Gothic 3 Sucks -- A Critique From a Longtime Gothic Fan (Updated Ver 1.1)

Note: This article was originally published in January 2018, but has since been updated with extra content, including a full video review.

Gothic and Gothic 2 are two of my favorite games of all time, being two of the games that had the most influence on my young and developing mind when I first played them in the early 2000s. And yet I harbor virtually no love for Gothic 3. I've barely mentioned it in any of my Gothic articles because I don't even like to consider it part of the series; it doesn't connect to Gothic 2 very well, and the whole gameplay formula is a radical departure from what made Gothic and Gothic 2 so great. Even though it was made by the same developer, Piranha Bytes, Gothic 3 feels like a different game by a different group of people who had only a vague understanding of what the Gothic games were, and who were told to make everything "bigger and more epic" in order to compete with the likes of Morrowind and Oblivion. Spoiler alert: they failed miserably.

Gothic 3 is a classic case of a game being ruined by ambition, of a developer trying to reach beyond their own means and biting off more than they could chew. The game, besides being unfinished and under-developed, was a buggy mess upon its release, and it took years of fan-made patches to supposedly "fix" the game and make it functional. The community patch is now almost one-third the file size of the base game, and contains numerous bug fixes and stability tweaks, and also attempts to completely redesign and rebalance the combat system. I played the game at launch (late 2006) before the community patch even existed, and again a few years later with it, and while the patch truly does a lot to improve the game's overall playability, it doesn't (and simply cannot) fix the core gameplay design and story problems, which are the real reasons Gothic 3 sucks -- not just the bugs and broken combat that the patch supposedly fixes.

Normally I'd be content to dismiss the issue and move on with life (the game's over a decade old, after all, and I haven't even played it in about eight or nine years), but I find it surprising that, even today, people still speak highly of Gothic 3. With the recent release of Elex, newcomers to Piranha Bytes games frequently ask about their previous games and which ones are worth playing, and people readily leap to defend (or even recommend) Gothic 3, usually with the caveat that you need to play with the community patch. That's sound advice, of course, but I just can't justify recommending Gothic 3 to anyone because of how bad of a Gothic game it is, and how mediocre it is, just as a game in general. So in this article I'll be explaining my opinion on Gothic 3 and why I think it sucks.

The video version of this article.

#1 UNIMMERSIVE DESIGN

The first thing that stands out when one starts playing Gothic 3, apart from the completely different engine, is that its core design philosophy feels fundamentally different from the previous two games, where Piranha Bytes strove to make everything as immersive as possible, not only from a world-building perspective but also from a mechanical standpoint. With Gothic 3, that emphasis is apparently no longer an emphasis, seeing as you're blasted with awkwardly slapped-together tutorial windows as soon as you launch the game telling you there's a hotbar in the center of the screen, and that you can press "1" to draw your sword, and click the left and right mouse buttons to attack and block. These windows continue popping up in the early stages of the game explaining things to you, until eventually it's saying "Very good! Next, you should talk to your old buddy Lester. Walk out of the village and follow the path to the left that leads to the coast. There you can find Lester who will give you more information. Talk to Lester on the beach!" And it's like, do they really need to tell you this through an obnoxious immersion-breaking tutorial window? If this were Gothic 1 or 2, they would've had a character say something like "Hey, where's Lester? He might know more. I saw him leave town a little while ago, looked like he was heading for the coast" but because it's Gothic 3 there's no in-world mention of where to find Lester -- just an omniscient tutorial window.

The rest of the HUD likewise throws a lot more information at you. Whereas previously the HUD only showed you your health bar and that of your current target, in addition to your mana bar only while actively using magic, Gothic 3 adds your mana meter to the HUD permanently and also adds a stamina bar, in addition to a compass and a 10-key hotbar. While these serve useful mechanical purposes and are certainly a welcome convenience in a world this big, they're decidedly more intrusive than the previous games' HUDs. When picking up quests in the previous games, your quest log would track information in a journal format, as if the character were writing information down to help him remember things, but in Gothic 3 the quest log simply pastes the dialogue script from the conversation when you picked up the quest, as if the character is running around with a voice recorder. Then you got more "video gamey" elements, like how the reputation system works, where you gain percentage points towards increasing your standing with each faction and town by doing quests for people, but it's just an obscure, abstract number where you ask to speak to the town leader and a guard says practically says "You're still missing 10% reputation with us before we'll trust you." And on top of that, people psychically know when you've stolen things or murdered people, even if it happened outside of town with no witnesses.

#2 THE WORLD IS TOO BIG

Gothic 3 abandoned the tight, compact world design of its predecessors in favor of going for a massive Elder Scrolls-style world with dozens of towns and hundreds of quests. A large world isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is when it isn't filled with interesting content, and Gothic 3's world feels needlessly stretched-out. The central area of Myrtana, which comprises roughly one-third of the map, is at least decently-populated with towns and caves and monsters and so on, but Nordmar and Varant, the two areas to the north and south, are noticeably lacking in content compared to Myrtana. Varant is just a sprawling, barren desert with huge stretches of absolutely nothing but sand, and Nordmar, while having a far more deep and complex topography, is mostly a bunch of combat encounters where you just run around twisting pathways fighting enemies and looting things, like it's an over-sized level from a hack-n-slash game like Diablo or Icewind Dale. Because of the huge size of the world, exploration becomes incredibly tedious and time-consuming because you have to waste so much time just traversing the map, and in a lot of cases there isn't anything interesting to reward you for your effort or time invested in exploring this over-sized world.

Leaving the first town in Myrtana.

