly because Gothic 3 has questionable load times.

Oblivion has a cinematics opening sequence featuring a ship sailing along the estuary, armies of Daedra and Patrick Stewart. Old PS dies soon after you start and there are no ships you can sail in and no armies of Daedra in the game. Which do you think is more dissapointing? Not having water look as good as it does in the intro or not having ships, armies of daedra (the whole point of the main quest) and more than a handful of Patrick Stewart dialogue?

I’ll admit this machine isn’t a spring chicken any more but it can still dance the rumba. Launching the game means skipping through five intro/logo screens (Piranha Bytes, Deep Silver, JoWood, NVIDIA and Intel Core Duo) but not before leaving me with enough time to put the kettle on. After the kettle is on, I go to the load screen to pick up where I left off.

Oblvion also has 5 intro screens. You can deactivate them in the .ini file, but that might also be true with G3. Loading later in the game takes a while because the save game gets bigger as you progress, although I never thought it was too long (note I have superfast PC)

Gothic has a handy quicksave option that lets you do just that. Best practice would suggest that having only one quicksave file is a bad idea (Sid Meier usually gives his gamers four). This is because quicksave games can become corrupted leaving you in a serious lurch. Blessed are those who have yet to come across an RPG you can’t save properly.

There is only one quicksave in Oblivion, and a corrupted Quicksave is one of the most common problems I run into.

After I get the game loading, I go downstairs and make the tea. One of the advantages of Gothic 3 is that it wraps nicely around other parts of your life. One of the disadvantages of Gothic 3 is that it takes quite a long time to load (at least on this PC). The long load times are either a bug or a very clever design feature. Everyone here at GE is thankful for all the extra tea that’s been going around lately. In fact, Gothic 3 might even get me promoted. Wishful thinking aside, the load times of Gothic 3 raise serious doubts about the code behind the game. It is little wonder that so many players have found it unstable.

OK so the load times are long in G3. We get it. Spend 20% of the review criticising the load times.

The game begins by throwing you in at the deep end. This is designed to get you familiar with combat. Your hero comes equipped with an Orc slaying sword, just the tool for the job. The first battle you fight has Orcs that can’t kill you which is just as well. Death is a costly experience in terms of cups of tea.

Oblivion throws you in at the deep end too, if you consider helping protect the Emperor from deadly assassins the deep end. Luckily the games pretty much ensures you will not die, although if you try to protect the Emperor from the assassin that actuall kills him, that assassin will KILL YOU and there is not much you can do about it. So you either let the guy kill the the emperor or you have to reload. Nice.

This first battle usually dictates your fighting style for the whole game. Because it begins in third person, the tendency is that the player behind the eyes of the nameless hero will continue to use this perspective. The combat system seems to be geared towards using a third person perspective, although the game supports both first and third perspective and the former is just as effective in battle.

So far, I’ve gotten by using a simple button mashing technique. The only button I need to beat anything in my way is left click. The combat system leaves a lot to be desired. Many users attest to the tactical nature of opponents, but simply left clicking until the cows come home works on more occasions than I’d care to admit. Orcs seem to attack at a very predictable, sedentary pace, akin to a golf cart with a flat battery. Hacking away at them does the deed indubitably leaving behind a road paved with corpses.

Oblivion is no different. Melee combat is a lot easier in third person and most oponents charge, attack and then pause in a very predictable manner. The most effective strategy for beating any opponent is to run forward, slash, run back out of reach, repeat. If your character has higher agility, strength and blocking skill then you can attack/block/attack/block effectively, and beat almost anything with no damage, but blocking against fast opponents (e.g. Mountain Lions) and/or strong opponents is deadly because blocking is just too slow. Most of the time I am screaming at my character "Raise your f**king shield you stupid b*tch" as she is constantly interrupted by enemy attacks. Basically, combat variation only enters Oblivion when modders make it so, but even then you can beat anyone with run forward / slash / run back unless they have health regeneration (trolls or modded content).

