Gothic 3

Tried the demo when it came out and it seemed pretty broken, so I forgot about it. However, casting about after Bioshock, I bought this title last week and have been playing for 3 hours or so a night. Basically the start's a bit rough, the combat's somewhat manked, the setting's a bit cliched, you need to have a long-term view when playing, you need to tweak the graphics, but its really grown on me - love a big sandbox game I can lose myself in.

So last night I discovered a castle haunted by skeletons, zombies and a big demon, as you do. The castle was being guarded by orcs. Don't like orcs, but they didn't attack me and I figured there had to be some good loot up in the castle. So I went up there and landed a few arrows in this demon's head. He didn't like this so it drew him out and I led him on to where the orcs were. The demon goes for the orcs, so I sneak in behind the demon while he's occupied and manage to deliver the final blow. Instant level up! However I'd sliced an orc by mistake, so they all start on me. Time to run away. Up to the castle where I clean out the remaining zombies and skeletons and gain some nice loot.
Love this kind of freeform play!

That sounds like a lot of fun!
Has it been patched since release to be less broken?

There were 2 commercial patches I think - and a couple of community patches (which I've installed).

Game seems fairly stable - crashed once when trying to backtrack to a previous area. Has given an out of stack error on a couple of reloads, but apart from that (touch wood). I've bumped up the details and it can start to chug in some of the more detailed areas, but still playable.

Have also bumped up the vegetation draw distance. Oblivion's better in terms of drawing distant scenery (gothic has obvious glitches - particularly when looking out to sea), but Gothic's vegetation is more detailed in the close up and makes better use of bumpmapping and dynamic shadows to give detail that sometimes approaches photo-realistic.

I should add that once I'd cleaned out the castle, I came back down to the orc camp expecting trouble - but they'd forgotten about me by then. So I snuck into one of their huts and lifted some of their gear. Discovered a human prisoner. Paid a bribe to the head orc to have him released. So this guy said he was going to try and rebuild the castle - so a nice sense of 'closure' there.

I like Gothic 3.

Me too. It's just a shame that it was left a bit broken and unrefined.

I liked gothic 3 but got fed up with the weird animal combat. Those boars had a kind of hammer effect where one hit and you were unable to recover. In the original build they were the hardest creatures to beat, if you had more than one you had almost no chance of defeating them. Since they would repeatedly knock you down before you could recover.

Hope they fixed that at least. I still prefer gothic 2 in the combat department.

I just cheat at it.

Think they've rebalanced the boars - however you're right about the 'knock down' effect. I've mastered the fine art of running away and when I do go to swordfighting (I mainly kill with the bow), it's basically just clicking continually in an attempt to overpower my foe - not much strategy.

From what I've read, it was another case of a publisher rushing a game to release before the last 20% could be fixed and polished. Then afterwards they failed to support the developers in terms of properly patching the remaining issues.

But apparently there'll be a Gothic 4 -