What's even worse is that the world is designed to be done in sequence, going from one town to the next, completing each one as you move across the map with no real need to return to previous areas. Each town is pretty much self-contained (sometimes an orc-controlled town is tied to a nearby rebel-controlled outpost), meaning what you do in one town won't affect anything in another town (except to block quests in the other, opposite town/outpost, if you take too strong of a side in the orc/rebel conflict, say, by liberating a town and killing all of the orcs within it). Once you "complete" an area, it may as well cease to exist, and most of the towns/areas only exist in the first place to pad the game with repetitive stat-grinding as you complete mundane tasks for a minuscule amount of faction reputation. Exploring the world, therefore, feels like you're categorically checking off boxes on a list instead of actually exploring the world, and it makes the world feel incredibly fleeting because you only ever really see a place once, and then move on to the next area once you've completed it.

Varant: The Land of Near-Infinite Nothingness.

Gothic and Gothic 2 were ultimately much smaller, more intimate-feeling games. Their worlds were a mere fraction the size of Gothic 3's, but they were more densely-packed with unique and interesting content. You didn't have to run somewhere for minutes at a time just to find something remotely interesting on the horizon; there was interesting stuff everywhere you looked, often to the point that you might feel overwhelmed with possibilities, just within your immediate surroundings, in terms of where to go and what to do. As a result, they were more fun to explore because you were constantly engaged with interesting terrain and structures (as opposed to wandering across huge empty fields), and the landscapes and their overall layout felt much more memorable, partly because the worlds were smaller but also because they were far more detailed. Their worlds were also designed around the central focus of the story, which helped to make every area feel significant, as if it tied in with everything else in a meaningful way, because they actually did. With Gothic 3, it feels like they made the world first and then came up with stories and quests and such afterwards, and so most of the game's content feels like it's just kind of pasted onto the world like a sticker, with a whole bunch of boring, tedious filler in-between. 

#3 MMO-STYLE QUESTS

Virtually every town is filled to the brim with simplistic MMO-style quests, which consist entirely of tedious objectives meant to give you a repetitive bunch of tasks to do so that you can grind experience and faction reputation, and so the back of the box can proudly say that it has "over 500 quests" to complete. Things like "kill 5 wild boars" or "collect 10 healing plants" or "escort so-and-so to such-a-place" -- pointless objectives for random people you've only just met, who serve no purpose in the story or even in the world itself except to hand out busy work to the player, who'll become completely obsolete once the quest is complete. There's no interesting story behind these quests, no narrative or worldly context for them, and no reason to care except to satisfy an obsessive compulsion for completionism. There are no meaningful decisions to make, either -- nearly every quest follows an entirely straightforward, linear progression from beginning to end with completely mindless gameplay amounting to nothing more than cliche errand boy fetch quests.

New Quest: Harek wants some meat.

Quests in Gothic and Gothic 2 were never that ground-breaking, in the grand scheme of RPGs, but they at least gave you a reason to care about them, or a plausible reason within the context of the world for why you would be doing those things. In Gothic 1, when Cor Angar sends you to fetch healing plants from the swamp, it's to help save Y'Berrion after he almost dies conjuring the vision of the Sleeper, so the quest is centered around a spectacular event with apparent stakes actually on the line, since Y'Berrion could theoretically die if you aren't quick enough (even though you know it's a video game and it'll maintain a status quo until you advance the quest further). It's also a quest given to you by characters you have established relationships and a bunch of previous interactions with, since you've already worked with Y'Berrion extensively to prepare the ritual. Plus, it creates a unique gameplay scenario where you have to sneak through the swamps in the middle of the night avoiding dangerous swampsharks who're much too strong for you to fight at that stage of the game, thus making it a more challenging and more interesting task than simply walking down the road and picking some healing points off the ground. There's a reason you would want to do this quest, and a reason to care, since it has a meaningful impact on the characters and the story.

In Gothic 3, when Sebastian sends you to fetch 10 healing plants, it's because he's out of supplies and needs more healing plants. That's it. There's no pressing need for healing plants and no real consequences at stake if you don't fetch them, and no interesting story element to back up why this character needs you to fetch him the plants. The actual mechanics of this quest are pretty mundane and boring, too, since he's sure to stress that "they grow almost everywhere" and that "you shouldn't have a problem finding them." And so all you do is walk right outside the rebel camp and there are healing plants abundantly growing everywhere, which then begs the question of why this guy is even out of supplies in the first place if they're so easy to acquire. These are, ultimately, the same type of quest on a superficial level, but Gothic 1 creates a sense of drama around the simple task of fetching healing plants, with an interesting mechanical challenge involved of having to find rare, special plants in a dangerous area, as opposed to Gothic 3 which gives you no story element whatsoever with finding completely mundane, ordinary plants in a completely mundane, ordinary area in a completely mundane, ordinary way.

In fact, pretty much every single quest is a shallow two-step "Point A to Point B" affair where you're given a task, go there and do it, and then return to the quest-giver. They don't develop into more elaborate ordeals with interesting twists along the way, or present you with a dilemma that you have to solve through your own creative means -- they're just completely on-rails and practically resolve themselves with little regard for your own input. Gothic 1 and 2's quests are by no means a gold standard of sophistication in terms of their actual mechanics, but they do at least like to give you open-ended objectives like "retrieve Matteo's money from Gritta" where can beat it out of her, steal it from her, or get Thorben to pay for her, where you get actual choices about how you'll solve the quest, or much broader objectives like figuring out who's been supplying the bandits with weapons where you have to figure things out on your own by talking to people, exploring the world, putting clues together, and following leads. Very few quests in Gothic 1 and 2 are shallow two-step affairs, and even when they are they have some sort of meaningful story or character element behind them which makes them interesting, as opposed to Gothic 3 where the quests are basically churned out by an assembly line to meet a quota. 