This in turn speaks ill of the AI. Gothic 3 has gone to a lot of trouble to try and make Orcs seem cunning but after you realise that they can’t counter a simple attack, the whole system falls flat on its face. My pet brick could finish the game if it were placed atop left click. The nameless hero soon develops two foolproof attack strategies: “hack away like a loon” and “pack lots of ammo then find a high rock”. The former works on Black Trolls, beasts so large they’d need 16 seats on a plane. Woolly rhinos, bison, wolves, Orcs, goblins, sabretooths, ogres, golems, even dragons (hard to find but they exist) are susceptible to a cheesy attack from a character that can jump.

Exactly the same in Oblivion, except with Oblivion it is hack/step back/hack. Beating a ranged attacker using a bow or a spell is easy because their projectiles move so slow. You can mod to increase the speed, but even at very high speed it is easy to avoid enemies because they ALWAYS shoot when they see you, so you duck out, duck back, they are fooled into shooting, so you duck out again and fire on them while they "reload".
And you cannot criticize and AI and praise Oblivion at the same time. Oblivion is the game where two NPCs can be talking and you can run up and hack one down without the other one doing anything. The only effective way to get multiple enemies to attack you is to use an area of effect spell, since the ability of enemies to react to nearby combat is very limited. I have actually spent ages trying to make the AI more intelligent in this regard, but without scripting it always leaves a lot to be desired. Even with a one-on-one situation, if you are using a ranged weapon your opponent will not always fight back or do anything - often they just stand there while you turn them into a pincushion.

Yes indeed, the nameless hero appears to be the only biped in the entire game that can jump up onto rocks, roofs and boxes. This allows ludicrous attacks such as the bow or crossbow attack mentioned above. It also allows him to scale mountains, in a roundabout fashion. Continuously jumping up against a mountain is time consuming, but it allows the nameless hero to get into all sorts of interesting places. One such place has a giant stone P.B. (presumably a monument to Piranha Bytes). It’s a little hard to find but I can tell you it’s on the border.

Ditto with Oblivion.

Gothic 3 as an RPG is a fair contribution to a crowded genre where a few notable games shine brightly. One of these is a game called The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Both are RPG games with similar ideas. Gothic 3 alludes to competing with Oblivion, but it is beaten in sheer scope and completeness.

It sounds as though Oblivion has less bugs than Gothic 3, but apart from that I do not see how there is any basis in fact for the above statement. The basic design of Oblivion in terms of story, plot, choices, quests, loot, combat and AI is total crap. There are more choices and consequences in Dora the Explorer.

As I mentioned of Jowood, parts of Gothic 3 are quite obviously unfinished, most notably some of the towns in the desert where details trail off like an old coot telling a rambling story that doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. Or something like that.

Whereas the wonderful Oblivion features multiple planes of Oblivion that all look exactly the same; pop-up windows that basically tell you that you MUST do the next step of the quest LIKE THIS because if you try and do something different it has not been accounted for by the designers; NPCs that switch voices mid conversation; a landscape that has trees or trees & snow, all apparently randomly placed. Oblivion does look polished, I will give it that, but it is clear that no time or imagination was applied to any of the elements.

There can be a lengthy debate about which game is better but I’ll save us all time and say that Oblivion wins on panache. Everything about it is just somehow slightly better. If I had to pick the tie breaker, it’d be the memory leaks issuing forth from Gothic 3. Although Piranha Bytes developers such as Carsten say these are due to be fixed, my belief is that such a high level of community involvement is unprofessional. By all means, appoint a community representative to voice concerns to the development team, but don’t waste valuable time posting in forums when there is a job to be done.

