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I recently replayed G1+2 (after finished both 20th times + over years) and those titles are still great and aged very well (G2 in particular) but G3... well I really want give it chance but after some 2 hours I am discouraged already.. Combat, storytelling and immersion are just meh compared to predecessors.
Animals locked on attack and frenzy attack without any patterns like in previous title make combat really frustrating savescum - that is multiplied by still too long loading times.
And god, how it is graphic looks worse than G2 and it is lagging all the time when I move around (unless set minimal view distance and turn off everything..). It is nice performance gets betetr on SSD... for 15 years old title...:p
Too much to bear... I am taking break but guessing I will rather hide G3 in inventory forever and pretend it does not exists (as DA2 and other titles that killed great prdecessors..)
First of all, read up on what the two difficulty modes added by the CPT do. "Alternative AI" in the difficulty settings and "Alternative Balancing (AB)". Here's a link to the English manual about them. Scroll to the G3 section:
--> https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Gothic2/discussions/0/1489992713694241017/
Second, with Alternative AI turned OFF, foes stop chasing if player character flees far enough. As in many other games. Use that knowledge wisely.
Third, with Alternative Balancing ON, you must specialize quite a bit more compared with OFF where you can become a jack of all trades. So, consider turning off AB mode. With AB ON, start with ranged combat, retreat before getting overwhelmed or surrounded. Don't invest into melee skills, but gain some bonuses from arena fighting, for example. Perhaps ignore ranged skills, too, and invest into magic as much as possible. Mana regeneration is among the best things in this game. And the high-level spells.
G3 features a seamless world with background loading of data. It performs well even with a HDD instead of SSD. If you notice small delays while running through the world too quickly, just stop for a second or walk more slowly for 1-2 seconds and give the game a short break, so it can load area data.
Playing a magician with mana regeneration in Gothic 3 is awesome and highly recommended.
--> https://steamcommunity.com/app/39500/discussions/0/2145343824283615216/
Explore carefully, support all factions as per the main quest goals, pay attention to the main quest, and eventually decide on your allies. G3 is not a map marker chasing game, so you need to understand what you are doing in the game with the nameless hero. Randomly talking to people without a clue will reduce the overall experience.
Why odd? I do not believe I am single one in this. Even with community patch - I can easily clickfest humanoid enemies (while they do their combos hitting the air) while even the simplest animals do fast sequences of combat animations that are hard to handle - making eg. 2 boars MUCH more dangerous and challenging than orc patrol... which above all just give right feeling how terrible things are broken here.
There is actually no working link to any sort of manual...
You possibly missed the part I know and experienced G1+2 upside down.. and well... what G3 introduced being able master in everything in 1/2 playthrough is not best about the game either. Its only good community patch addess this.
Dont work so well for me, in aprticular there are new enemies... it offer terrible experience having to stop all the time...
I guess so much with mana regeneartion in particular.. hwoever why it is so terrible when melee was working well (possibly clunky for today standards but I like clear patterns and moves sequences it had) in G1+2, even ELEX is fine compared to this...
belive me I have a clue.. but actually this Loose faction system with magical Karma where each action adds rep points that is magically known by everyone and even used in dialogue (eg. rep for trade) + no respect to G1+2 lore i(and somehow generic NPCs and fetch quests) is jsut another immersion killer to me, more than thing to enjoy...
Anyway than trying overcome so much flaws G3 has I started rather Gothic 2 returning 2.0 and having a blast already..
Yep. G3 is essentially a game about AOE - most of the time you are fighting multiple enemies, even wolves, lurkers and bloodflies come in packs. And many story content (temples, Nordmar forge, city liberations) are heavily AOE geared.
This means there are only two viable playstyles, both focused at fighting masses rather than single enemies - mage with mana regeneration and warrior with orcish halberd.
Archer is confined to a "shoot-run-shoot-run" playstyle which is inherently unfun, one handed warrior is stuck with a "click-click-click" combat which is viable but also unfun.
Ultimately a mage is arguably the only way to enjoy G3, because magic is not only about combat, it is very versatile, has great utility, opens up new options for gameplay and quests. I mean good luck killing the cows in Montera without magic.
I run community patch with magic mod on top of that. What it does it A) makes hailstorm and fire rain targeted instead of around hero and B) it drastically shortens cast time for many spells which were not viable precisely because of the long cast. With this mod spells like flame wave and ice explosion start to shine and your AOE potential increases dramatically - it feels like it was intended way to play after all.