#4 RANDOMIZED/SCRIPTED LOOT PROGRESSION

The majority of loot in Gothic 3 is randomized inside of chests. A select few items are hand-placed in the environment, but these tend to be useless junk or otherwise so rare that they barely deserve mention. Chests aren't even scaled to a certain value, meaning the rewards for discovering a hidden area or getting past a tough enemy are essentially a dice roll of whether get something actually good and valuable, or a bunch of mostly worthless junk. Rewards, therefore, are generally tied more to random chance than to specific actions or challenges. Some chests, noted as either "old" or "heavy" chests, are programmed to give you fixed rewards in ascending value, based on how many of those specific types of chests you've opened previously. In other words, the core loot progression through these special chests is completely fixed, and earning better rewards isn't a matter of overcoming more difficult challenges or discovering obscure, hidden areas of the map, but is simply a matter of grinding chests. Near the start of the game, for instance, there are some special chests being guarded by dragons, which should be the most challenging enemies in the world guarding the most valuable treasure to be found, but if you go there at level 1 and find a clever way past them then you'll be rewarded with crappy, worthless loot in those special chests because you haven't opened any previously. There are no shortcuts, either -- end-game loot will always be restricted until end-game because you have to go through the entire process, hunting down every single chest in the game to get the best loot.

All the loot from all those skeletons is in those two chests.

Absolutely nothing in Gothic and Gothic 2 was randomized, or followed a scripted scaling system -- every item was individually and uniquely hand-placed by the designers. Getting good loot wasn't a matter of rolling the dice and hoping for something good, or about grinding chests; it was about deliberately pushing yourself into dangerous territory where you could expect to find more valuable loot. The more dangerous the challenge, the greater the likelihood of finding greater rewards. It felt more exciting to get a unique reward for a unique challenge, and also allowed for satisfying meta-gaming on future replays because, if you remembered where the good loot was, you could go out of your way and push yourself to achieve more powerful loot earlier in the game. Plus, there were often fun narrative and lore explanations for why you would find special loot in special places, like the legendary Dragonslayer being found in a knight's crypt, floating in blue light above a certain casket, guarded by two skeleton knights, or a dexterity-boosting amulet being found in the mountains on the decayed corpse of an adventurer who fell and met an untimely demise. You don't get that kind of world-building when all the items are randomly found inside random chests.

#5 BORING, BROKEN COMBAT SYSTEM

Combat in the first two Gothic games was ahead of its time, being one of the first fully three-dimensional, third-person combat systems in an open-world action-RPG. Those games had some issues, like the somewhat cumbersome, idiosyncratic tank-like control scheme, but the combat played at a pretty satisfyingly fast pace with quick animations and response times, while still following a grounded, realistic tempo that had a good back-and-forth rhythm to it. The system demanded precise timing and positioning, with you having to time each and every attack, block, and dodge just right else you'd stutter in your attacks or get hit. You could also string attacks together in different ways, chaining forward-momentum attacks with left and right swipes, and the attack animations changed and improved as you gained better training with your weapons. Doing well in this system required a high degree of skill, both in terms of learning enemy attack patterns so you knew how to exploit their movesets, but also in terms of having good hand-eye coordination and reflexes, with being able to execute the controls just right, at the right time.

The brawl in the first town.

Gothic 3's combat is complete rubbish. Attack animations feel slow and awkward, like the hero is spreading butter on toast with a giant sword, and the recoil from being hit is obnoxiously excessive. You no longer have to time your attacks or blocks, as you can just spam the attack buttons or hold down the block key indefinitely. The stamina meter, meanwhile, does practically nothing as you can still block and perform most attacks even with no stamina. The game adds a distinction between light and heavy attacks, but there's no real reason to use heavy attacks because light attacks will stunlock enemies better, and the special attacks (which consume stamina) tend to be absurdly over-powered, like the 360-spin with polearms. There's no more upgrading movesets, and enemy AI is so painfully miserable, with every fight against humanoid enemies turning into a one-on-one where you spam attacks against the one enemy, who's powerless to interrupt your infinite combo, while everyone else stands around watching. There's no innate skill threshold, whatsoever -- you just spam right-click. There's also way too many enemies in this game, to the point that you're having to fight literally dozens of enemies at once, all by yourself, turning the game into something more like Dynasty Warriors and making certain playstyles like archery borderline unusable. The community patch helps the combat, to a certain degree, like by preventing creatures from being able to stun-lock you and vice versa, but against humanoid enemies it makes combat more meticulously involved to the point that if feels like you're really just exploiting the broken AI, as opposed to fighting in a sensibly intuitive system. 

#6 NONSENSICAL ENEMY HIERARCHY

In Gothic and Gothic 2, there's a very clear hierarchy for enemies; as you get stronger and work your way up the ranks, you know what's beatable and what's not. Perhaps more importantly, you feel like there's an intuitive reason why a shadowbeast would be more powerful than a snapper, or why a lurker would be more powerful than a field raider. And with the way those games handle damage resistances, it meant that certain enemies were literally unbeatable until you reached certain offensive thresholds, so there was a tangible feeling of progress as you got stronger and eclipsed a new threshold when you could finally take on certain types of enemies. Gothic 3's enemy hierarchy doesn't make a lot of sense, because different types of enemies are randomly much stronger or weaker than they would seem. Wolves, for instance, are presented as some of the earliest and easiest enemies in the game but are ironically some of the most powerful because of their broken stun-locking attack animations. Never mind that the same enemy types get recycled with slightly different names and skins, further blurring those lines (ie, is a sneaky goblin more or less strong than a thieving goblin?). Ironically, orcs (who should be the main threat per the story) are some of the weakest enemies in the game, while basic wolves were far more devastating enemies than skeleton warriors or any other tough enemy, just because their attack animations were so ridiculously fast. Every fight is a crapshoot because you rarely know how strong you'll actually be against a certain type of enemy, just because of how inconsistent they are. Meanwhile, there aren't many damage thresholds preventing you from tackling different types of enemies, since pretty much every enemy can be killed the first time you encounter them, and so getting stronger doesn't feel that rewarding.

