EPTThe Story
Gothic is a fantasy game using tons of stereotypical creatures, factions and the usual mechanics of magic. The title already gives a hint, there were two other parts before the story in Gothic III picked up. So far, the story was „good“, or at least far better than the ordinary, artifically sounding constructs of competing titles. I'm didn't do any research and have to summarize from my memory. Be aware that half of what I'm saying isn't true. Most likely.
Gothic I
The hero of Gothic was introduced in the first series. He doesn't have a name in that, because he suffers from severe amnesia. It all starts when he's dumped into a prison and is left on his own, with him only possessing a letter he has to deliver. The prison is no ordinary prison, but a huge area surrounded by a magical shield, which destroys any living thing trying to escape. Moreover, the open world area is actually a gigantic mine, in which magical ore is being dug out of the mountains. The ore is not only the currency (no gold here) and used in the outside world to forge better weaponry. No wonder all prisoners mine for free, trade it with their captivators and in turn get food and important supplies. It's more complex though, the prisoners aren't united, they are self governing. Three factions exist inside the prison: Junkies praying to the Sleeper (an evil god), the ordinary everyday prisoners ruled by fire mages (who didn't make it out the mine areal for whatever reason), and the vikings in a snowy northern area following the water mages.
To keep it short, the unnamed hero has to fulfill thousands of quests and side with the factions to gain experience points. In the long run he becomes powerful, a notable member of the society and defeats dragons. It all cumulates when he destroys the shield and defeats dragons. To do so, he finds an exile magician with an doubtful reputation: Xardas. A guy who sides with Orcs. Yes Orcs. Those are the wretched creatures, who aren't that wretched after all, and those are the beasts the king has to fight in the outside world.
Gothic II
Surviving the collapse of the prison and its magical shield, the unnamed hero arrives in the second part. This time the open world is an island, covering a larger town, several villages, an orc territory and the old (prison) mine district. He wakes up next to Xardas (memory loss for the second time), who tells him they have to get off the island and to the mainland (the actual kingdom).
Again, there are several factions, which the hero has to serve. After another hundred of well written dialogues, he finally gets a ship, a crew and sails away. But before he does so, he eventually kills the evil demi god called „The Sleeper“. End of this part.
Gothic III
Welcome to the actual story. The unnamed hero arrives in the kingdom, only to find it in times of turmoil. Due to his actions, the king's army lost battles, because it has no more magical ore to forge good weapons. However, that's not really the reason to lose the battle, more of a guild trip used to bully the character.
You get to learn that the actual mainland is not only the kingdom (Myrtana), which was home to ordinary every day people (hunters, merchants, …). It's only one third of the world. There's still the North (snowy, icy, frosty)(called Nordmar), home to vikings and the motherland of Orcs. Also, there's the south (Varant), a huge desert, home to Assassins.
Myrtana was entirely conquered by Orcs, for reasons you don't understand yet. Apparently Xardas helped out the Orcs by destroying the king's magicians (fire and water magicians) ability to control magic. The only exception is the captial city, Vangard, in which the king still hides out behind a magical barrier. Nobody knows what goes on in that city. The other „exception“ would be a city called Gotha, in which every living soul died and is now haunted by skeletons, demons and zombies.
The Assissins from the South supported the Orcs, more or less. They made a treaty: Assassins get better trade conditions, slaves and jewelry, the Orcs get to dig out stuff in the desert – artifacts mainly. Both pray to the same god, the god of darkness and death. It makes sense. The other faction to support the Orcs are Orc Mercenaries, humans who gave up fighting them and now help them to guard slaves. In Nordmar everything's as usual. Vikings still fight the orcs and guard the remainder of the fire magician's legacy, their last monestary. However, not all hope in humanity and the kingdom is lost, as there are still rebel camps throughout Myrtana.
It sounds more complicated than it is really. For every pro-Orc faction, there's an anti-Orc faction. It's up to you to side with one faction or both at the same time. To do so, you go on quests and can decide how to solve them. You can either free cities, or destroy rebel camps, free slaves or bring them back.