So Oblivion wins because it looks more polished. Great, thanks. And I suppose John Grisham is better than James Joyce because his books are so much more accessable. And community involvement is a bad thing? Ever heard of the Unofficial Oblivion Patch, an essential fan made mod that fixes a lot of the stuff Bethesda has not quite got around to yet (such as quest events that strip you of your abilities and other "minor" stuff). Bethesda practically relies on community input, which is why they allow you to download an editor to make/adjust/fix content. Who fixed all the game stopping bugs - fans. Who fixed the horrible performance issues and long distance draw issues - fans. Who made the game remotely playable for anyone who is not totally brain dead - fans. Had there been no fan made content I would not have bought Oblivion in the first place because I never believed the hype.

Gothic 3 has a lot of good qualities like crossbows and a quest system that rewards you for random acts of violence. Unfortunately, the crossbows needed patching before they worked completely. I still get the odd reload bug, but it doesn’t adversely affect gameplay.

Almost all Oblivion quests are resolved through random acts of violence. I get random CTDs (plus save game corruption) with Oblivion when transitioning from inside to outside. It doesn't effect gameplay.

When Oblivion shipped it looked like a fine block of polished marble. Gothic 3 shipped looking like a slice of pizza on a Sunday, released into the world by its makers at a stage where it was only really half cooked. Many would regard such an offering with blatant indifference. Although it is gooey, grainy, raw and tasteless in places, a few minutes in the microwave fixes it right up.

True. Very true. I cannot see why this would penalize the game too much though. It is not uncommon.

By that I mean it looks good. Gothic 3 supports the latest rendering technology, including the new Pixel Shader 3.0. There are a few flaws here and there such as weapons on your back drawing on top of each other and “arbusti ignotus”, more commonly known as the obscuring shrub (sorry, my Latin is a bit rusty), a plant that blocks your view of the character. The most quizzical bug I found was the bleeding skeleton bug. Whenever a skeleton takes a hit from a sword, he spurts blood. I can only hope that all the skeletons in the game carry donor cards; their marrow could go to good use after the nameless hero has dispatched them. Still, it looks quite good.

Bushes obscuring either your view of your character in 3rd person or what you can see in 1st person is very common in Oblivion, given that the landscape is all bushes and ferns. Actually, the most annoying part is that these things do not obscure the sight of your character from enemies. Enemies cannot see through items that you cannot walk through, but they can see through bushes and long grass, which makes sneaking up on someone in the forest almost impossible despite the visual impression that it should be very easy. And Oblivion has a lot of clipping issues.

Sound is somewhat repetitive. I would wager that the average game of Gothic 3 will have the words “nothing to be had (here)” said over 200 times. The nature of the game means that checking corpses for loot (and quest items) is important. The fact that corpses can disappear is worrying: many players have fallen foul of this trap on a certain quest involving a certain stone. The dialog in Gothic is well written and quite comprehensive thanks to the FMOD sound system.

I have only three things to say to you:
- "Rats! They have fighter's guild people out chasing rats ...."
- "I heard that when you murder someone the Dark Brotherhood visits you in your sleep ..."
- "The Emperor and his three sons dead!"

As for music, Gothic 3 supports my theory of mediocre-at-best games with great music. As games improve, their music improves exponentially until the game becomes so good that the great music melds seamlessly with the experience. Gothic 3 is somewhere around the middle of the curve. The gameplay leaves a lot to be desired but the music is excellent. The battle music is always the same for every conflict or scuffle you encounter, but it never annoys past the point of airborne speakers. The few tunes it does employ are all well written. Minor improvements could be made by using additional chord transitions and melodic shapes. Even a simple key change would spice things up.

This theory makes no sense whatsoever. For a start, the reviewer called Gothic 3 a good game earlier, so now it is mediocre? Also, if the music improves exponentially but the game does not then how does the music meld seamlessly with the experience? Wouldn't a more sensible theory be that "Great music does not make a game great", or is that too obvious to be claimed as "my theory". Or maybe the theory should be "If the game looks and sounds good, and the game does not overtax our brain, then we are prepared to overlook any flaw. But if a game shall violate any part of this triad then everything else the game does shall be spat upon and derided."

