Following up the great success of its prequels and the expansion, The Night of the Raven, developers, Piranha Bytes has a lot of pressure to deal with to make another great game in its successful series. Could they handle the pressure and capitalize on what the fans have been asking for, while adding to the expansive history of their created world? With a new graphics engine with some amazing visuals and an epic musical score, the developers sure try their best. Releasing onto store shelves on November 14th of 2006, a new installment in the Gothic series was born.

The plotline is much like the previous games. It’s there, but it truly doesn’t carry the game. It pretty much starts off where its prequel left off and you’re on boat headed for Myrtana, but once you get there, you find out that all is not as you would have hoped. It seems that the ors have taken over while you were away on the island prison dealing with miners and taking down magical barriers. Like I said before, there is a storyline, but you really aren’t lead along any linear path towards that ending. And that’s been one of the best things about the Gothic series. The developers make it a living breathing world for you to tool around in doing quests at your own leisure, progressing through the storyline how you want. And you’ll have choices along the way and some of those choices will affect you later on in the game. Such as with whom you side with, the orcs or the humans. That’ll be a large decision for you to make early on because it’ll depend on how you’re received when you walk into settlements around the vast large map.

You won’t necessarily get to create your character from scratch like other recently released role-playing games, but in Gothic 3 you’ll again be playing as the Nameless One looking much the same as you have in the past, but obviously a better graphical interpretation because of the updated graphics engine. You will however be able to customize your character the way you choose with different skills as you gain levels by completing quests and roaming the land killing beasts and this is how you truly define yourself as a hero. Like many role-playing games, there are three types of attacks including melee, ranged, and magical combat. But that doesn’t mean that you have to pick one and then stick with it throughout the game. You can advance in an array of skills to make your character the way you choose. Want a raging warrior who hurls immense spells at a moment’s notice, go ahead. Make any combination you want in this game. The choice of who your character becomes is up to you.

The graphics in Gothic 3 are beautiful. Everything from the different NPCs to the environments look superb and realistic. And unlike some other open-ended games, the developers really did well with creating an atmosphere for the player to run around in. From the beginning, you’ll be able to travel anywhere you’d like to, whether it’s across the sandy dunes of the desert or up in the snowy mountain trails or just running across the open field expanses of Myrtana. Every place in this game, whether it’s a cave against the edge of a mountain side or a dungeon inside a broken done ancient temple, you’ll be able to explore it from the start of the game. Will you survive, well, that’s another question. The nice thing about Gothic 3 is that there isn’t any loading times except the initial load screen at the beginning of the game. As you travel from one end of the huge expanse of land to the other, you’ll never see a loading screen and this adds quite a bit to the realism. While every time you entered a dungeon in Oblivion you had to sit and wait for a loading screen, Gothic 3 lets you keep playing until you either die or have to load a previous save or just stop playing the game.

The sound in the game is quite atmospheric like the graphics. While traveling through the miles of expansive land including dense forests, open plains, snowy mountain tops, or mass amounts of dunes of sand, the environmental music really adds to the experience while you play. You’ll hear ravenous wolves, birds chirping, and sometimes, the roar of an orc or human swinging its club at the back of your head. Multiple voice actors were hired during the development process of the game and these voices add quite a bit to the conversations you’ll be having attaining quests or just chatting with the locals. The overall musical score is epic in the sense that when it plays in the background, you’ll find yourself unconsciously wanting to achieve greatness with your character whether it’s through melee, ranged, or magical combat.

Like the previous games in the series, there isn’t a multiplayer component, but in the role-playing genre, there really doesn’t need to be because that just means that the development team is taking time off of creating a wonderful single player experience for the player. With the superb graphics and the ability of never having to see a load screen, there does come some difficulties with the overall engine and its performance for different players and their respective systems. Being first released in Europe, Gothic 3 came to the United States with a patch already installed and another patch to update the game to 1.12 was quickly released to get rid of some of the remaining bugs, but unfortunately, there were a lot of bugs left in the game. Many players have had a lot of problems with the performance of the game with a stuttering issue, and turning the graphics and visual effects down doesn’t seem to help at all.

Some other complaints would be some of the balancing issues in the game, such as attaining one of the best weapons early on in the game. This would seem to make the gameplay pretty easy, but the combat system restrains the player from being the ‘godly’ character he strives to be. What I mean by this is the fact that even though you may possess one of the single best weapons in the game early on, you’ll still probably die easily at the paws of the wolves or boars in the beginning of the game because of how the developers made the combat system. Creating something along the same lines as the previous games in the series and unlike other role-playing games of its time, Gothic 3 has each mouse button provide a different attack for the main character. One being a slash and the other a parry. This at first would seem fun to fool around with in different confrontations, but after taking on a few of the first wildlife animals such as a wolf or a boar, you’ll soon come to partly hate it. Your hits are based upon a statistical analysis and this will probably screw up your system of overall combat because you believe you’re hitting the wolf, when you’re actually not and the missed swing, which actually looks like a hit, will leave you open for a nasty strike from the creature and 80% of the time, that strike will knock you down and a few moments after that, unless you pick yourself off the ground and change your strategy, you’ll be dead. A very frustrating combat style to master, but once you get the hang of it you’ll come to be a menace to overpower. Like every other game, it just takes time.

Overall, Gothic 3 is a success in the image that it’s a large expansive world to explore with a multitude of quests to attain and complete. The atmosphere presented in the game can’t be compared with any other role-playing game at its time of release. A few bugs may dissuade your confidence of the overall game, but if you stick with, you’ll be presented with a lengthy, fun experience that can be completed different ways each time through. Unfortunately, the developers, in the mists of putting together the next patch (which was rumored at being over a gigabyte in size), were disbanded, and the rights to the game were taken away, thus making the existence of the patch dead, but no need to worry. Fans from the community have been contacted and given the code for the game to make further patches and some patches have already been released to enhance the overall quality of the game. Time will tell with Gothic 3, whether it will ever achieved a ‘finished’ state or not, but it’s up to the fans now.

Gameplay: 9
Graphics: 9
Sound: 9
Story/Plot: 7
Replay Value: 9
Stability: 7

Overall: 8.42