Recent reviews by hackbod

This review is for people who have played Morrowing or Oblivion, to help decide if Gothic 3 may be of interest to them.

Gothic 3 is one of my favorite games. Though the initial release was quite buggy, the community patch available these days turns it into a very playable game. This review will assume you are playing with the patch installed, as described in my instructions here:

Gothic 3 Optimization Steps

Gothic 3 is a classic open world first/third person RPG like Elder Scrolls, so there are many similarities between them. In a way it is a mix of many of the good parts of both Morrowind and Oblivion, though there are also some general differences from Elder Scrolls that should be covered first.

There is no character creation: you will play as the male human nameless hero, period.

There is no respawning of creatures or flora; once you clear an area, it will remain clear.

There are basically no books of lore or other reading material for people who like to spend hours reading about the history and culture of the world. That said, I think the Gothic 3 world often has more detail than what is found in Elder Scrolls games and does a good job using those details to flesh it out. Every detail of the world often feels carefully hand-placed, such as this screenshot of the entrance to Montera, with individual stones spread around from the broken walls after war with the Orcs:

Ruins of Montera

Gothic 3's world is also completely seamless: there is no loading between areas, not going into houses, into caves, between the different major regions, never. This has a huge positive impact on the overall experience, since it really feels like a completely open world, and in practice you can take advantage of this with tricks to get to places you aren't yet ready to go. You will often find yourself in this kind of situation, looking on an open city thinking about the ways you can go about exploring and exploiting it:

Looking down on Bakaresh

Gothic 3 is more "gamey" than Elder Scrolls games. The Elder Scrolls games try for a certain sense of realism, as a way I think to try to make them more "immersive." Gothic 3 in contrast tends to wear being a game on its sleeve: character progression is very numeric with learning points you use to raise stats and gain skills along with gold needed to pay to do so; tactics you use for success in the world are often based on playing it as a game (rather than what is "realistic"). Even the main character's voice acting often makes me feel like he is self-aware of being in a game and giving another sarcastic comment about another freaking fetch quest.

If immersive realism is something you find really important, that isn't Gothic 3's style. However, its gamey-ness has benefits: not being realistic allows the art design to be much more interesting (I often say I feel like I am wandering around a beautiful painting), allows it to have a more exaggerated scale compared to how Elder Scrolls games try hard to hide their gamey world scale, and it can just be fun to figure out all kinds of tricks and ideas to take advantage of Gothic 3's more visible game systems.

Maybe Gothic 3's world isn't as immersive, but in many ways I find it more interesting and engrossing.

Those differences asside, there are many more similarities between Gothic 3 and Morrowind/Oblivion.

In many ways, Gothic 3 sits somewhere between Morrowind and Oblivion in experience. It came out soon after Oblivion, and has many of the improvements that one would expect from that generation of games, yet still has many of aspects of Morrowind that were lost in Oblivion. That isn't to say that it the best of both games, but it has a nice combination that may appeal to people who loved Morrowind but found Oblivion lacking.

Gothic 3's graphics are in the same class as Oblivion. It has a lush, dynamic world (with moving grass and trees), dynamic shadows and lighting, fairly high resolution textures, and is comparably rich, detailed, and complex.

The world is a more traditional fantasy environment compared to Morrowind's interesting alien world, but doesn't suffer from the blandness of Oblivion. It has three unique environments: the central lush wilderness region, southern desert, and northern snowy area; the world also feels much more hand-crafted, with little details everywhere you look and very little repetition.

All of the dialog in Gothic 3 is spoken -- both NPCs and your own character. This results in quests and dialog being along the lines of Oblivion: more simplistic than Morrowind. However the world is huge, with a lot going on, and is much more connected together than in Oblivion, adding more complexity that way. Even most of the side quests (including simple fetch quests) are fairly connected to the larger picture, since they will impact the feelings of the factions towards you and how you can further interact with them and decide how the game will progress.

The music in Gothic 3 is fantastic. The sheer quantity of it is at the level of Oblivion if not more, but it is not in the background and bland. The quality is much more like Morrowind: strong melodic pieces that will transport you back to the world when you hear them again. It is also much more connected to the world, with very distinctive themes for the three different regions and even sub-regions of those. The first time you walk over a desert hill to view some ruinfields stretching out away from you, with their theme playing along, is not something you will forget.

Gothic 3's world has a lot of verticallity, much like Morrowing and something I found lacking in Oblivion. It doesn't go so far as to have a levitation spell, but the world itself is filled with interesting use of height which you can use to your advantage or can get in your way. You will often find yourself looking up at something and trying to figure out how you can get up to it. For example, this huge hill in the distance that begs you to figure out how to get up there to check it out:

New goal in life: get up there

Or this view after trekking up a high mountain pass down on to the open castle and city below:

Looking down on Faring

In these games I tend to prefer bows over swords, and for that I find Gothic 3's combat to be far better than Morrowind and a bit lesser than Oblivion. It doesn't have the physical presence that Oblivion was able to create, such as the satisfaction of sneak attacks with bows and physicality of swords and shields, but does have fairly fun interactions for aiming and shooting bows, blocking with shields, etc. Sword and shield play is maybe a bit more tactically interesting than Oblivion, since there are different moves you can make and you need to watch the moves of humanoid characters to determine when they are going to make themselves vulnerable. Fighting creatures I find to be much less satisfying, with them easily getting past your defense; in fact I seem to often find myself looking for high ground I can take to shoot arrows or bolts at them while they can't reach me, much like using a levitation spell to the same effect in Morrowind. (I have also not been above leading some creatures back to a city for the guards there to help me take them out.)

Finally, there are basically no physics in Gothic 3, which is a negative compared to Oblivion... but then again compared to how little of interest Oblivion did with physics, maybe not. Characters do have rag dolls when you kill them and the equipment in their hand will go flying.