Now, all "suggested" mods is something that I tried and discarded simply because of how misguided they are - things like alternative balance, rebalance 2.0 and the like.
G3 literally screams "powerful protagonist", because everyone around talk how he's the "redeemer", "decider", slayer of the Sleeper and dragons etc. Also no plot reasons for him to become weaker than he was in Irdorath - meaning it is reasonable for the hero to be extremely OP from the very beginning. Most mods aim to severely reduce that.
Also, G3's game design screams hybrids. Paladin is the most obvious example. Strength for one handed, some smithing for better blade, some spells like healing and light for utility and role play, some hunting skills for shield usage.
That's not even mentioning lots of synergies like sleep spell + master thief or ice lance + fireball which really encourage hybrids.
Instead, the common mods simply kill the hybrids alltogether - you are either a fire mage, or water mage, or an axe wielder, or an archer, or an alchemist. It imposes arbitrary game design choices upon the player like you need to learn sneaky hunter before being able to learn remove skins which makes no sense. It forces you to learn useless spells before you gain access to the useful ones.
Long story short, it doesn't turn an easy game into a challenging game. It turns an easy game into a tedious and unfun game, which is hardly a solution.
It was said that "fire rain needs to be endgame spell because it was most powerful in G1-G2". Except it doesn't, because G3 has its own top tier spells like Meteor and Summon Lightning. G3's game design is a step in the right direction - specialized spells instead of a single "I win / delete everything from the screen" spell. Modmakers try to make it an "ultimate" spell again, but nerfing its damage and tripling its mana cost.
G3 also has a problem with weapon balancing. You can easily forge a bastard sword which can reach top damage of 120 in the beginning, don't even need to learn anything to forge it. And the ultimate sword of ancestors that you have to jump though a ton of hoops for is only 150 damage max. Moreover you get it extremely endgame to the point you have nowhere to use it.
Staves are useless as you don't need them as a mage, their bonuses are irrelevant, and starting orcslayer is better for arenas.
I tried rebalance mod which has a good point of buffing melee / ranged to make it more viable as opposed to magic, especially the late game weapons, so orcish halberd is not the king anymore. But same mod brings atbitrary changes of alternative balance back into the game (skill requirements) while also heavily nerfs magic in terms of damage and mana cost.
TL;DR G3 has a beautiful and atmospheric world but the only non-painful way to enjoy it is a mage.
And Gothic 3 is so terrible because it was scheduled for release in Mar 2006. But PB wasnt finished so Jowood delayed the release for Oct 2006. But it was still unfinished.
So Jowood forced PB to release the game while PB thought they get another 6 month. In this situation PB hadn''t prepared any quests nor a finished combat system and so on. They were still working on their new game engine. As a result they had to write the game story, the quest, monster animations and the skill system for Gothic 3 in a few weeks. And they planned to patch the combat system and so on after the release.
But Jowood didnt wanna pay for the additional needed patches and PB said, well then they wont do it if they dont get payment for the needed patches and they stopped working on Gothic 3 after patch 1.12.
Imho our small piranhas simply lost courage swim against the current and they never managed replace old G1+G2 engine (combat system included) properly with either old mechanic or something enjoyable - they are still good in making small compact worlds if they have enought time fro that but thats it - imho it simply do not work so well in big world as Elex either and things like combat system fgive feeling they are really too old even to guy with so strong nostalgia as me - overall i have feeling that any time they tried grown up from Gothic1+2 shadow they ended at trying compete with TES games and fail at it...
I jsut feel sorry for myself I am not able enjoy G3 evenm with all work community did on that - and suprised at same time many people actually rate it positive way.
And I really think their game engine is fine. It works well in all Risen games and Elex.
I agree they just try to copy a lot of mainstream mechanics in their games now.
But in Gothic 3 they had the order to compete with TES games and thats why many things are as they are. Jowood dreamed of making a Bethesda killer while not even having the expertise of making a competition to My Little Pony. And the funny thing is Piranha Bytes got bought by THQ Nordic where a lot of people work which were working at Jowood back then.
Furthermore if I listen to the current PBs youtube j3rk offs then it feels to me they dislike their gothic past and they dont even know what made the first two gothics so great.