The Arrival in Myrtana
The intro of the game was heavily critized by fans of the series and I can only agree. As is tradition, the hero starts without any information. However, not in a beautiful landscape next to an NPC to fill in the gaps, but in a skirmish in a village called „Ardea“. He has no opiton but to kill Orcs. Killing means to first get rid of the tool tip jumping up immediately. Meanwhile an Orc is doing his best to kill the player, who can't defend himself. Also, the tool tipp has typos. At least in the German, unpatched version.
The skirmish is over soon and you get to learn the story by a real unnotable non-PC called Hamlar. Who is a fat cook and now the leader of the freed village called Ardea. Interestingly enough, you can just pick up every weapon in the village before talking to him, as well as steal anything left in the houses. If you do that, you get a ton of gold later on by selling these items. If you talk to Hamlar first, you get accused of stealing if you enter houses. Kind of strange, but that's how it works.
The first quest you have to do is to deliver a message to the rebel camp nearby. From there on, you're free to do whatever. The nice thing about the free choice model is, that you get to learn a connected story line, regardless where you go first: the suggested route via more Myrtana cities, or directly north/south. The downside to that is, that you don't learn anything new the longer the game lasts. Each citizen will tell you the same story all over. Only fragments add to your knowledge. However, not too bad, there are worse examples in gaming history. Like, Tetris is definitely more repetitive.
Before I forget, something also needs to be added to the positive spectrum of the game: It came with a manual, printed out. It's the last of the kind I remember to have. Any game after has a five page flyer added to it. Gothic 3 has a nicely designed 30 page thing, explaining more than just the very basic controls – like giving a short summary of the world.
Back to the game. For some reason it doesn't matter (deus ex machina) that your hero defeated dragons, gods and entire tribes of Orcs in the previous parts. He arrives as weakl guy, again without memory. I guess it wouldn't work otherwise. He has to re-learn anything.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/oBbtqQ2.jpg)
To learn stuff, get stronger or obtaining more mana, the hero has to gather experience points. Like in any other game of that genre. He has the basic knowledge how to hold a blade, a bow and how to breathe, which is something. To get experience points you can do several things, out of which killing living creatures is the most important one. There are dozens of monsters, ranging from weak (Scavengers, which are repitle chickens), to really scary (Ogres, Trolls, Orc Mages). The bigger the creature, the more experience points. Other than that, you can fulfill quests, which give you huge boost.
There are tons of things you can learn. Strength and Dexterity are more important at the start. However, there are more basic skills, like Alchemy (brewing potions), Forging (create own weapons), Thievery (Stealing things) and finally Magic. With more strength you can carry bigger blades, more dexterity allow you to handle bigger bows. Each basical skill has more sub-skills. E.g. the strength/melee tree allows you to handle shields, two weapons or cross bows. Thievery allows you to open harder locks, to pickpocket or to assissinate; dexterity allows you to strip animals of their claws and furs, so you gain a higher resell value later on.
Skills, Quests and Difficulty
The quests are so-so. On one hand, most of them are easy to solve, others are not. They're not exactly repetitive, to the level you just get bored, but they do follow a pattern. In each city controlled by Orcs (mostly) you have to gain their trust first, before being allowed to talk to the boss and get the more important (overall) contracts.
There are entry quests for almost each city, like „bring me some booze“ or „go ask that guy about issue Y“. There are also tons of „kill monster X“ quests. Then again, there are some like „steal something of value from Z“, or „convince person A to do B“ which need more planning than just smacking down guards with a blade. The especially annoying parts are those, where you have to randomly gather shit you saw a hundred miles back and didn't pick up. Random flowers or herbs for example. So run back, get them, get experience, feel bored.
As it turns out, the variety of skills isn't too deep. You don't need much strength to defeat single NPCs in arena fights, as they fight like idiots. Even the best of the best NPCs will just randomly swing twice, die from four hits, and barely manage to kill of your health. Monsters can not really be killed with blades easily. They'll just take a step back, bite you, and step back again. Meanwhile, your retarded character doesn't manage to correctly kill them. Once there are multiple opponents, the blade won't help at all, as you get thrown down by the tiniest bite. Even wolves, low level creatures, will kill you by throwing you down before you're ready to take a swing, if their number is large enough.