A cave full of zombies.

#7 UNREWARDING CHARACTER PROGRESSION

Getting stronger and progressing as a character doesn't really feel that satisfying. Similar to the game world being stretched too thin, it's like the progression system is stretched so thin that it takes long chunks of time and leveling (ie, grinding) before you make any kind of noticeable progress towards actually getting stronger. With the scripted loot progression you're forced to get stronger in small increments at a time, while end-game gear isn't really that much better than some of the starting gear.

Magic is a prime example of this; in Gothic 3, the basic fireball spell that you can learn in the first town is the main and only offensive spell you'll be using the entire game because there's no upgrade path for magic projectiles. Flamewave is practically worthless because of its long casting time and needing to be nearly in melee range for it to hit, meaning you'll almost always get interrupted trying to cast it, and Meteor is restricted until near the very end of the main quest, so you basically use Fireball the entire game until you get eventually get Rain of Fire, and then you're done. In Gothic 2, you started with Fire Arrow and worked your way up to Fireball and Large Fireball, with Firestorm and Large Firestorm also being in the mix as viable alternatives that could do AOE splash damage around its target. Each spell looked and behaved a little differently in addition to simply having better stats, whereas Gothic 3 gives you basically one spell and then has you improve its damage very slowly over the course of the game by increasing your magic stat, which is something entirely passive and only happens in the background math, rather than actually affecting gameplay in a meaningful way like learning new and different spells.

The skills and stats window.

In a similar vein, melee combat's not much different, since the basic Halberd you can get in the first town is arguably the best weapon in the game since it does above-average damage and has the longest reach of any other weapon. Weapons you get much later on do more damage, but not by all that much, in exchange for having much shorter reach, so generally speaking finding new melee weapons isn't that rewarding because they're always either inferior to what you already have, or are only marginally better. Meanwhile, increasing your melee combat skills serves as basically only a threshold to equip stronger weapons, since improved combat training doesn't unlock new abilities or enhanced attack animations, such that melee combat remains basically the same from the beginning of the game until the very end, and actually mastering a particular type of weapon is actually a downgrade since it causes enemies to get knocked down all the time, where they become invincible until they stand back up.

The game world is also designed to be conquered in sequence, starting on the east coast of Myrtana and working your way west, so while the game's enemies technically don't scale with your level, they tend to get stronger as you work your way further west; unless you veer really far off the game's intended path, most enemies in an area will likely be within your level range as you reach them. Then, after a certain point much too early in the game's overall length, you become insanely over-powered and leveling up any further then becomes pointless. If you do most of the game's quests and explore most everywhere you'll eventually have enough skill points to become a master magician, master swordsman, master archer, master thief, master alchemist, and so on. In fact, there's no reason to even invest points in alchemy because you can learn all you need from just reading random books.  While it's decently satisfying to become an all-powerful god, essentially, it's pretty unsatisfying to reach that point far too early in the game where you cap out your progression in your desired field and then have nothing else to build towards, except branching out into other fields that you won't really use. The community patch addresses this, but "solves" the problem primarily by slowing down level-ups and limiting your skill points to such a degree that you're forced into picking one specialization and sticking with it for the entire game, which is perhaps counter-intuitive in a world built around having the freedom to explore, and also just slows progression down so much that it rarely feels like you're making any progress at all.

#8 THE REALLY LOOSE FACTION SYSTEM

One of the coolest features of the original two Gothic games was how both of them forced you to pick from one of three different factions to play as, which would change the way you played the game by unlocking unique skills, equipment, and even quests. This not only gave you a more uniquely personal feeling of playing the game, but also allowed for some good replay value since you could replay it and experience a whole new perspective on the same game. In Gothic 3, you never really join a faction -- you're sort of a freelance hero the entire game, doing whatever quests for whatever faction you want, whenever you want. Even though you might pick a side in the orcs versus rebels conflict, doing quests exclusively for one side, you never actually join them. In fact, if you want to maximize experience points and get the most out of the game in a single playthrough, then you'll end up doing quests for every faction, anyway, except for the major tipping points like choosing to wipe out a rival faction. Although the reputation system can unlock rewards with each faction, as you complete quests for that faction and improve your reputation with them, it feels more like an abstract number -- a stat, if you will -- then actually joining that faction, and the only real benefit to gaining reputation with any faction is being able to equip their special armor sets, which really aren't that good or interesting. How you build your character is also completely independent of which faction you choose to support since no skills or abilities are tied to specific faction.

Quest log showing faction reputation; one more stat to grind.

#9 NO REGARD FOR LORE AND BACKSTORY

In Gothic and Gothic 2, orcs were a primitive tribal society. They used crude weaponry, wore minimalistic gladiator-style loin cloths, lived in tipis, ate from their bare hands around campfires, believed in arcane gods, practiced spiritual mysticism, and spoke a guttural beast-like language. They were incredibly tough warriors and felt genuinely intimidating. In Gothic 3, they all suddenly speak English, they wear normal human-looking clothes and armor, live in normal human buildings using normal human tools and furniture, and have a fully organized societal and military structure. They look and sound kind of like they were made by Dreamworks, and most of them are push-overs in combat (it's easier to kill an entire platoon of heavily-armed battle-trained orcs than a couple wild animals). They're almost completely different, and utterly ruin the fearsome aesthetic of the orcs in the original games by becoming ordinary, mundane humanoid enemies in Gothic 3. Even if we were to say that these are supposedly a different race of orcs (allegedly "northern orcs" versus "southern orcs") it's still a jarring change that completely undermines the established relationship with the villains that we've developed over the previous two games. They did this, of course, so that you could actually interact with the orcs and take quests from them, and maybe also have incentive to support them, but this gameplay design doesn't really work with the story that's already been set up, unless we choose to ignore the events of Gothic 1 and 2 and treat this like a stand-alone game. Which, it might as well be.

