Gothic 3 (PC) (gamespy)

- gamespy -

I'll confess that the popularity of the Gothic series in Europe, particularly Germany, has always mystified me. It's not that I don't understand the appeal of what developer Piranha Bytes has been going for since the first game was released back in 2001. It's the same thing that the rival Elder Scrolls series is also working on -- a massive, living RPG universe that adventurers can explore to their heart's content. The difference is that while the basic design of the Gothic games is equal (and occasionally even superior) to Bethesda's offerings, they've also labored under terrible coding, a god-awful number of bugs and weird design decisions that make the releases (including Gothic 3, the latest in the series) fail to even come close to fulfilling their potential.

Gothic 3 puts the player in the armor of a nameless, goateed hero completely devoid of personality. The hero was away adventuring in Gothic II but has returned home to the mainland of Myrtana at the start of this game. It seems that while away, things haven't gone too well for the people of Myrtana. Orcs have invaded and conquered the kingdom and the magic of the land's defenders -- the Paladins and the Fire Mages -- has gone dark for some reason. Don't expect to figure this out from the game's devoid-of-dialogue opening movie, however. The first thing most players will see is their character getting the snot pounded out of him as the game opens in the middle of a swordfight with a group of orcs.

The opening scene is somehow symbolic of the many offenses this game commits against the player. First, the game starts the player off in the middle of combat! It's difficult to find the words to express how galactically stupid this is. You mean my initial tutorial on how things work in the Gothic universe is happening while I'm getting my head caved in by a surly orc? Even better, the game doesn't bother to pause while I'm accessing my interface, equipping my weapons, moving stuff to my hot bar or reading my tutorial text? Great! This is fun already. This "feature," by the way, never stops being annoying. It's always great to get knocked down and disarmed by a creature only to desperately try to either pick up my weapon or pull another one out of my inventory while being disemboweled by something with a few too many teeth.

In order to play the game, I first had to do battle with a seemingly endless legion of nasty bugs. The game's tutorial text kept telling me to click on the mouse to swing my sword and move my camera, yet no matter what I did, the game refused to recognize any mouse commands. It didn't seem to have a problem recognizing the mouse in the menu screens though. A call to Aspyr, Gothic 3's North American publisher, put me in touch with Piranha Bytes, who noted that the developers had no idea why this was happening, had seen no mention of it on the official message boards and did not yet recognize it as a problem. In the meantime, had I tried installing it on another machine, using another mouse or tweaking the in-game options? (I did try all of these, only to find it made no difference except to force me to wrestle with a game-related memory management issue on the other PC.) I eventually gave up and set the controls to a pure keyboard configuration, only to find out that the game would occasionally reset my configuration and my difficulty level back to the default mode when I turned it off and restarted it.

The irony of my losing battle to get the game to recognize my mouse was that this was the mildest of the bugs I experienced during the game. My hero would frequently get caught on the landscape, once getting stuck in the air while trying to jump over a fence. Every once in a while the whole screen filled up with bizarre graphic artifacts that necessitated a game restart. I had a couple of crashes to desktop, one massive lockup that required me to restart my whole computer and a nasty memory leak that caused the whole game to experience massive slowdown. Even at the best of times, Gothic 3 is no speed demon. My system is hardly underpowered and I had to run the game at 1024x768 with most of the graphical bells and whistles turned off to get anything close to an acceptable frame rate.

The good news is that I had a lot of time to enjoy the landscape, as the game frequently hangs for long periods while the terrain loads. The bad news? The landscape simply isn't much to look at. The art design for this game is pretty atrocious. The game is divided up into three climate zones: a temperate forest where the main storyline happens, a colder zone to the north and a desert to the south. Of the three, it's the desert that's the most appealing, with occasionally beautiful vistas of endless sand dunes, mysterious Persian-style towers and gorgeous skies. The main area is filled with villages and castles that are just squat and ugly with way too few textures and a whole lot of repeated walls, furniture and decorations. This is unavoidable to some extent in a world as massive as this, but when I fight my way through hordes of undead in a forgotten ancient temple, I have a hard time believing that the supposedly mighty creators of the place didn't have the imagination to design more than one wall-hanging.