The solution: Obtain a good bow, shoot down everything and do hit&run. Works from the beginning, works at the end. Regardless of what kind of creature you face. Crossbows theoretically offer more damage output, but to re-load you have to stay still for an hour or so. Not an option either. Also, regardless of your chosen sub-skills, you will always be able to scratch meats off creatures. That you can fry and eat. It's more efficient and cheaper than potions, herbs or any other alternative. Hence, why learn anything at all?
Forging, in theory, sounds like fun. Like in Diablo, where you can customize weapons up to a point. However, you can only forge blades, shields and whatnot from a pre-set selection. So, no point in wasting your energy there. Same goes for magic, for too long you have to rely on scrolls; for those you only need Mana. Powerful spells are only viable later on, when you already have a bow enough to one shot anything smaller than a house sized Troll. Alchemy is bullshit altogether, as potions are not that powerful.
Hence, learning dexterity and thievery related stuff makes most sense. The first to get fur, claws and such to gain even more money than you already have, the latter to open randomly, stray chests. And there are tons of them.
Luckily, not everything can be solved by a bow. Any Skeleton will take no damage from bows; nor do fast walking monsters like Snappers (Jurassic creatures). But they, in turn, die to one good hit with the blade either way.
There are hard opponent's though. Those creatures coming in masses very fast at you (Snappers, large hordes of Bisons). Or the ones able to cast fire. Even small goblin mages kill you with one shot, if you are not careful. You'll just burn to death. Sometimes arena fights against Assassins turn out to be hard, as their blades are poisoned.
The Big Bugs
In my initial attempt to play through the game, I lost my nerves. The bugs were outrageous, even after patching. I had five save games, from which all turned out to be damaged. However, the game doesn't tell you that. The quick save was good. However, after about 10 hours of play, the game crashed and I learned that all my saves were gone. I was level 30something at that point. Yeah, no way I was starting from scratch.
My second attempt wasn't any better. I was 20 hours in, just to learn that the most pivotal and needed artifact for the overall story just wasn't there. I looked up multiple walk throughs. No chance. Just gone. Then I thought I just use cheats to spawn it manually. That worked. I picked it up. But the trigger wasn't activated. So I couldn't progress. Re-loading wouldn't solve it. Using a fan patch wouldn't help either, as the save games weren't compatible. Urgh.
I don't even know why I tried it for a third time, but with the help of fan patches (iirc the company was broke and dissolved) the game was finally playable, about 2,5 years after release. However, playable doesn't mean it's bug free. If you think the pathing in BW is bad, you haven't played that game.
Now the actual fun review starts. Quint, a friend of mine, is always magically soaked into speed runs, and says stuff like „I can't believe how much they can bend games with bugs, only to run through faster“. This doesn't appeal to me. However, bugs, which make the game more fun by accident are interesting.
The Fun Bugs
I don't even know where to begin with the bugs. For some examples I'm not even entirely sure if those are bugs at all, or just bad/hilarious game design. Like honestly.
Voice Overs
Let's start with something I wouldn't really classify as bug. As previously mentioned, there are factions against Orcs. One of them are called „Waldläufer“, a sort-of rebel faction in Myrtana. I have no idea how to translate that word. Basically, these are former peasants, peaceful and ruled by Druids. They are strictly against violence, at least the first tribe you'll find if chosing the „easy“ path through Myrtana. However, they DO fight Orcs.
The first guy you find is their best soldier, telling the hero that you can not be trusted yet. How can they be sure you're not friends with Orcs? Hence, you have to kill off an Orc squad nearby and re-capture the Druid's stone. He'll also give you an insight about the mindset of his faction: cherish life, even the one of the Orcs, be level and one with nature. He only kills because he has to save his tribe. So you start to run with the soldier and are about to kill Orcs. He'll talk to you in a deep voice, being all esoterical before taking off. However, the second you get into the fight, his voice changes into a higher pitch and also gets a form of accent. He'll talk in slang, not in the medievil lingo anymore. Talking actually is screaming. He'll hack wildly, not hitting shit, while blurping „I REALLY ENJOY THESE FIGHTS“, „TAKE THAT“ and once the Orcs are dead „HAHA. YOU SERVED THEM WELL BOY“, „HOW WEAK THEY ARE“. Yeah... gratulations, you just fought with a sociopath.
More interestingly, their druid is really fond of boars, and the tribe kind of holds boars therefore in an almost holy regard. If you run into a boar with this maniac, he'll curse like a teenager: „DAMN CREATURES, GO AND DIE“. Imagine an Indian slaughtering a cow.
