MWaser
Arbiter
The topic came up in a group chat I was a participant of recently, and it got me thinking: could it have been good?
Let's start with the issues. As I see it, Gothic 3 suffers from 2 major flaws that are its complete undoing:
Flaw #1 - Basic gameplay mechanics and balance:
Gothic 3 was, and still is by all means, a broken game. The melee combat was, at release, probably one of the worst ever put into an action RPG, with infamously bad stunlocking and terrible AI which could be very easily exploited against human/humanoid enemies for a free victory. The Alternative AI introduced in the later Community Patches has made the melee combat considerably less terrible, albeit I still would not call it good. Furthermore, nothing has ever fixed the balancing insofar that magic is by far and large infinitely more overpowered than other combat methods, both for you and for the AI - enemy spellcasters are orders of magnitude more dangerous than non-spellcasters. And it is the most boring and mindless of spells (elemental archer style) that are the most powerful and useful in the game, as well - nothing to praise.
Even besides that, the damage calculations in the game are poor - armor is not very useful, even the lategame armor which is difficult to acquire. Its silly reputation requirements also serve to do little more than to try and poorly imitate, in the new system, the reward factor that Armor served in terms of faction progression in the first 2 games. Damage scales badly with better weapons, and thus range is far more important than damage. The biggest damage scaling can be seen, ironically, within the already most overpowered magic which scales its damage with Ancient Knowledge. Because of these aforementioned things, there is little sense of progression that is meaningful and noticeable because you can take on most challenges, including mass fights, at a relatively early point in the game, and the biggest difficulties (such as spellcasters and big fights where you can't help but be surrounded and stunlocked) still present a major challenge in the lategame, unless you are yourself playing the aforementioned overpowered spellcaster yourself.
Flaw #2 - Story, faction and quest system:
I don't know the overall consensus in here, so perhaps my opinion is abnormal, but I don't actually think the story itself or its structure is a major detriment to Gothic 3. Yes, it is structured as a major fetch quest, and there are many things that can be improved upon in it, but I see the validity of its open-endedness by making it a truly non-linear possibility when you are given such a broad task. What is far more damning however is the most basic and common factor of the game, and that is the nature of repeated, grindy reputation farming within cities, whose only purpose is letting you see leaders of the cities, which is largely unnecessary as most of them provide you with no important information which you can work off and the only benefit is getting quests to kill rebels or getting rebels to help you (in orc cities) or getting a way of getting global Hashishin reputation in hashishin cities by seeing their leaders. The main quest's leading motivation that you are started with, to find Xardas, is hurdled by reputation significantly twice (if you don't already know the game) because the important information that he's in Nordmar are given in one city, and reputation is required to pass TO Nordmar in another city (though there exist alternate passages). However during the game you are deluded by NPCs into thinking that you should grind out reputation in every city because you absolutely need to talk with each and every orc leader on the way. And this reputation grinding involves inane activities that also clearly show the devs had no idea what kind of quests to give you, so most cities in the game have some arbitrary arena which gives you NPC combat opportunities in 1 vs 1 situations which otherwise would almost not happen in the game at all due to the way it's structured. To get into more individual details than that is pretty unnecessary since I think the best summary of this point would be to just say "Gothic 3 is a game about doing inane quests to see a number get to 75 so you can progress a quest flag with someone, 30 times".
What if it were more polished?
Here's where I get to the thread title again. What about these issues could be improved if the game was not, so to speak, "rushed", or maybe if PB had some more good ideas to work with?
Gameplay Mechanics wise, the balance and formulas could certainly have been done better with some attempt, but the crux of the problem is that the game's design in gameplay is not suited for the presentation and requirements of the story. Magic in particular, if it were powerful, but made into a more double-edged sword, could have been interesting. Damage spells being AOE and hurting your allies in a game that should be more relying on allies (more on that later), having longer cast times almost always to require allies to cover for you, and having tactical buffs/debuffs could have worked wonders for the mechanics of the game, as well as remove the omnipotence from enemy spellcasters at the same time. Of course you could add plenty of more polish that would have been welcome, like more fighting styles akin to the improving styles with ability of Gothic 1/2, but that's fluff that's not as important to the core gameplay ideology (even if it could potentially be a big improvement)
Now, story wise, let me present an example I thought of instead of just writing out raw statements, to both show how storywise it could have been made more engaging and could have interwoven itself with gameplay more at the same time.