Once I had a handle on the technical issues, I could finally get down to really exploring the game. My next challenge was the combat system. Here again, Gothic 3 is a crashing disappointment. The system isn't flawed in concept. Simply click on the right or left mouse button for a short strike or a longer power-swing. Holding the mouse button down longer results in an even stronger swing that takes more time. In execution, the combat system is a confused mess of button-mashing that never seems to work properly. The game's combat and collision animations are extremely poor, making every fight a desperate clickfest where prayer seems more effective than any kind of skill. Of course, creatures in the game have a bit of an advantage in that they use swarm tactics (which is fine) and they have a seemingly miraculous ability to walk through walls, rocks and various other bits of the game's landscape to hit the hero from the other side of impenetrable barriers.

The game's story -- such as it is -- is a boringly generic fantasy tale badly told through atrocious dialogue and voiceovers that run the gamut from acceptable to truly dire. The main focus of the tale is the rebellion of the oppressed humans against their orc overlords. As the player travels around the land, he or she will be constantly confronted with mutually exclusive quests that lend support to one side or the other. Depending on which ones the player chooses to do, each quest completed enhances or degrades the player's reputation (both at the local city level and globally) with one of the game's factions and will determine how he or she is received in areas controlled by that faction.

This factional quest system is easily Gothic 3's greatest achievement. Oblivion tried something similar and ended up with a wide-open world that felt hazy and unfocussed. In terms of world and quest design, Gothic 3's system is far superior. Every choice a player makes has ramifications not only for their hero, but for the world at large. Choosing to support the human rebels (as I did) gradually leads the player to free townships from their orc overlords. As this happens, NPCs will move into newly freed towns and set up housekeeping. As a player's local reputation goes up, NPCs will begin to treat the character differently, eventually hailing him as a local hero (or villain, depending on their own factional loyalties). This contributes enormously to the feeling of a living world and is clearly one of the great attractions for the series' fans.

For all the good elements in quest and world design, even here the game manages to screw up. Supporting one side or the other will eventually piss off the other side so badly that their strongholds will attack you on sight. That's fine except that in order to complete the main story, players must acquire certain items and complete certain quests from both sides. Since there's no way to go back after falling into one faction's bad graces, it's entirely possible to be unable to complete the game just by playing the game as designed!

The game's character development system, like the world design, is very good. Players acquire "learning points" as they go up in level. These learning points can be spent on a variety of skills available from trainers placed around the world. Skills range from combat-oriented to stealth and thievery to wizardry. The result is that how a character develops is a great combination of player inclination and their actions within the world. As certain skills are only available from certain trainers, closing off a factional resource necessarily limits the way a character develops. This is not a bad thing. Like the factional questing system, it means that every choice a player makes has genuine consequences for both themselves and the world.

The bad part is the interface the player uses to do this. The player interface for character development (and inventory control and the quest journal and myriad other functions) is simply terrible. Character skills and player controls are laid out in confusing and counterintuitive ways. It's prohibitively difficult to tell exactly what a player's skill progression is and what the prerequisites are for getting a particular skill. This makes character planning almost impossible. Even worse, the skill tree can't be open when the player is making selections during skill training. These choices are offered in a dialogue box as a simple list with no other information accessible during the decision process. It's the RPG equivalent of developing a character by dropping the Dungeons & Dragons Player Handbook on the ground and selecting the skill on whatever page it opens to.

In the end, the greatest tragedy of Gothic 3 is that there are actual moments when what might have been comes peeping through the digital detritus. The basic design of the game is quite sound and if Piranha Bytes could clean the game up, it might end up becoming a classic. As it stands now, my nightmarish trip through the world of Gothic 3 made me want to send my disc on a one-way trip into an incinerator. Here's hoping Gothic 4 turns out better, because this one's a complete miss.