Even though Fallout 3 was the first RPG I finished, it wasn’t the first I played – this title goes to Gothic 3. From what I heard (I was 1 year old back than), Gothic 3 had really rough launch. To this day it is highly recommended to play the game with Community Patch 1.75 and Parallel Universe Patch. And I played the game with these patches installed, so I am not qualified to talk about the state of the game without these patches. However, CP 1.75 is included in the base game on Steam, which makes the previous point irrelevant. And with these to patches, I haven’t encountered a single bug.
Gothic 3 starts with arriving to the coastal village of Ardea, where the Nameless hero and his friends quickly realise, that the Kingdom of Myrtana has fallen into the hands of Orcs. You liberate the village and start your search for Xardas, your old wizard friend who is supposedly become the leader of Orcs. This is basically the whole main story. Find Xardas, listen to his plan, find 5 artifacts of Adanos, which you probably already have, because by the time you actually find Xardas, you would have discovered most of the map, and then decide what to do with these artifacts. This story is ridiculously simple and to put it frankly – it’s bad and basically non-existent.
Side quests aren’t exactly the strongest aspect of this game, because they are quite repetitive, but sometimes you find towns and villages with interesting stories in the background. For example, one quest in the city of Montera, where you try to solve the problem with slaves’ shifts, offers several unique ways of resolving it and some of them results in slaves giving you information about the rivalry between farms’ bosses or that the chief of city’s arena embezzles money. Or the rebel camp Okara sends you on a mission to find people willing to join the camp and you have no clue where to find them. I like that you have to figure out on your own what to do and where to go or that you must at least listen to descriptions provided by people and orcs. This old school quest design in terms of figuring out what to do is the core of Gothic’s identity and I am happy about it. I want modern games to return to this formula, because players don’t want to be treated like children. Gamers are mostly grown-up people who can rely on their own senses and intelligence. And if not, well, there’s this thing called internet, which can help you with literally anything you can’t figure out on your own.
Gameplay is really lacking though. Combat is too simple for my taste. Alchemy doesn’t offer anything special or more complex either. Magic is almost inaccessible at the beginning, but later in the game it’s absurdly overpowered. Balancing in this game basically doesn’t exist.
RPG systems are quite good to be honest. Perk trees are okay. You can kill anybody you want and still finish the main quest, which is quite unique, even though the main storyline is horrible. I like the reputation system, which is the most profound RPG mechanic in this game, because it offers quite simple, yet functional system which influences your standing with different factions in different cities, towns, camps, etc. If you have high enough reputation, you can buy better faction armour or gain access to more important people with valuable information. On the other hand, if you liberate too many cities, Orcs (or any other faction) will recognize that you are behind these revolts and will attack you on sight.
The best part of the game though is the exploration, atmosphere and soundtrack. There are no map markers aside from cities and you have to find everything on your own. Fast travel is limited to teleportation to certain areas after you find teleportation stones connected to them. These factors make exploration feel rewarding and combined with beautifully crafted world (which still holds up even to this day), especially Myrtana (Varant is still quite good, but Nordmar is hell to navigate, and it just feels awful to explore, which is shame, for it contains really atmospheric music), and astonishingly gorgeous soundtrack these are the moments when Gothic 3 truly shines.

Summary:
Technical state (9/10)
Story (3/10)
Side quests (7/10)
Graphics (9/10)
World and level design (9/10)
Atmosphere and soundtrack (10/10)
RPG elements (8/10)
Gameplay (4/10)

Final score: 7.4/10
I can definitely recommend Gothic 3 to fans of hardcore old school RPGs. Even though it’s not as good as its older brothers, Gothic 3 is still a very solid RPG, which unfortunately falls flat on its story and weak character design. Fortunately, its technical state is no longer problem, because the game runs perfectly these games.

This feels like a mobile game adaptation of your favorite tv series. Everything about the game feels way too different from the well-grounded world building of Gothic 1 & 2.

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