These orcs are much too regimented.

At the end of Gothic 2, the nameless hero set off from Khorinis (and subsequently Irdorath) with a boat full of friends and allies. At the start of Gothic 3, suddenly Lee, Lares, Vatras, Angar, and assorted other NPCs are all inexplicably missing, nowehere to be seen in the intro cinematic and disappearing as quickly and inexplicably as the ship disappears, scattering all over the world where they become just generic quest NPCs with no interesting quests or interactions. Everyone looks and sounds different than they did before, and they even act differently. At the end of Gothic 2, Angar wanted to retire to a life of peace as a farmer, and then in Gothic 3 he's inexplicably living it up as an arena champion in Mora Sul. Lares was just a roguish adventurer in Gothic 1 and 2, and now apparently he's a renowned thief. Diego, Milten, Gorn, and Lester, despite being your closest allies from the first two games, all decide to split up and go their own ways and do absolutely nothing to help you with the main quest, with Gorn and Lester having motivations that seem to come out of nowhere. In Gothic 2, you're said to be the avatar of Innos and Xardas becomes the avatar of Beliar, and suddenly in Gothic 3 those roles are inexplicably switched to King Rhobar and Some Hashishin Guy, respectively, while the gods themselves (Innos, Beliar, and Adanos) seem to be worshiped completely differently than they were in Khorinis, seeing as there's an entire race of humans worshipping Beliar, a god who supposedly wants to see humanity eradicated from the world. Throughout Gothic and Gothic 2 you keep hearing about the mainland being a war zone with the orcs on the cusp of winning and enslaving all of humanity, and then you get there in Gothic 3 and it seems like a relatively peaceful stalemate where the orcs are content to let you -- a free human -- wander through their occupied cities like their equal. Basically, it feels like they started from scratch with Gothic 3 and tried miserably to tie it in with the established lore of the series, since very little in Gothic 3 feels "right" from a Gothic and Gothic 2 standpoint.

#10 THERE'S NO MAIN STORY

Gothic 3 is basically just a fantasy sandbox game with a very limited scope of what you can actually do in its huge open world. Whereas most games of this sort (e.g., The Elder Scrolls) give you a main quest line to follow which is ultimately optional and should by no means be your main focus in the game, Gothic 3 pretty much skips the whole concept of a main quest altogether -- there's no main story and hardly any main quest line to pursue, even if you wanted to. There's an opening premise about finding Xardas (your necromancer friend turned badguy) accompanied with the general suggestion of "pick a side in the orcs versus rebels conflict" and that's basically it. You spend essentially the whole game on a giant side-quest (liberate orc-controlled cities or destroy rebel outposts) for your own reasons (improve your character by gaining experience and better gear through factions) and because it's really the only thing in the game to do besides wandering around killing random enemies. Then you find Xardas, collect a few items for him, kill a couple people, and then the game abruptly ends. The whole story premise is that you're supposed to be picking a side in the war of the gods, a concept introduced as far back as the first game, but this whole aspect of the story plays out in the span of just a couple quests that only last an hour if you've already explored the world. I really must stress that there's no actual story element to this, and hardly any quest line to follow -- it's just a bunch of random, arbitrary tasks until the game eventually ends.

The main story collect-a-thon.

#11 ILLOGICAL DESIGN ELEMENTS

So many things in this game don't make any sort of logical sense, which then makes it difficult to get into the experience because you're constantly having to question things. Early on you ask a hunter if he can train you, and his immediate response is "What's in it for me?" and I'm just thinking "Well, I assume you're going to charge me for your services like every other trainer in the world, so I'll obviously be paying you a hefty sum to share your knowledge." But, ultimately, I have to steal a bunch of wolf pelts for him before he'll train me, and he still charges me anyway. In Geldern, a character wants to meet Lares, "one of the greatest thieves in Myrtana" and would pay 1000 gold to meet him, but in reality Lares is sitting literally right outside this guy's building and he could easily just walk outside and introduce himself without having to pay a middle-man a seemingly large fee. In Cape Dun, a mercenary complains about how they now have to guard the slaves after one of them ran away, implying that they weren't guarding slaves before because I guess it didn't occur to them that slaves might try to run away? The rebels want to rebuild the ruined city of Gotha, and need 1000 gold to do so, when in the actual game's economy 1000 gold is just enough to buy a single set of leather clothes for one person. How is that going to be enough to rebuild an entire city? Why is there no harbor or port anywhere on the coast of Myrtana, where the capital ship Esmeralda supposedly came from? If, according to Gothic 2, dragons are supposed to be mythical creatures no one has seen or heard of in hundreds of years, who were summoned to Khorinis as armies of Beliar with the Sleeper's dying breath, then why are there two just hanging around in a random cave literally underneath a major coastal town?