The example I thought up will regard itself of the city Montera, as it is one of the biggest cities in Gothic 3's Myrtanian mainland, and such offers a good opportunity to present the example. Let's start with the base prospect being the same: You need to find a way to talk to the Orc Leader, for information about Xardas, perhaps. However, instead of stupidly grinding reputation to 75, let's say that instead, only people presented to the orcs by the human mercenary leader would have such privilege. To achieve that, the game could offer you some options:
1. Get the favour of Marik, the mercenary leader, by testing the loyalty of his people thoroughly, finding the rebel contact in his mercenaries and betraying him to the orcs (pro-Orc, anti-rebel option)
2. Replace Marik as the mercenary leader with the help of the rebels by destabilizing the area around the city, showing his incompetence to deal with the problems and baiting him into making extra bad decisions, while doing favour for the rebel contact to get him appointed as the new mercenary leader (pro-rebel, anti-Orc option)
3. Replace Marik as the mercenary leader with the help of Sobota, the Hashishin slave merchant who is conflicted with him by putting him into a "political incident", and getting a Sobota-favoured Hashishin appointed as the new mercenary leader (pro-Hashishin, rebel-neutral option)
Giving the player such choice would be far more interesting than the forced reputation grinding, and furthermore, would present more sensible opportunities:
These ideas might seem a bit far-fetched to you, since I am clearly making Gothic 3 into a game of large-scale conflicts here, but I think that is what PB had intended with it, while not making its mechanics work for it at all in the end. I think if they fully dedicated themselves to the idea, made those conflicts more legitimate by giving you ways to actually carry them out without just being a one-man army yourself while still giving you plenty of opportunity for the one-man armying against less ridiculous odds such as groups of dangerous wilderness creatures and lesser enemy patrols, it could have ended up being functional enough in that way.
Let's start with the issues. As I see it, Gothic 3 suffers from 2 major flaws that are its complete undoing:
Flaw #1 - Basic gameplay mechanics and balance:
Gothic 3 was, and still is by all means, a broken game. The melee combat was, at release, probably one of the worst ever put into an action RPG, with infamously bad stunlocking and terrible AI which could be very easily exploited against human/humanoid enemies for a free victory. The Alternative AI introduced in the later Community Patches has made the melee combat considerably less terrible, albeit I still would not call it good. Furthermore, nothing has ever fixed the balancing insofar that magic is by far and large infinitely more overpowered than other combat methods, both for you and for the AI - enemy spellcasters are orders of magnitude more dangerous than non-spellcasters. And it is the most boring and mindless of spells (elemental archer style) that are the most powerful and useful in the game, as well - nothing to praise.
Even besides that, the damage calculations in the game are poor - armor is not very useful, even the lategame armor which is difficult to acquire. Its silly reputation requirements also serve to do little more than to try and poorly imitate, in the new system, the reward factor that Armor served in terms of faction progression in the first 2 games. Damage scales badly with better weapons, and thus range is far more important than damage. The biggest damage scaling can be seen, ironically, within the already most overpowered magic which scales its damage with Ancient Knowledge. Because of these aforementioned things, there is little sense of progression that is meaningful and noticeable because you can take on most challenges, including mass fights, at a relatively early point in the game, and the biggest difficulties (such as spellcasters and big fights where you can't help but be surrounded and stunlocked) still present a major challenge in the lategame, unless you are yourself playing the aforementioned overpowered spellcaster yourself.
Flaw #2 - Story, faction and quest system:
I don't know the overall consensus in here, so perhaps my opinion is abnormal, but I don't actually think the story itself or its structure is a major detriment to Gothic 3. Yes, it is structured as a major fetch quest, and there are many things that can be improved upon in it, but I see the validity of its open-endedness by making it a truly non-linear possibility when you are given such a broad task. What is far more damning however is the most basic and common factor of the game, and that is the nature of repeated, grindy reputation farming within cities, whose only purpose is letting you see leaders of the cities, which is largely unnecessary as most of them provide you with no important information which you can work off and the only benefit is getting quests to kill rebels or getting rebels to help you (in orc cities) or getting a way of getting global Hashishin reputation in hashishin cities by seeing their leaders. The main quest's leading motivation that you are started with, to find Xardas, is hurdled by reputation significantly twice (if you don't already know the game) because the important information that he's in Nordmar are given in one city, and reputation is required to pass TO Nordmar in another city (though there exist alternate passages). However during the game you are deluded by NPCs into thinking that you should grind out reputation in every city because you absolutely need to talk with each and every orc leader on the way. And this reputation grinding involves inane activities that also clearly show the devs had no idea what kind of quests to give you, so most cities in the game have some arbitrary arena which gives you NPC combat opportunities in 1 vs 1 situations which otherwise would almost not happen in the game at all due to the way it's structured. To get into more individual details than that is pretty unnecessary since I think the best summary of this point would be to just say "Gothic 3 is a game about doing inane quests to see a number get to 75 so you can progress a quest flag with someone, 30 times".