Fights
Similar to the task described above, there are dozens of quests which you engage with an allied NPC. They come with you to help you to fight, or to lead the way. Usually, there are two kinds of allied NPCs: weak slaves and strong and experienced warriors.
The first theoretically rely on your help to get from A to B and are scared. The latter just do it out of boredom. However, the slaves running for their live can slay the fiercest animals holding a stick (e.g. three slaves against upgraded wolves [wargs]), and really do no need you. They can take hundreds of bites, rarely go down or just run through the scariest monsters, knowing you have their back. With them you can either slay or outrun anything, until you're in safety again. No care taking needed.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/iqnf3Hb.jpg)
look at dat shield
With soldiers it's a whole new level of stupidity. You run into three goblins, stuff you can one shot kill with your bear fists; the Paladins will stand around, trying to kill them with hilariously huge weapons but miss. They will also not run or heal themselves once their health bar reaches a critical minimum, unless told to do so (more on that later). Hence, it's best to start the quest, see what path they suggest, then load again and clear the path for the mighty warriors, before running with them. I mean, theoretically, it'd be possible for you to just kill anything from far with your bow, before the warrior NPCs reach a dangerous obstacle (like a single rabbit with no attack). The NPCs are told to stop if you don't catch up are not stand nearby. However, thanks to patching and to avoid collision, the NPCs will catch up with YOU and stand in front of you, making it literally impossible to use your bow. What the...
The most annoying NPCs are not warriors, these are Hunters. They boast how they killed fearsome creatures and only go with you to lead you onwards. So, whenever they see a monster, you think they use their arrows to kick shit from long distance. Instead they take their blade and go on a suicide mission, often fighting stuff like ten wolves alone. It's so bad that they sometimes, in the unpatched version, stand on a cliff, jump down, just to kill a boar. Well, needless to say they often die in the process. Urgh.
Fights
The game has a few fail saves for players, at least that's what the intention must have been. Whenever the hero is about to be attacked, the music changes to give you a hint. E.g. you shoot down one wolve, and the rest of the pack turns around and engages you.
Now, the music also indicates that the „fight mode“ is enabled. In this mode certain actions become impossible. If you are in a cave and killed several monsters, you might want to stop for a second and pick up their fur. Possible, even if another potentially dangerous creature is near. The twist: they might not see you, you might not see them. Hence, they won't attack. But the fight mode is still on. In this mode, you're not allowed to open chests. If you walk back about half an inch, the mode is off and you can do that. That's annoying.
I see the intention behind it. However, there are stupid things you can do. Remember the part about the warriors fighting and not healing themselves? Guess what. I once saw one huge ass Paladin go after a weak monster. The battle theoretically was over, even him couldn't lose. So I, stupid as I was, tried to pick up meat from the other dead animals close to the hero. Out of a sudden the mercenary fell in front of me and I started a dialogue with him, trying to ask him to heal. Since I had no potion, the dialouge gave me a negative, but didn't vanish. In the end he died, because he'd rather talk to me, then fight the weak Scavenger. … … 8[
No Contract?
As you walk around the world, you'll recognize the standard type of monsters. E.g. Lurkers. Whenever you see a horde of monsters having a slightly different name, such as „Strange Lurkers“, you'll want to shoot them down. In ALL cases the monsters are basically the same, but in name. It's a hint for the player that these specially named monsters need to be kicked, in order to fulfill a quest. Hence, if you kill them without obligation already, the quest is done and you get more experience. You will later find an NPC giving you the task and you can immediately tell him it's done. A time saver. That works well for monsters.
Like perviously mentioned, there are also tasks like „go over there and fetch me something“. Like for instance, lumber. So you see lumber lying around, stuff which you can't pick up. Applying the logic of monster kills, you think that'd be good to do already to save some time. Wrong. It's a roll of the dice. If you're unlucky, the NPC will be in rage mode if you pick up that shit, as it's their „belonging“. They'll go on a rampage and try to kill you. If you do have the quest, it's suddenly ok to take their shit without asking. Sometimes though, it's ok to pick it up.
