Gothic III First Impressions (ign.com)

- ign.com -

November 16, 2006 - For anyone who hates having their hand held by a game's design, Gothic III seems like the game for you. We've put in around 20 hours so far, and have yet to run into anything that resembled a main narrative. The game kicks off in the small village of Ardea, gives you a vague quest to eliminate a villain named Xardas and directs you to a nearby rebel camp. It seems hordes of Orcs have descended upon Gothic III's human controlled cities and enslaved their populations. However, your goal isn't necessarily to free everyone, at least from what we can tell so far. From the rebel camp, you get bits and pieces of information regarding how to go about eliminating the Orc threat, but how exactly to proceed is left entirely up to you.

At the camp you get a few side quests aimed at netting you experience, but few of the dwellers can tell you anything specific of what's happening in the world. The bulk of Gothic III's gameplay so far has been to aimlessly wander around the world, searching for people who can tell you more. On our travels we've visited a few neighboring cities, picked up more side quests, and accidentally stumbled upon a few more main quests. Quests are recorded in a log which can be filtered by city and by main quests to help keep things organized. Still, going about quests so far has been somewhat confusing. For instance, if somebody tells you to destroy a group of bandits in a nearby cave, they don't tell you the cave's location. They just say it's somewhere nearby, so it's up to you to scour around and find out exactly where. Descriptions in your log are also vague as they record a few lines of dialogue from the NPC who gave you the quest.

Completing quests and killing things rewards you with experience and eventually levels you up. Each level up earns you a handful of learning points which, along with gold, you can use to buff up your character's health, weapon wielding abilities, base statistics, and spells. Finding trainers is yet another aspect of the game that relies entirely on how thoroughly you explore. We learned hunting skills from a random NPC in a shack, for instance, after completing a quest for him. After visiting a few towns, these trainers seemed fairly common, so it's not like they're impossible to find. It's just a little strange to have to find all this out on your own. Magic, health, and spells are learned from shrines littered around Gothic III's vast woodlands, but nobody tells you this in the game, either.

This kind of extreme open-ended design isn't a bad thing. In fact, it's an enjoyable alternative to being forced along a pre-determined direction. The game world itself is enormous, and there are tons of ways to occupy yourself. In addition to your magic spells, you can also invest in pumping up alchemy, thieving, smithing, and hunting skills. As those increase, higher levels of proficiency with swords, axes, crossbows, bargaining, staves, and resistances are accessible. Eventually characters can dual wield, extract teeth, claws and horns from animals, and specialize in forms of magic like water, fire, and dark, and even take on the shape-shifting abilities of a druid.

With all these options for play and places to visit, we wish the map system were better. The game forces you to find maps on fallen enemies instead of just giving you one. Let's say you discover a tucked away grove of druids in the wilderness and get a few quests. If you venture somewhere else before completing them, you could very well forget where the grove was located. Discovering an area doesn't result in it appearing on your map, so you basically need to memorize where each non-marked area is. We're assuming more maps can be discovered to provide you with more information, but this kind of design seems like more of a hassle than anything else. Why not just include a map that auto-updates with important locations?

Adding to the game's open-ended design is the reputation system. Completing quests for each town earns its favor, which eventually opens up new missions in some cases. In addition to gaining reputation with each town, you can curry favor with six factions: Nordmar, Orcs, Rebels, Rangers, Nomads, and Hashishin. We've yet to really see how far reaching these effects are and what kind of long-term consequences they hold for players, but it certainly makes for some varied gameplay. Completing a quest often isn't a straightforward affar, as many offer multiple paths. You could just kill the quest giver if you don't like his tone of voice, steal his stuff, and then move on. Of course you'd then miss out on a follow up quest.

The combat itself is what's really disappointed so far. Though you can play from first-person perspective in Gothic III, it's far easier to tell what's going on in third. The issue we have with the combat so far is there's just no feeling of weight behind any of the attacks. It's just a floaty series of sword swings and magic blasts. When attacking an enemy, they'll frequently back up as you make swings. This often translates to having to swing your sword nonstop until the enemy backs into a wall and your blade can finally make contact. An auto-targeting system is in place to help direct your attacks to enemy flesh. It works fine for single opponents, but where there are a bunch cluttered in front of you things can get confusing.

Gothic III definitely has some pretty environments and excellent lighting effects, especially when you bust out a torch. One cool aspect was the darkening effect of heading into a cave. If there aren't any fires burning in there or outcroppings of luminescent stone, the cave will gradually get darker as you venture further in, eventually getting pitch black. The only way to counteract this is by casting a light spell or carrying a torch, which adds an excellent touch of realism. Character models have a cartoonish aspect to them, and animate awkwardly for the most part. Though the fighting animations are smooth, they somehow just don't look right. During conversations, characters move around with a series of exaggerated hand gestures that look pretty silly and get repetitive rather quickly.

There's a significant amount of voice work in the game, and its quality is all over the charts. Sometimes you'll wince, sometimes you'll laugh and become absorbed in the dialogue, and other times you'll furiously right-click to get to the end of it. Thankfully, you can turn on subtitles so you don't have to wait for every character to finish what they're saying. Great overland themes accompany you on your journeys, making wandering through the wilderness all the more atmospheric. When engaged in combat, battle sounds like weapon clashes, grunts of pain and such don't really stand out, and occasionally get annoying if the fight goes on for a while.

So far we haven't experienced that many bugs, just a few odd glitches here and there and one crash. A few annoyances include sliding down slopes and travel time. Whenever you're on a steep enough rock face, be it on a cliff or a small rock, your character gets locked into a slide animation and is unable to do anything else until flat ground is reached. In the middle of a fight, this can get frustrating. Also, traveling between towns and outposts consumes significant portions of time. We've acquired one portal stone so far that allows for instantaneous travel to a rebel camp, but other than that it's up to our own two feet. We'll see what else we can find to cut down on this.

We obviously still need to play more before reviewing this one, so check out the video and image galleries for updated media.