Gothic 3 provides a once in a lifetime experience for gamers who get along with its bugs and minor glitches.

User Rating: 9.5 | Gothic 3 PC
Gothic 3 is perhaps among the most ambitious games ever made. But that's a two-sided coin. It's the reason for both praises and hates this game gets . Many people praise this game because of its literally open-world nature and pure freedom of exploration In a huge world. But there are other people too who hate on the game for the same reason, calling it a sloppy confusing bug-ridden mess. Well these people are somehow right too. Gothic 3 is sloppy at many parts, Sometimes it's awfully confusing and it's a really buggy game. But by no means, it's a mess. All of these faults can't hurt the brilliant core of the game. Just as some fans say, Gothic 3 is an unpolished gem. It is unpolished, but it is still a gem.

Due to the fact that game is completely Open-World, there isn't much main story in it.
You and your friends from previous game arrive in mainlands with ship. Nameless hero lost his equipment by pirates and forgot or lost most of his abilities ( Obviously ) so he can start a new adventure. Mainlands consist of three regions, The beautiful Flourishing Myrtana, deserts of Varrant and the icy lands of Nordmar.

You start the game in Myrtana and your first quest is to find Xardas. Myrtana is occupied by Orcs (who are civilized, they talk and they don't attack you on sight like previous Gothics, there are still savage Orcs though in Nordmar. ) and there are human rebels who want to take back their cities from orcs. You can choose to either join the rebels and destroy the orcs or join the orcs and eradicate all three rebel bases or just follow your own way. If you ally with humans, you truly ally with them. After your reputation with them becomes more than 75%, All of the orcs become hostile to you and attack you on sight and vice versa. There is truly freedom In Gothic 3. No gimmicks. Only Fallout 1&2 and previous Gothics in a smaller scale are in the same league with Gothic 3 in terms of RPG freedom.

As it has been said, the world is huge and this huge world is filled with huge number of foes and beasts that should be confronted with combat. Gothic 3 's combat system was somehow a subject of criticism by some. Previous Gothics combat system were somehow tactical in which you had to push buttons in a certain rhythm for effective hits. But in Gothic 3, you only need to click the left mouse button constantly to defeat your Opponents. Although that's not completely true, because there is a new bar among your ordinary Health and Mana bar called Endurance and its duty is to limit Nameless hero's Sprinting, weapon swinging etc. but still, whenever your stamina ( or health and mana in that case ) becomes empty, you can use one of the game's bugs ( or maybe it was done in purpose, idk ) in your advantage. Whenever you open one of the in-game menus ( like Inventory screen, Character screen, etc ) you completely become invulnerable! You can drink potions , wait for your endurance to refill etc without any worry. But it has to been said even if Gothic 3 Combat's is a clickfest, it's still fun and challenging.

Gothic 3's Musical scores are perhaps some of the best created for a video game. Some of them can be compared to Lord of the Rings scores. Kai Rosenkranz truly used all of his musical knowledge to create some of the most epic and ear-catching soundtracks of all time. Nearly half of the joy that exploration has in Gothic 3 is provided with the game's top-notch sound-tracks. Although the same thing cannot be said about sound effects or voice acting. But as an originally German game, there can't be much complain for voice acting.

Gothic 3 visuals are extremely gorgeous and detailed. Great draw distance , Pixel Shader 3.0 support and Dynamic lighting are just few of the Genome's engine abilities. Although with all of it's power, it's a very unstable engine. One of impressive things about graphics is the rendering of three different environment (desert, jungle , ice region ) pretty well.

Gothic 3's RPG system is still based on learning points and it's pretty much like Gothic 1&2. But differences are: 1. You should acquire spells with LP too. There are no rune stones anymore. 2. There is a skill screen which is full of skills in different categories ( fighting, hunting, magic, smithy, thieving, alchemy, misc ) and you should pay attention to learn skills alongside with increasing your basic stats like strength , ancient knowledge ( intelligence in other RPG's ) etc.

We can't talk about Gothic 3 without talking about its bugs and glitches. The game loads the whole world map in one loading . of course, that's a really good thing, but the problem is that you die a lot in Gothic 3 , especially at first, and every time you die, you have to tolerate the long loading screen. Though it's a good way to prevent players get the bad habit of letting the main character die over and over again until they find a solution, but it's a waste of time too. There are many big and small bugs here and there including broken quests, odd NPC behavior , etc, but the good thing about them is the fact that they are not fatal and don't make the game unplayable. These bugs are the result of the ambition of the game. It is really hard to imagine such a huge game without loads of bugs.

Gothic 3 like it's predecessors, is a cult favorite game. It is not a game that can appeal to mainstream. But it will satisfy the cult who follows it in the best way possible. You might labor a lot for completing a quest, but when you see that lovely green line " Quest success " and XP points, all of those labors replace with pure joy.