The funniest example however was a mix of killing monsters AND picking up shit. In one village you'll get told a story of a builder, who escaped from a lurker attack by throwing his hammer onto the beast. So he asks you to kill it and get back his hammer. The thing with this quest is, you don't get to learn it, until you're in the village. If you approach that from South, you'll find the builder. If you'l approach from North, you'll find the creature first. Regardless, in many scenarios it's ok to just kill the lurker, get the hammer from it's belly and return it to the builder. In this one special case, I did not know of the story, saw the lurker, it attacked me. Theoretically good, because, apparently, the beast was standing in large distance to the village, so far you only saw the village's outline. In my example the thing was standing rather close to the builder. I killed it – task 1 of 2 completed: kill the beast. I took the hammer and it went to shit. The builder accused me of stealing. I had to smack him down. Consequence: all other villagers attacked me. Time to quick load. Yey!
Stealing? Killing? Trust?
The choice of quests and your solution for them plays a bigger role. Some of the quests do not only earn you monetary rewards or experience, but also „trust points“ for factions and cities. For example, if you defeat NPCs in arenas, you earn the trust of Orcs WITHIN the city, but not for the Orc faction as a whole. If you decide to bring back an escaped slave, you do earn trust points within the city and points FOR the Orc faction alone. Most times the „within“ points for a certain area are important to access the leaders of each location, like described above.
Related to the previous point about stealing, this does matter for some reason. E.g. more often than not you have the option to „free“ a city by defeating Orcs (killing all of them). The designers must have thought that this is impossible for a lone human, hence they often included a rebel underground. They will help you if they get weapon bundles you can pick up in Orc houses. Once they have it, they'll help you. You'll also get points for the Rebel faction.
Now, sometimes you can pick up weapon bundles already, without needing to access closed off city areas (like the fortress basement or attic). If you do that before earning the city trust (at least 75 out of 100 points), you'll be accused of stealing – sometimes. Sometimes not. It's frustrating, as it forces you to load and unload rather often. However, if you do have that, the Orcs won't mind.
That's kind of odd. Imagine you rule a city, a person comes in, gets weapon bundles, walks straight to the slave camp and talks to slaves. You see all of that, but do not react. Boy, I wonder what he does with that. Also, he never returned the escaped slaves, even though he promised to deliver. Hm. Hm. Hm.
Also, it should be noted that killing and killing are two different dimensions. If you use your blade against monsters, they'll die for good. If you use them against bandits, they'll also die. In the Northern part there are almost no friendly Orcs, so they die as well if hit properly. However, if used against townies, the townies will fall over. Then you can grab their belongings. It takes a minute, then they'll get up again. If you want to kill them for good, you have to perform another attack when they're unconcious. Why does this matter? It has some funny side notes combined with the stealing part.
If you only learned the basic pickpocket spell, you can only rob unimportant NPCs such as slaves. However you can attempt to do that to anyone. They'll notice and scream bloody murder. If you try to steal their belongings (e.g. opening their chests in their home), they'll also cream and try to smack you down. Picking up shit means you'll get smacked down, you go unconcious and they take away some of your gold and your activated weapons. If you pickpocketed, you will be killed instantenously. Why that is, only god knows.
Sometimes, if you steal shit and nobody saw you do it, the guards will stop you and accuse you of doing it. Accused for the first time won't do anything but activate a dialogue. Stealing important things (treasures) or stealing for the second time, will make the guards attack you. Mind you, now it gets really crazy.
If they catch you stealing, pickpocketing or accuse for a second time, they charge and go after you. In one of the cave rebel camps, this turned out to be funny. I was at the bottom of a cave, the merchant caught me and went after me. He was a merchant, I was a level 50 warrior. One smack, he was unconcious. Suddenly THE ENTIRE CAMP charged at me. Since I was behind a curve in the cave, they came one by one and suffered the same fate as the merchant. All bodies were there. When they woke up, everything was fine again, nobody remembered why I was so bad. This happens frequently, sometimes you kill entire cities that way. Even for good.
Killing is a no go. Regardless of how huge your reputation is with a faction or a city, it will be gone the second you sent one of their own to his maker. However, there are exceptions. You will get quests to kill the king, the leader of the assassins and the leaders of several Orcs and Orc Shamans. Sometimes it's possible to lure them out of range of their guards and kill them. You'll be asked where they went, but that makes sense. Nothing happens and that's how it should be. However, for the king(s) and leaders it's different. No matter what you do, they will not go out of range. But you have to kill them.
