I read something recently where the developers of F.E.A.R. stated that they knew that they diminished quality and value of the two expansions to that game had lost them more than a few fans, and that they hoped that wouldn't translate into folks not giving the upcoming 'Project Origin' a chance. So what does this have to do with Gothic? Well, Gothic 2 was good enough to make Gothic 3 a hotly anticipated title on an international scale, but the issues with that game hurt the franchise as well as both Piranha Bytes and JoWood, the developer and publisher. With JoWood working on Gothic 4 and Piranha Bytes developing Risen, neither one was in the position to have their reputation tarnished further by having the expansion for Gothic 3 released in sub-par form (while Piranha Bytes is not the developer, their name is inextricably linked to the Gothic franchise). So how did things go? Read on and find out!

Should have called it 'Forsaken Fans'

It has been pointed out that I shouldn't waste so many words on a crappy game - and I will follow that advice and not bury my lead: Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods is a crappy game that none but the most rabid Gothic fan should bother playing and no one at all should part with full price to get.

I say 'Forsaken Fans' because this was an opportunity to make up for past misdeeds on the part of JoWood: all they really had to do was release the expansion in a relatively bug-free state and with the performance optimized based on learnings from the release of Gothic 3. Had they done that, fans would have forgiven many of the flaws of the game itself, saying that while it really is nothing on the level of Night of the Raven, at least it was a fun little quest to immerse us back in the Gothic world. Instead we have been dealing with patches, apologies, more patches, excuse heaped on excuse, still more patches, and open letters from the publishers.

The time has long since past to deal with such nonsense. We deserve better, and the Gothic franchise - one of the great RPG franchises of recent years - deserves better than to be treated so poorly.

A few details for the faithful

If for some reason you are still reading this, I will not forsake my RPGWatch friends by shirking my duty to provide a bit more context than 'just say no'.

Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods begins after the events of Gothic 3, with a introductory cinematic telling of the strife and conflict that have ensued since the nameless hero emerged victorious. It also tells of a conflict between the nameless hero and Xardas, which leads to a battle that damages both, leaving Xardas in an unknown state and our hero cast back to Myrtana with almost all power stripped away. It sets the stage for the core quest - reuniting the various lands of Myrtana.

While I found the cinematic introduction interesting enough to engage me to go further, there were already issues by the time I was done with my first conversation. I recall when I started Gothic 3 that the graphical performance in Ardea was abysmal. The same is true when starting the expansion: you start inside a house and immediately enter a discussion, but the frame-rate feels choppy and jarring while you watch the conversation transpire, and you confirm this by moving around afterward. It smooths out eventually, but getting adequate performance in Forsaken Gods means going back to those old threads and recalling all the tricks you used to get Gothic 3 to run acceptably. I had to remind myself that I am running this on a PC that handles Crysis with ease, yet I still struggle with Gothic 3 and especially now the expansion. Just to be clear - adding Forsaken Gods to your installation will slow down performance on all aspects of the game.

Back to that first discussion - had it not been for the awful load times I would have repeated the conversation immediately to confirm what I heard. The next time I played I did restart a new game just to check and confirmed that I heard three different voices for the nameless hero. Two were the same person I believe - but sounded like they were recorded separately and out of context. That is not the only time it happened - in fact it seemed to occur all over the place. It was one thing to have it occur occasionally in the Night of the Raven expansion to Gothic 2, because there they were patching a few new lines in here or there with existing content. Here we have an entirely new game, so it just feels wrong having the entire game feel like someone played a game of 'cut & paste the audio'.

A final thought on the first discussion - I entered the world not liking the nameless hero much at all.  He is self-righteous and petulant and none of the stuff he talks about suggests that much role-playing will come our way ... which ends up being true.

I have always loved the character system in the Gothic series and fortunately that is not messed with here. You earn 'learning points' which can be used when you meet trainers to increase your strength, dexterity or mana attributes as well as your combat skills. You can immediately see the impact - and you will need them as combat is still as difficult early on as it was in Gothic 3 (and 2 ... and 1). There are never enough points, but the game remains very beatable.

In my Gothic 3 review I praised the depth of the quests and interactions, stating "Wait a moment! That isn't the typical clear moral structure that we're used to seeing in recent role-playing games! Who is the good guy and who is the bad guy?" It has been easy to forget over the last couple of years that under that mess of bugs Gothic 3 was a very solid and ambitious game that offered quite a bit of freedom and refused to tell you the 'right' or 'wrong' thing to do. In Forsaken Gods, the quests are thin and instead of being given with limited detail that works in terms of being realistic, these feel like they are vague for the sake of making you feel like you are persuing something something important instead of doing the same banal FedEx quest with a new target.

Oh, I guess I have one more beef with the start of the game - you start off as the former 'hero of Myrtana' and known to all and with full knowledge of all ... yet the first person you talk to has you collecting favor from villagers to convince him to help you, which leads to a series of menial tasks.  It feels entirely unreasonable - much worse than the typical 'kill the rats' stuff, and completely unlike the way a similar situation was expertly handled at the start of Gothic 2.

Technically the game is a mess - between the long load times, the poor performance, and the lousy audio it is already enough to scare most people away. But I actually would have dealth with that were it not for two things - crashes and game-breaking bugs. Crashes are frustrating when you have more gaming than game time and know that a CTD means at least ten minutes before you'll be gaming again. But worse still were the game breaking bugs - times when you can't get to something or someone, or when you have been given two quests at cross purposes and the game won't let you advance the story because you chose the wrong one, and on and on. My mantra became 'save early, save often, and back up your saves'.

The comparison that kept coming to mind for me was Soldier of Fortune II. While Soldier of Fortune II had a reasonable plot and characters wrapped around a very gory game driven by a locational damage system that remains magnificent to this day but was simply part of the game ... but the sequel (not developed by Raven, the original developer) took out the precision and visceral excitement and replaced it with a system where you might decapitate someone by shooting them in the foot twice. It wasn't fun and just repeatedly demonstrated how the developers simply failed to grasp what made the original games so beloved to FPS fans.

OK ... enough already

Let's be honest - taking a flawed game, wrapping a lame story, lame quests, and poor programming around it, and hoping that by tossing in your old friends from previous games, the excellent music by KaiRo and a world we all have enjoyed for many years that fans will be satisfied is either delusional or arrogant. Either way the game is an utter failure - I cannot imagine a price at which this would be acceptable to buy, because I don't feel it is worth the twenty hours you will spend wading through this mess. I believe that my ability to see the bottom of a cloudy pool was sharpened by al the time I spent analyzing Dungeon Lords ... and guess what? Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods will never be a great game regardless of how many patches or bug fixes or performance improments are don, because at its' core it is just a pretty lousy game. And that is a sad thing for us forsaken fans.