A main plot point is that Xardas destroyed rune magic, thereby eliminating all the mages' and paladins' ability to use magic, and so everyone's lamenting their newfound magical impotence, but it seems like all the mages know enough about ancient magic to be able to train you in it, and learning spells is easier than ever before because all you have to do is pray at a shrine, so why is everyone so concerned. Orcs in Nordmar are forcibly hostile and attack you on sight, even if you've been siding with them in Myrtana. The rebels, orcs, and hashshin all have large infrastructures and tons of spare bodies, and they're sending me, a random unknown stranger, to do important work that seems like it should already be covered by someone in their operation. The orcs are trying to conquer all of humanity and yet they don't seem to care when you, a free human, start wandering around their camps. Another main point is that the orcs are trying to uncover the five Artifact of Adanos by excavating the temples in Varant, which requires them to find five keys to unlock the front door to each one, but they all have a completely open roof and so all you really need is a ladder or some rope, so why is getting through the front door such a big deal? At a certain point in video games, you have to suspend disbelief and understand that certain gameplay elements are going to necessarily defy logic in order for gameplay to happen, but this game just stretches it to an extreme, both on the larger scale of the story as well as in many of its smaller details.

#12 VENGARD, KING RHOBAR, AND LEE

This subject gets a special entry because there's just so much wrong with it, and it's supposed to be an epic, grand culmination in both Gothic 3's story and also one of the more interesting backstories spanning all the way back to Gothic 1, and so I feel like everything going on in Vengard is just perfectly emblematic of what all is wrong with Gothic 3. Nothing in this section of the game makes sense within the setting of the world they've created, nothing lives up to the expectations of the main story premise, and it does nothing to satisfy or expand upon established lore and backstory, in addition to having some of the most shallow and uninspired gameplay of the entire game.

Gothic 1's intro cinematic tells us there's a war against the orcs being spearheaded by King Rhobar, and Gothic 2 advances the plot by suggesting that the orcs are on the verge of winning the war, having pushed all the way to the capital city, and that the king may have already fallen. When we get to Vengard in Gothic 3 we see that the orcs have indeed laid waste to the capital city and are camped literally right outside the castle walls, where the last of the human survivors have fallen back to. The visuals depict the crumbling and burning remnants of this city, while the soundtrack plays an extremely somber piece meant to emphasize the dramatic loss that humanity has suffered here. So you fight your way through hordes of orcs and make it to the castle, and none of the guards or NPC's make any sort of reaction to the fact that an unknown person just made it through the orcs to reach the castle, when they've been completely cutoff from the rest of the world for who knows how long. They should all be shocked and surprised, rushing to get you to the king knowing that you might have information from the outside. But they just stand there and give no reaction to this dramatic change of situation.

So you go into the castle and the first NPC starts calling you a scumbag and a no-good hero, when he should have no idea who you even are, and should be elated at seeing a fresh face who's managed to get past the orcs. He says that everyone's been hyping you up as some kind of savior who'll defeat the orcs ever since they saw your ship approach the mainland, but how does anyone anywhere even know who you are since all of your heroic exploits happened on the island of Khorinis, and no other ships have been coming or going from there for word to have even reached the mainland that there's a supposed hero on the way? Secondly, how do they even recognize you personally as the captain of the Esmeralda? This is the first that any of them should have actually seen your face, since they were only seeing your ship on the horizon, where they surely can't see your face. The only way any of this makes sense is if word somehow made it from Ardea, where you first land at the start of the game, to Vengard, but how could that be when Vengard is completely cutoff from the rest of the continent by virtue of the magic barrier, and everyone is keen to stress that they've had no contact with the outside? And furthermore, why is this guy's merchant stand set up literally right next to the barricaded entrance to the outer courtyard? That seems like the least secure and most dangerous place to possibly be, and yet they have the guy in charge of distributing and rationing all of their food right next to the barricade.

The next guy finally has some kind of semi-appropriate reaction to the fact that a new guy just made it into the castle, but he doesn't stop you to address this point, you actually have to talk to him to initiate the conversation. And apparently he's heard that a man with a lot of promise arrived from outside, but, who told him that? Did the guys at the temple that you warped into somehow send a message, and if so, how? Did they fold up a paper airplane and throw it over the castle walls? For that matter, why are those guys in the temple, where you first warped into, even trapped there? That temple is literally right next to the castle walls, so the guys inside the castle could easily lower a rope or something and lift those guys into the castle. While we're on the subject, why haven't these people already been wiped out? There's literally dozens of orcs a mere stone's throw away from this temple, some standing within plain eyesight of the guys guarding the temple, and there's only a half-dozen people there so the orcs could easily storm the temple and wipe them out. It's not like they're in an unreachable spot, or a highly defensive fortress, either, since that temple has a wide opening that they've made no effort to close off. They barricaded one tiny little side door and a window, but not the huge gaping hole in their defenses? They have a few palisades set up outside the temple, but what good are those when they're not really blocking anything?

Anyway, back to the castle. You make it into the inner fortress and it looks like ramshackle slums with a bunch of makeshift living arrangements as freed slaves and guards sit around campfires and sleep on the ground, but no one that you can talk to in this area gives any real indication that they're under any sort of distress other than being low on supplies. The few voice actors in this area deliver lines exactly like any other NPC anywhere else in the game when they should sound far more weary and down-trodden. No one tells interesting stories about how they came to be in this situation, or what life has been like the last few weeks trapped inside the castle with orcs bearing down on them from outside, and you get no quests that allow you to interact with the survivors in any sort of meaningful way, other than fetching a metric crap-ton of stuff for them. This is the capital city that's been literally razed to the ground, and it should be under extreme duress, and all you do to help the survivors, apart from killing all of the orcs, is fetch them 30 bread, 30 meat, 20 bundles of weapons, 20 pickaxes, 10 hammers, and 5 saws. There's no story element behind these quests other than to establish that they're low on supplies, but there's no real indication that these supplies are really all that necessary, or that there will be consequences if you don't bring them, since we're only told about how desperate their situation is -- not shown through gameplay mechanics or visual storytelling. It doesn't feel like their situation is all that grim because this may as well be any other town anywhere else in the game.