So, there are ways to murder them. Either do it blantantly obvious, by using bow, blade or anything in front of the observers, or by the skill „assassinate“. Regardless. One time I went to Vangard, got to the king and just shot him down with my bow – one hit, one corpse. Now this happened: His body guard approached me and said, quote: „ONE OF OUR MAN DIED. DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING?“ „NO“ „I HAVE AN EYE ON YOU“. He saw me doing it. What the actual fuck.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/itSW8dB.jpg)
Tried to steal here
That however, was the final solution of mine. Naturally, I tried to make it more sneaky. E.g. by pickpocketing the king (yes you can do that), which would fail. He would charge me. I lured him on top of a tower, killed him. Now I was on death row, anyone else would try to murder me. Ironically, nobody accused me of killing the king, but to try to steal FROM the king.
I also tried to get the attention of the king by stealing, hold on to your seats, a bottle of water on a nearby table. The entire court got mad at me for doing that. No solution either. Again, I already stole every treasure there was in the castle, by randomly opening every chest. Which was fine, my city trust level was over 90%.
Misc. Bugs
I don't know what the word is, I guess it's pathing or collision control or god knows what. The stereotypical bugs.
Sometimes, NPCs vanish when trying to walk around. E.g. a Paladin trying to go up the stairs, suddenly vanishes into the stairs and returns at the bottom of the tower. Rinse repeat. It looks majestic, how he sinks into solid stone and you see his arm slowly escalating until he hits rock bottom. You can also talk to him while doing his trick.
When trying to cleanse a city from Orcs, you usually don't want to start the fight in the center of the city. Rather approach from the outside and shoot arrows, so they come out in a conga line. Hit and run, until enough people died. The first two cities are hard that way, but it's possible. However, thanks to the collision bugs, I had it easy. About thirty mercenaries and Orcs tried to kill me, but couldn't get close, as they couldn't find their way around a tree.
In several missions you have to kill hordes of thieving goblins. Those stole cattle, money and whatnot from farms. So you find their cave. From far distance you shoot them down, no biggie. However, in one particular cave there were pigs standing around. Monsters which can't attack. Accidentally I killed a pig with an arrow. The other three pigs started charging at me. Since no goblins were left I just watched my screen and wonder what would happen next. The pigs could only shove me around. The end of the story: these moronic creatures pushed me from a cliff. I died.
The capital city is also fun. It is designed in a way that you can only reach it after leveling up multiple times. E.g. you have to defeat the haunted city of Gotha, which is only possible if you're somewhat good. In this city you'll find a teleportation rune, which in turns allows you to bypass the magical barrier. Now, speedrunners, it's possible to just run around the Skeletons, get they rune, and transport right away. No upgrades needed here.
However, you'll be caught between a rock and a hard place in the capital. You'll spawn in the ruins of the temple and are surrounded by orcs. To get to the king, you have to at least kill one hundred Orcs. This, I guess, was a must in the design process, as the path to the court is a long slope, blocked by burning buildings. Well, three jumps later, you'll already half way through, while being chased by orcs. See the picture:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/T6m2W5f.jpg)
You can just walk up. I don't get why the Orcs never found out.
Also, there are dozens of quests like „find someone we couldn't find, but we tried REALLY hard“. An Example:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/53B1icO.jpg)
The Verdict
Without patches this game is barely playable and is just really frustrating. Vanilla: 2/10, would recommend my worst enemy (already sent a PM to Artanis[Xp]).
Once the worst bugs are out, the game is somewhat fun. However, it's a bit too linear at times and the concept of just running around gets increasingly more stupid, once you have to run around in Nordmar; beasts are weak, but there are hundreds of them. Hence, a lot of killing, only to be told to run even futher. Well...
Anyhow, even though it's buggy, the story is still somewhat good. There are dozens of funny dialogues hidden, and it's entertaining for a while. I guess playing it once is ok, playing it twice in a row probably not. It needs a year or more in between. So, 5,5/10, due to having a printed hand out and the nice details and fan patches 6,5/10. Would maybe not know if I killed the king again in 2016.
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