GOTHIC 3 - GOLD!!!!!

[Slowtrain]

I'm trying to decide if I should throw away my boxed copies of Gothic 1 and Gothic 2. I'll probably never play them again, but you never know.

[6 Foot Invisible Rabbit]

 

Throw games away?!?!?

 

 

ARE YOU INSANE?!?!?!?

 

I still have my copy of Ultima 4.

[Slowtrain]

I've been trying to throw away a lot of games recently.

 

Just say no to clutter!

[Tigranes]

See, that's when you utilise a nice little thing called a closet.

 

Or some space with a door.

 

You don't know what you're missing until you dig up the doll you had when you were 2, or the diary you wrote when you were 6.

 

Apparently I knew the word 'subsidies' when I was 6.

[6 Foot Invisible Rabbit]

Games are never clutter.

[Azure79]

I've been trying to throw away a lot of games recently. 

 

Just say no to clutter! 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

What games are you trying to get rid of? Can we have a list?

[SteveThaiBinh]

I liked the video . The world seems alive and attractive, although we may just have seen the best bits. The settlements seem smaller with more people, and that will be a relief after Oblivion's empty world. The gestures are a bit odd-looking at first, but I imagine you get used to them, and it's better than having everybody stand around like lumps.

 

I hope it works on non-spectacular systems.

 

I don't think I've ever thrown away a game. I still have King's Quest I on floppy somewhere. I wonder if it still works.

[Dhruin]

At a glance it looks pretty much the same as Gothic and Gothic 2 to me in terms of being "alive", so I doubt the video shows just be the best bits. That's just the way Gothic is.

[mkreku]

The excessive hand gesturing during conversations has been around since Gothic (and also in Gothic 2) so for me it just feels like Gothic to see them flail around while talking about the weather etc.

 

The gameworld has always been what's fascinated me about the Gothic-series. The part they're showing in the video is (probably) indicative of the game itself, and not some part they've chosen to show off for maximum effect. Even in Gothic the NPC's behaved like people. I remember spending hours just walking around observing daily life in the first castle. People were chatting, fighting, watching gladiator games, eating, gathering around campfires and even getting up after one too many beer to take a leak. And the pee was yellow (most games censor pee and make it white)!

 

The only problem I can foresee about Gothic 3 will be the system demands. It looks like it has been badly optimized this time as even all the promotional videos show massive framedrops and stuttering gameplay. Let's just hope the game is still enjoyable even if the technical part is not 100%.

Edited September 14, 2006 by mkreku

[alanschu]

The white pee just means that they were properlly hydrated. You know, your pee SHOULD be white (well, clear)...not yellow "

[6 Foot Invisible Rabbit]

It will probably have verious settings you can play with like Oblivion. Sure Oblivion can make high end systems strain and weep if you have everything turned on but you can keep all the settings low enough that a computer 2 generations old can play it. It would make good sense that Gothic 3 followed the same route.

[Cyric]

The first Gothic was a good game IMO. However, its sequel Gothic 2 while not bad could have been alot better. Its seemed Pirhana Bytes rushed the later stages of Gothic 2's development or simply ran out of original ideas.

 

Perhaps one of the key game plot writers of the original left before Gothic 2's was in the works?

 

I just hope they make Gothic 3 worthy of the original.

[mkreku]

At least I found out today that the game has a setting for turning off that "blurry background" effect for long distance viewing! Great news for me! Also, there are a bunch of new, very pretty screenshots on that russian site that we already linked to in this thread. I'll link it again for convenience.

 

http://www.crpg.ru/modules.php?op=modload&...howgall&gid=273

 

I can't find the gay ponytail on the main hero anymore Someone must have cut his hair! Oh noez!!

Edited September 14, 2006 by mkreku

[6 Foot Invisible Rabbit]

Did the Gothic main character go emo on us?!?!

[Volourn]

I'll buy Gothic in February. Hopefully G3 can win me over. It looks like it will be great, and a much needed improvement over the earlier two which had potential but ultimately failed.

 

Surely beats the horrid, unredeemable ES series.

 

That's for darn sure.

 

GO GO3 GO!

[6 Foot Invisible Rabbit]

You haven'y even played ES4 and as faras I know you have no plans to ever will so who do you know that ES4 is what redeems the series in your eyes? All the crap you coplained about in ES3 is pretty much been fixed in ES4.

[Volourn]

That's what people said about MW, too.

 

The sad part... they were right... and, it still wasn't impressive...

 

G3, on the other hand, I can see lots of things I can tell there's a very good chance I'll like. The new, much improved character system, the drama between orcs and humans, and so on.

 

With Oblivion, on the other hand, we get their lameo idea of their 'dialogue minigame'. That's enough to make my skin crawl.