Let's take just a moment to compare this situation in Vengard with a similar one in Gothic 2, where the paladins are holed up in the castle with the orcs laying siege to the castle right outside. In Gothic 2, there's a logical reason the orcs aren't just storming the castle -- because the paladins are on higher ground and have solid walls all around them, meaning there's nowhere for the orcs to actually break through without more advanced equipment. They already took out part of a wall with the battering ram, but they can only go up that one at a time and will get mowed down by archers, so they're effectively locked out of the castle. Meanwhile, the first three NPCs you meet once you get inside all stress the fact that, "Hey, there's someone new here! This could be good news!" One of them actually stops you in your tracks to ask about you, and pretty much every subsequent character acknowledges the fact that you're the new guy, out of place here.

Then, you can ask people about what's been going on, and they tell you stories, like about the time Tandor was out with a reconnaissance unit who was attacked by orcs, or how Brutus's assistant got scared and fled the castle during the last orc attack. Books and other characters shed more light on what's been happening in the Valley of Mines in the meantime since and even during Gothic 1. When you ask about training, they offer to teach you in the context of the situation they're in, like needing more men to help defend against the orcs. You still get a few mechanically simple fetch quests, but there's more reason to care about doing the tasks and helping them out, and they also have more interesting objectives than just "bring me 30 loaves of bread and 20 pickaxes," like getting the ore reports for Garond, meeting Gerold at midnight to sneak him some food, getting Gorn out of prison, passing a message on to Oric from a guy near the pass, retrieving valuable goods that Den absconded with, and so on. It's the exact same premise as what's in Gothic 3, but they actually bother to paint an immersive picture and contextualize the situation for you, thereby bolstering the grim, dire atmosphere and making the quests and character interactions feel much more real and plausible.

So you enter the castle proper and finally get to meet King Rhobar, the most prestigious person in the entire realm and the most important figure in the orc war, the person you had to fight your way through an entire battalion of orcs to reach, and you're rewarded with 75 seconds of dialogue where he tells you things you already know in a completely straightforward, matter-of-fact way with no further elaboration, and sets you on a quest to find Xardas which you were already doing anyway. There should be a wealth of history and backstory to gain from the king, in terms of what led to the war, how and why he set up the mining colony in Khorinis, how the war was faring before Xardas showed up and destroyed the rune magic, how they've been faring after losing their magic, and so on. But because this is Gothic 3, we get none of this and the conversation is completely anticlimactic and underwhelming. He also goes on to retcon Gothic 1 and 2 by saying he sent the Esmeralda to Khorinis per a divine message from Innos that "a ship would bring salvation," when the paladins in Gothic 2 made it clear that they were there just to get the ore, which was the whole point of setting up the mining colony in Gothic 1 in the first place. So even though the paladins were there to get the ore that Rhobar already wanted anyway, and had strict orders not to return to Myrtana until they had the ore, it was apparently because Rhobar knew that you, specifically, would steal the ship and return to the mainland to save them from the orcs. If he knew that their salvation was going to take the form of a hero, instead of some ore, then why were the paladins so intent on getting the ore and doing everything possible to prevent you from coming aboard their ship and returning to the mainland? It kind of seems like this is all one big coincidence and Rhobar is trying to take credit for it.

Meanwhile, one of Rhobar's best generals, Lee, has been locked up in Khorinis ever since Gothic 1, when a bunch of nobles in Rhobar's court conspired to murder the queen and frame Lee for it, because they apparently didn't like that Rhobar heeded Lee's counsel more than their own. Lee tells you this story in Gothic 1 in a fairly dramatic moment while peering over the dam in the New Camp, vowing that one day he'll get his revenge. But according to the story as he tells it, he doesn't blame the king for what happened because the king didn't know any better and had no choice; his real beef was with the nobles who framed him. In Gothic 2, when you recruit Lee to join you on the ship, he agrees, saying he still has "some old scores [plural] to settle on the mainland," which again seems to be referring to the nobles. Then, in Gothic 3, for whatever reason his vendetta is suddenly against the king himself, even though he references the king's "toadies" who made him lose his graces with the king, with no mention of the murder for which he was framed. So I guess we're going back on the whole nobles thing and suddenly Rhobar is the one at fault, even though he had nothing to do with the queen's murder, had no personal grudge or grievance against Lee, was just going off the evidence he had, and was basically just an innocent bystander in the whole ordeal.

So, then you set out to kill Rhobar. Okay, whatever, we'll roll with it. Remember that Lee was supposed to be the best general in Rhobar's army, meaning he must have been a great strategist and tactician, and yet his plan to kill Rhobar is just to brazenly walk into the throne room and attack him on sight, in plain view of all of his guards and fire magicians, where you get aggro'd by literally every NPC in Vengard. It seems like there should have been a smarter plan like to lure the king out of the castle, or sneak into his chambers when he's sleeping, but instead we just walk in and attack him, without even any sort of dialogue from Lee. And when the fight's over, all he has to say are two lines: "My revenge is complete. I will stay here for a while." No resolution or followup to this epic journey whatsoever. We've been following this subplot for three whole games, and it was honestly one of the more interesting backstories of any character in the entire series, and when it came time to resolve it in Gothic 3 they basically did nothing at all. Ultimately, we got way more story, character, and drama from a simple teaser in Gothic 1 than we did from actually fulfilling this quest in Gothic 3.