What if it were more polished?
Here's where I get to the thread title again. What about these issues could be improved if the game was not, so to speak, "rushed", or maybe if PB had some more good ideas to work with?
Gameplay Mechanics wise, the balance and formulas could certainly have been done better with some attempt, but the crux of the problem is that the game's design in gameplay is not suited for the presentation and requirements of the story. Magic in particular, if it were powerful, but made into a more double-edged sword, could have been interesting. Damage spells being AOE and hurting your allies in a game that should be more relying on allies (more on that later), having longer cast times almost always to require allies to cover for you, and having tactical buffs/debuffs could have worked wonders for the mechanics of the game, as well as remove the omnipotence from enemy spellcasters at the same time. Of course you could add plenty of more polish that would have been welcome, like more fighting styles akin to the improving styles with ability of Gothic 1/2, but that's fluff that's not as important to the core gameplay ideology (even if it could potentially be a big improvement)
Now, story wise, let me present an example I thought of instead of just writing out raw statements, to both show how storywise it could have been made more engaging and could have interwoven itself with gameplay more at the same time.
The example I thought up will regard itself of the city Montera, as it is one of the biggest cities in Gothic 3's Myrtanian mainland, and such offers a good opportunity to present the example. Let's start with the base prospect being the same: You need to find a way to talk to the Orc Leader, for information about Xardas, perhaps. However, instead of stupidly grinding reputation to 75, let's say that instead, only people presented to the orcs by the human mercenary leader would have such privilege. To achieve that, the game could offer you some options:
1. Get the favour of Marik, the mercenary leader, by testing the loyalty of his people thoroughly, finding the rebel contact in his mercenaries and betraying him to the orcs (pro-Orc, anti-rebel option)
2. Replace Marik as the mercenary leader with the help of the rebels by destabilizing the area around the city, showing his incompetence to deal with the problems and baiting him into making extra bad decisions, while doing favour for the rebel contact to get him appointed as the new mercenary leader (pro-rebel, anti-Orc option)
3. Replace Marik as the mercenary leader with the help of Sobota, the Hashishin slave merchant who is conflicted with him by putting him into a "political incident", and getting a Sobota-favoured Hashishin appointed as the new mercenary leader (pro-Hashishin, rebel-neutral option)
Giving the player such choice would be far more interesting than the forced reputation grinding, and furthermore, would present more sensible opportunities:
- You get to talk to the orc leader for your own business' sake in either case, no matter whose side you'll be taking later, and moving on with your "main quest task".
- For the rebels' side, you actually influence the situation of the city and it is not just you "getting inside" that matters to them and suddenly earns you their help in liberation
- For the orcs' side, you weaken the rebels and gain the orcs' trust, which then would allow you more viable options for discussing "permanently dealing with the rebel problem" with the orc leader
- For rebels, removing the guards from the ruins' side and removing the mercenary from the watchtower would give your rebel allies vantage points for attacking in the case of the revolution without having to get through the main gate
- The quest for getting wheat and milk could be worked with further - imagine an option to get the wheat to the rebels while claiming the grain thieves already sold it, while poisoning the milk that you give back to the quartermaster. These combined could give an hp bonus to the rebels in case of attacking while giving penalties to the city defenders.
- Quests for Okara regarding smithing could have accurate representations on the later attack forced by giving rebel soldiers improved damage and armor.
These ideas might seem a bit far-fetched to you, since I am clearly making Gothic 3 into a game of large-scale conflicts here, but I think that is what PB had intended with it, while not making its mechanics work for it at all in the end. I think if they fully dedicated themselves to the idea, made those conflicts more legitimate by giving you ways to actually carry them out without just being a one-man army yourself while still giving you plenty of opportunity for the one-man armying against less ridiculous odds such as groups of dangerous wilderness creatures and lesser enemy patrols, it could have ended up being functional enough in that way.