[Ellester]

imo, Oblivion plays too much like Morrowind. Sure there are a lot of changes, but it still feels like Morrowind.

[Meshugger]

-"A Dan Brown novel set in a fantasy world"

 

Sounds like a killer story <_<

[Pidesco]

-"A Dan Brown novel set in a fantasy world"

 

Sounds like a killer story <_>

 

 

There goes the interest I had in Gothic 3.

[Musopticon?]

Well, that wasn't the exact quote. But yeah, I cringed a bit there.

[Judge Hades]

imo, Oblivion plays too much like Morrowind. Sure there are a lot of changes, but it still feels like Morrowind.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I bet you to say that on the TES forums.

 

To me it doesn't feel like Morrowind. As for the dialog system, replace it with a mod. That is why they are there.

[mkreku]

Just a few tidbits of new info:

 

Gothic 3 will natively support widescreen gaming. It was possible to change the .ini file for both Gothic and Gothic 2 to support widescreen gaming, but not everyone knows how to do that. Gothic 2 Gold had widescreen gaming implemented in the menu, just like Gothic 3 will have.

 

Also, although the Piranha Bytes team have done their best to sort out any bugs, there will be an official patch released on 13'th October. Same day as the release of the game that is. Expect a bug-fest if you buy Gothic 3 early! Both Gothic and Gothic 2 were released in Germany over six months before they were translated to english. By the time international players got hold of the game, it had been patched 3-4 times already. Gothic 3 is the first time Piranha Bytes releases both the international and the german version at (almost) the same time. Will be interesting to see what the germans have had to go through..

[alanschu]

It seems it is becoming a more common trend to have patches come out on or near the day of release.

[mkreku]

Some nut took the time to write down a preview from PC Gamer (US version), so here it is:

 

It's hard not to feel a little sorry for the creators of the Gothic series. Few gamers are aware that a surprising amount of what made Bethesda's Oblivion so great in early 2006 - loads of voiced dialog, elements of its combat system, and its life-like AI routines that allowed NPC's to go about their daily business in a lifelike way - had already been done brilliantly in Gothic 2 back in 2003. Clunky controls and an unwieldy UI led to relatively weak sales of G2 in the US, so there will be plenty of gamers coming to Gothic 3 this fall thinking it's merely an Oblivion knock-off. Oh, how wrong they'll be. In fact, Gothic 3 is shaping up to be the Oblivion many of us wish we'd gotten.

 

G3 is a first/third-person RPG set in a fantastical open-ended land filled with over 50 unique monsters, 50 spells, countless weapons, armor, loot, and quests. Its class-free character development system lets you train your character in a wide variety of physical combat disciplines and magical powers. Sounds familiar, right? But unlike most RPGs, G3 places you in a land after it has suffered a major defeat, one that has no relation to anything you did in earlier chapters. Orcs have invaded the world and made mankind their slaves, and you're one of only a handful of free humans remaining. It's up to you to decide if you want to go out of your way to save your fellow humans or your own hide.

 

What I found most interesting and surprisingly invigorating as I played an early build of G3 is the absence of a sense of impending doom. The worst, it seems, is over, and rather than running around in a panic, closing "dimensional gates," I felt like a real adventurer in a real medieval land, taking missions at my own pace without feeling like I was being forced down a path.

 

That's not to say that the world was sitting around waiting for me. In stark contrast to Oblivion, if you don't finish many of the quests in G3 within a certain period of time, events will play out on their own. For example, you may be asked to help the humans storm a castle that has been overrun by orcs. You can go along on the raid with your AI buddies and help turn the tide, but if you don't, and you go to that castle later, you may find that the battle has already happened and that either the humans or the orcs have won.

 

Graphically, G3 is up there with Oblivion - a little worse in places (e.g., low-res ground textures), but a little better in others (e.g., draw distance) - and the world has a grittier, dirtier, more lived-in feel. One aspect where it has Oblivion beat hands-down is load times: Once G3 starts up, there are none - the world streams in seamlessly.

 

As someone who loved Oblivion and appreciated its huge variety of voiced dialog, even I must admit that the game's limited number of voice actors made NPC's seem generic, but Piranha assured me that G3's 20+ hours of voice dialog are being recorded by a whopping 25 actors, hopefully ensuring that the game's hundreds of unique-looking NPC's also have distinct personalities.

With its controls and UI finally up to modern standards and the series' revolutionary features blinged out like never before, Gothic 3 is poised to give ravenous RPG fans their largest, juiciest meal since Bethesda fed them at the start of the year.

 

A lot of Oblivion references. Not unexpected, but still a bit annoying.