I’d love to see the design charts for this game. It feels as though certain elements were left out because the developers were pressed for time.

Of course, there is no way Bethesda would ever do this.

Gothic 3 requires a mammoth system to deliver a game that ought to run just as well on a middle aged system. There is no minimap or waypoint marker system (something that appeals to RPG fans), meaning that locations and geography need to be memorised. Part of the challenge perhaps, but sometimes this sort of thing is construed as a missing feature and shunned by RPG gamers who prefer knowing where to go.

If your idea of an RPG is Oblivion and GTA then I guess you are correct.

Plants in Gothic 3 seem wide and varied, however none of them are climate specific and the alchemy skill is rather inflexible. This is due in large part to the way alchemy is tied to towns. In Gothic 3, alchemy can only be performed with an alchemist’s bench. There aren’t really that many things to make either. Mana potions, health potions, stat potions, and maybe transformation potions to turn you into an animal are all available but there’s nothing terribly exciting. A player only needs 60 skill points in alchemy to brew just about anything. This may indeed be another indicator of some unfinished element but the same applies to almost all the other skill categories such as hunting, fighting, magic, smithing and arcane knowledge.

The climate in Oblivion does not vary much between snow and no snow. Certainly, the trees are all the same. Alchemy ingredients grow in different areas, but there is little reason why this should happen because the climate hardly changes since the map is only 16 miles or so across. I still cannot figure out how Cairn Bolette can grow in the deepest darkest dungeon AND by the side of the road, or why no-one ever noticed that the supposedly rare Nirnroot grows almost everywhere: underground, by lakes, on the beach, in towns. In Oblivion you can make all sorts of potions, 95% of them totally useless. And your alchemy equipment is what effects the power of the potions, your actual skill in alchemy has little or no effect (except that you cannot use certain properties of an ingredient until you reach a certain skill).

But oh, what a shame that such a fine game bears the mark of the bane of JoWood.

I thought the game was mediocre two paragraphs ago.

We all know what happens when these people release games. The customer ends up being the beta tester. To the credit of the developers, patches have not been slow in coming and the latest patch addresses many of the issues experienced by otherwise happy gamers. Even as I write, another patch is on the way. I could (and in the past, would) write a lot about the curse of JoWood but it’s just as easy to say caveat emptor.

So the reviewer scores G3 lower because it was released by JoWood, while at the same time acknowledging that they do seem to be doing a better job.

The other big problem with Gothic 3 is one I’ll call ‘too many cooks’. With upwards of four companies behind the title, it’s no wonder the game has problems. Basic localisation issues crop up (I came across a quest title written in German) and there is utter lunacy surrounding the release schedule. Perhaps Aspyr Media want to release a working game to the U.S. Not a bad idea, but what will people think when they patch up straight past version 1.9? Shenanigans such as these conjure images of someone welding a wheel back onto a moving car, which isn’t a problem except that this is neither the first nor last time it will happen.

Basically, the game is worse because the original language was not English. I am sure German, French, Italian people never see any English words in Oblivion. Or maybe they are not petty enough to raise it as an issue?

Obviously I could go on to mention the broken console, the inventory exploit bug (remember the Diablo dupe cheat? Similar thing here folks!), the inventory system in general, the hefty fall damage, the one hit kill bug (more of a consistency issue), copy protection issues, the way the game doesn’t pause when you open the inventory, the quest system that’s based on dialog and maybe even the ridiculous idea that every fire in the land burns forever

Oh my.
Oblivion has zero exploits then?
And the inventory system in Oblivion is perfect, even though it was designed for the Xbox?
And you never died from falling in Oblivion, because I have died falling only the equivalent of 10 feet.
And I suppose pausing the game mid fight so that you can drink 4 potions is perfectly reasonable in Oblivion?
And the little message that you "Must finish your attack before you can change weapons" is not at all irritating?
And a quest system based on popups that tell you exactly what to do each step of the way plus a compass to lead you to exactly the right location is a perfectly sensible quest implementation.
And it is totally within keeping with a realistic gameworld that 1000 year old dungeons have lit torches in them, and that campfires stay lit for years, and that torches and candles don't even flicker in a howling rainstorm? Any game where you can talk to the soldier outside a burning city with a burning portal to Oblivion, have him tell you that we need to move quickly to close the gate and rescue the survivors, and then come back 10 YEARS LATER after getting yourself made head of every organization in the land is clearly the paragon of realism.