Nevertheless I still would play Elex and Risen 3 every day before I play vanilla Skyrim, Dragons Dogma, Outward, Nier Automata and so on.
Only Kingdom Come was a really great release for me. I like it more than all other rpgs released in the last years. They know how to make a hardcore rpg. And they are alone. All other just succumbed to casual gameplay for 80 year olds and narcissists who need their dose of instant gratification for nose-picking.
Still I hope the current leadership at PB will change and someone starts making real rpgs again where you get rewarded for you actions not for just existing, with sassy and funny dialogues, with quicker controls, an immersive game world with memorable NPCs and an interesting story which is not the ass-old aliens will come and invade the planet.
It just amazes me sometimes what the community considered valid issues and chose to spend so much time on. Most mods are so untrue to G3's game design that they turn it into a different game rather than fix it.
You can click-click-click melee combat - alright let's create "alternative AI" where the AI would block every attack of yours, making melee even less viable or fun in the process.
You get really strong by midgame - alright, let's bring back the questionable progression system of diminishing returns from NoTR and also arbitrarily force the player to learn trash skills before letting him learn the good ones. Oh, and also let's price the good ones 30 LP each!
You feel the game strayed away from what G2 was - alright, let's bring back G2 armors, G2 enemies, G2 music, well let's make the game G2 running on a different engine whether it makes sense for game design or not.
You are able to benefit from clever hybrids (aka "jack of all trades") - alright, let's cut this element from the game and make you specialize heavily, limiting your gameplay in the process.
End of the day, most of those don't make the game more interesting or more fun. Only more tedious and/or gimmicky.
The best example of G3's game design is a dark mage. Dark mage armor is actually an armor, not a robe, and that's not a mistake. Every dark mage we encouter in Varant weilds dual blades to great effect. Imagine a build where you are a dual blades fighter that can summon a demon to aid himself in combat. Exciting, isn't it? Yet such builds are virtually impossible with all those alternative balances, rebalances and what not.
No need to accuse me of lying and calling me names. I am not a "fanatic", and I don't think I can be classified as a "fan" with regard to definitions of that term, such as at
--> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_(person)
not with regard to the game or its developers.
If you disagree with my comment on combat or if you don't understand it, why don't you ask? This is a discussion forum afterall. Attacking me blindly will be a fruitless venture.
In ELEX, I've done full melee playthroughs using different weapon types, completely ignoring ranged weapons. But I've also done playthroughs with ranged weapons, some of them on Ultra mode, and faction abilities - like working on joining the clerics at level 1 and then using PSI powers early, sleeping often to regain mental power. And I've created a jack-of-all-trades Jax, sort of a Jax-of-all-trades *g*, who decided to use the full arsenal of weapons and grenades to get a job done.
And yes, the combat gameplay options in ELEX work nicely. Doesn't imply they would be perfect or free of glitches (such as those corner-cases where attacking a creature on the slope of a hill makes it hard to hit reliably, but player may simple relocate and choose a better location then). I have never claimed that combat would be perfect, but combat in KC:D and TW3 isn't perfect or superior either.
Well, quite some foes in Gothic 1&2 could be defeated easily by exploiting implementation limits, like applying well-timed button mashing or carefully staying in the back of the Black Troll and striking it for like 15 minutes as soon as the nameless hero wields a weapon that does tiny bits of damage.
Don't need to do any searching. I'm aware of some of the complainers, who get ripped into pieces by the first Runt Biter in the tutorial/prologue area of ELEX and who are not willing to play more cautiously as to study the creature's simple attack pattern. The same people tend to quit in rage - also other games, btw.
ELEX combat works well, because players gets many options and tools to get the job done, when and how exactly depends on playstyle and difficulty mode, too. Doesn't mean that it is a map marker chasing game or that any foes can be attacked and killed easily at level 1, but I assume the majority of players understand that.
Oops. Fixed. --> https://ds.thqnordic.com/community/Gothic3/Advertise/CP_1_70_Manual.pdf
Noticed that too. Primary reason seems to be that nowadays they laugh about the coarse graphics, the clunky animations and the comical battles, while they ignore the immersion/atmosphere and character progression that made those games great.
The original G3 was a cake walk for melee, but it's a different story with CPT 1.75 and the 2 Alternate settings enabled. For those claiming it's still a clickfest with the patch and those checkboxes checked - go ahead, keep dishing out the bull$hit.