There really should have been a verbal confrontation between Lee and Rhobar, where Lee gets to accuse Rhobar of betraying him, and then Rhobar could defend himself by saying Lee betrayed him by murdering his wife, and then Lee drops the truth bomb on Rhobar who's not sure what to believe, and maybe finally starts to understand and is willing to pardon Lee, but Lee is so blinded by rage that he kills him anyway. Revenge stories need that final confrontation between the characters, where the protagonist gets to proclaim their justice over the antagonist and make the antagonist realize what's about to happen and why -- the "My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die" moment. That scene in The Princess Bride is so poignant not because Montoya shows up and kills the Six-Fingered Man, but because of the powerful character interactions between them in those final moments, as it should be with any revenge story. With this quest, Gothic 3 fails not only in terms of upholding the established backstory, but also in terms of basic storytelling. Not to mention that the quest itself is yet another utterly shallow, 30-second "Point A to Point B" quest where we warp into the castle, kill Rhobar, and then it's over. This quest is perhaps the ultimate disappointment in all of Gothic 3.

SO WHAT'S ACTUALLY GOOD ABOUT GOTHIC 3?

I would be remiss to not give Gothic 3 credit where it deserves. Gothic 3 isn't all bad, it's just mostly bad. So here are some things for which I feel like it actually deserve some praise.

#1 TRULY OPEN-WORLD, NO LOADING SCREENS

Gothic 3 was released in 2006, and the world is absolutely huge. What's most impressive about that is that it has absolutely zero loading screen, beyond the initial load. Unlike Oblivion, for instance, which came out around the same time and forced you to sit through a loading screen every time you used a door, Gothic 3 lets you go everywhere on the map, from one corner to the next, and even inside buildings, loading everything in the background as you go. It was a major resource hog at the time, of course, but is still an impressive feat considering newer games, even today, still divide their playing areas into smaller loading zones. And it is a truly open world, with completely non-linear exploration and questing and complete freedom to go wherever you want from the very start of the game.

Waterfalls in the distance.

#2 GREAT SOUNDTRACK

Kai Rosenkranz is one of the few video game composers whose name I actually know, and that's entirely because of his work with the original Gothic series. I liked his soundtracks a lot in the first two games, being perfectly atmospheric to set the mood for those games' environments, while having just enough melody and musical structure to keep it interesting, without having too much of that stuff to make it stand out or become repetitive. His soundtrack for Gothic 3 goes a little too far sometimes, in terms of being a little too prominent and repetitive to the point that it actually starts to interfere with atmosphere and immersion, but the actual compositions are great and are usually a pleasure just to listen to. Gothic 3 received a ton of negative backlack from professional reviewers and gamers alike, but the soundtrack was one thing that everyone unanimously praised. Tracks like Vista Point and Exploring Myrtana have become emblematic of the game itself. I also like Geldern Night, Trelis Liberate, Castle of Faring, Sad Strings, but seriously everything in the full soundtrack is great.

#3 GOOD VISUALS AND ATMOSPHERE

The level designers and artists at Piranha Bytes have always been great at crafting outstanding-looking environments, and Gothic 3 is no exception. Though hampered by performance issues with having such a large view-able area, parts of the game looked truly beautiful at the time, if you had a rig powerful enough to render everything in high detail and longer distances. Other things, like character models, armor, and animations weren't so good, but the overall look and general aesthetic of the environments (combined with the great soundtrack) make Gothic 3 pretty satisfying just walking around and taking in the sights. The atmosphere of being out in the wild is pretty strong, just from an audiovisual standpoint alone, and the design of the world can be pretty interesting to explore just because of the landscapes themselves being so intriguing and alluring.

A picturesque castle in the mountains.

#4 ARCHERY AND RANGED COMBAT

Bows and crossbows in the first two Gothic games were never that great, and I always recommended against those playstyles for new players because they weren't very fun and were also difficult to make effective. In those games you were heavily restricted by limited ammunition which made it tough to specialize early on, but the actual gameplay for archery amounted to simply locking on to your target and pressing attack to automatically shoot the enemy. There was no aiming and enemies made no effort to dodge. In Gothic 3, you finally have to aim ranged attacks manually, which makes them so much more engaging, especially when you have to lead targets and compensate for gravity's curved trajectory of an arrow. Unfortunately, archery is a little too slow to be viable in most situations where you're fighting dozens of enemies at a time, but the actual mechanics are a lot more satisfying than they used to be.

#5 SOLVING QUESTS BEFORE YOU PICK THEM UP

As boring and tedious as the quests are, it's nice that you can actually complete most of them before being issued the quests from the quest-giver. If you've already gathered the items they need, or killed the enemies they want killing, you gain the experience the moment you finish the objective, and then if you stumble into an NPC who asks you to do something you've already done, you can say so then and there and collect your reward immediately. Not the most exciting thing, but it's a nice quality-of-life thing nonetheless, since a lot of similar games would wait to spawn quest objectives until after you've already picked up the quest, which can be pretty tedious when you've already thoroughly explored an area and have to go back now that the quest is enabled.

IN CONCLUSION

Gothic 3 probably isn't so bad as to warrant the "Gothic 3 Sucks" title, but it's a game that's so thoroughly mediocre and generally underwhelming, while feeling needlessly bloated and excessively long, with some really illogical design elements and things that just don't make sense given the history of the first two games, that I can't recommend it to anyone in good conscience. There's some good stuff to enjoy in Gothic 3, and it still has some of that unique Piranha Bytes charm, but it's all buried under tons of bad design choices and horrible execution, and the good stuff just isn't good enough to justify sifting through all the bad stuff just to find it. And while some people insist that it's a fine, decent, or even good game with the community patch, the patch is simply that -- a patch, a bandage over a huge gaping wound that stops the bleeding but doesn't suture or disinfect the wound. The community patch, while admirable and definitely worth using, only goes so far as to make the game playable by fixing so many of the glaring bugs and tweaking the combat enough to bring it up from "completely broken" to "at least functional." It doesn't (and cannot) change things like the core combat mechanics, or the boring, tedious quest design, or the bland and shallow world design, or the almost complete lack of a main story. It's just not a very good game, and it's a horrible conclusion to what was, until Gothic 3, an utterly brilliant and masterful series.