… but I think I’ve said enough.

If I were to never see anything written by you ever again it would still be a billion years too soon.

Gothic 3 is a game that punches above its weight. To a certain degree it holds out well against competing RPG games but with so many bugs and lingering issues, it would be wise to hold off for a while until the dust settles. Piranha Bytes are working hard to make sure this game lives up to high expectations. With a little luck and a lot of work, Gothic 3 will find a place on many overflowing shelves.

Bottom line is: It has bugs, wait while they patch it. Until then it is good/fine/mediocre game depending on how you are feeling at the moment you type that particular sentence.

 

[Volourn]

Gothic 3 is the best free roaming game ever. I couldn't play any of the earlier Gothics or other ES games (I haven't played Oblivion yet nor do I plan to anytime soon) for more than a couple of hours. I have played G3 for about 10 hours with no signs of slowing down. G3 has LOTS of things I despise; but at leats it's still at least an enjoyable game.

 

[Texas Red]

Gothic 3 is the best free roaming game ever. I couldn't play any of the earlier Gothics or other ES games (I haven't played Oblivion yet nor do I plan to anytime soon) for more than a couple of hours. I have played G3 for about 10 hours with no signs of slowing down. G3 has LOTS of things I despise; but at leats it's still at least an enjoyable game.

So all this time VD was right about the reviews?

 

[Hazelnut]

Limorkil - send what you posted to the author, I would love to see their reply.

 

[Volourn]

"So all this time VD was right about the reviews?"

No. He's still a G3 fanboy whow hines just because reveiwers don't think exactly the way he does.

 

[Bradylama]

Oblivion is no different. Melee combat is a lot easier in third person and most oponents charge, attack and then pause in a very predictable manner.

I thought the game was unplayable in third person.

 

[The Vanished One]

Oblivion is no different. Melee combat is a lot easier in third person and most oponents charge, attack and then pause in a very predictable manner.

I thought the game was unplayable in third person.

You can play it in third person, but first person is much better imo.

 

[Micmu]

Gothic 3 is one of the rare games I played where you can see your body in 1st person. Also, I like the mild view bobbing and its realistic 3D perspective illusion and depth of field.
Too bad the game switches back to 3rd person view (and stays there) each time you activate an object/actor. BL-style automatic 1st/3rd person view switching for melee combat would be a nice option.

 

[aries202]

When did waypoints or quest arrows become a must have thingie in RPGs ??

Afaik, BG1 & 2 didn't have these, nor did any of the older rpgs.

As far as opnening your inventory in combat means that the game is no longer paused, well I agree that this is realism as its best. You can't have it both ways. Opening your inventory could be considered as your move this turn.

I also do feel that yes, Oblivion is a lackluster graphics game, while Gothic 3 is more gritty realism. And I like gritty realism...

To explain it another way: Oblivion, to me, is like a cake with nice frosting on top, but when its comes down to content, there really isn't much more than flashy looks. Gothic 3 would then be the chocolate cake that doesn't have any frosting on top, and looks kind of boring at first, but when you taste it, you really feel how much work have gone into making this great tasting cake. (not that i would recommend tasting your game dvd's, though...)

As for the smart people in europe, here's a little hint (with a glimpse in the eye )

Unfortunatley, all the smart people in Europe decided that the wather was too hot for them; then they moved to Scandinavia ....

 

[The Vanished One]

When did waypoints or quest arrows become a must have thingie in RPGs ??

INNOVASHUN!!!