Gothic 3 - CP 1.7 Inteview, Part 2 @ WoG

[Dhruin]

A second page to World of Gothic's interview with the Gothic 3 Community Patch team is now up. This part deals with the difficulties they faced, despite having the source code.
More information.

 

[Ergonpandilus]

Funny thing, how big scope this unofficial patch has grown into.

I hardly remember any other game, that has gotten as anticipated patch, that people have waiting so eagerly and for such a long time, including me.

This really tells, how much people love Gothic universum and want the end of the trilogy to be the jewel they always wished it to be. The game world, the story, the music and quests all work, it's just it wasn't polished enough.

 

[Prime Junta]

I'm going to give it a try. One of these days...

 

[rune_74]

Funny thing, how big scope this unofficial patch has grown into.

I hardly remember any other game, that has gotten as anticipated patch, that people have waiting so eagerly and for such a long time, including me.

This really tells, how much people love Gothic universum and want the end of the trilogy to be the jewel they always wished it to be. The game world, the story, the music and quests all work, it's just it wasn't polished enough.

heh never heard of bloodlines?

 

[Ergonpandilus]

heh never heard of bloodlines?

Not in this scale!

There is no one big patch for VM: Bloodlines, that people would have been waiting for over one year. Surely, the unofficial patches has added bunch of features and fixed bugs, but there hasn't been these kind of interviews and news about it...

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

Well, its a unique situation, afaik, that a community is basically given the source code of a relatively new game that's still being sold to patch things up. Not sure it's a good precedent either. Part of me applauds the effort and dedication, and the willingness to share the sourcecode on the corporate side, but really, you know, these people doing the patches aught to get payed for what they do.
Personally, I am of course nevertheless looking forward to playing G3 in a hopefully far more playable form.

 

[DArtagnan]

Yeah, this is definitely my most wanted patch - more wanted than most upcoming new games, even.

I was absorbed in Gothic 3 for a few full days - completely - until I realised just how broken it was.

I've wished for a more complete experience ever since, and with 1.7 the time and opportunity seems perfect.

The Gothic games remain the only truly successful free-roaming singleplayer CRPGs - if you ask me. Not that there aren't others of merit - but they all lack one thing or another.

 

[JDR13]

The Gothic games remain the only truly successful free-roaming singleplayer CRPGs - if you ask me. Not that there aren't others of merit - but they all lack one thing or another.

Definitely - except that it's hard to include Gothic 3 in that statement. Even with the 1.6 patch, which is a HUGE improvement over the original release, it still lags far behind the first 2 Gothic games overall - imho.

Hopefully 1.7 will bring it very close to the developer's original vision of what the game was supposed to be.

 

[DArtagnan]

Definitely - except that it's hard to include Gothic 3 in that statement. Even with the 1.6 patch, which is a HUGE improvement over the original release, it still lags far behind the first 2 Gothic games overall - imho.

Hopefully 1.7 will bring it very close to the developer's original vision of what the game was supposed to be.

True enough, Gothic 3 was a bit of a tragedy from where I'm sitting.

What's interesting is that I actually prefer that kind of fully non-linear structure over what they did in the past, except it needs to be done right. I don't really like the "chapter" thing of the previous Gothics, because it provokes the sensation of linearity and structure - which is what I basically want to avoid.

I might seem overly sensitive - but anything dealing with chapters or any kind of rigid story division reminds me that there's a writer and a design team behind your experience, and that they're actively guiding you through the game by dividing it up in pieces you can manage. What I love most about the potential of games, is the fact that the player can be in more or less total control - something which my personality craves above all. That's also essentially why I don't enjoy story-driven games like Torment and The Witcher as much as other people.

However, I've yet to come across a game that DOES do it right - so it remains a dream of mine to get a fully free-roaming experience with enough story and sufficiently interesting NPCs to make it worthwhile. The Elderscrolls try something similar, but unfortunately I despise their character system and find their story presentation appallingly artificial and forced - even if I did enjoy the Dark Brotherhood quest-line in Oblivion.

Fallout 3 might actually be the closest thing next to Gothic, but I don't particularly enjoy the setting, and I don't appreciate their treatment of the SPECIAL system, which they've simplified and made entirely too forgiving overall. Still, a very fine game set in the wrong world for me, personally.

But I can honestly say that I was more "into" Gothic 3 for the ~50 hours I managed to play it, than I've been with any of the previous Gothics - even my absolute favorite - the original.

But once it dawned on me that the game was basically broken, and all my efforts to build my character wisely were basically wasted, I became so disillusioned as to ruin the whole thing. Haven't really touched it since.

Oh, and the music.... wonderful

 

[Ragon der Magier]

I´m really curious and wondering about their new AI and Balancing and what it has been able to do for fixing the low combat system, which had been, quite frankly, a true insult to the well designed original from the initial titles.

There you had a rather simplistic (except controls for some, maybe), but very effective game mechanics, which especially and above all was serving perfectly this one important deed:
- Sense of Achievement

Gone with the key role of statistics-heritage from P&P which had you reading your progress mainly from increasing values alone.
Instead here you were with a set of realistic moves - and your were in the driving seat with the direct control scheme provided.

(Aside from long range) there were two melee fighting schools available to choose from along with their respective skill and pool of weapons:
One-handed and Two-handed, the first relying more on speed and variability, the other on strength and damage power, hence representing the more allround vs. the more offensive combat style (and a better, more evolutionary implementation of shields would have made the acc. style a perfect addition as the defensive one ).

The mentioned set of strikes and swings was expanding over certain thresholds you would reach in your skill.

Your more gradual basic improvement became evident to you through how the game played it easier on you with the delicate combo timings the better you were getting in your combat skill.

After all, the difficulty posed you with problems even facing a young wolf at the start, where later you could feel your growth when you could knock out its parents with a few standard blows. Therefore the game presented you with tougher opponents requiring more swiftness and tactical wits to overcome - resulting more than often in true dances with the blade, making this an exciting and rewarding experience.

The greater honours in that context were reached when you were developing individual combat strategies for various foes
- like the hit and run in circles around the huge trolls
- restoring distance with two fast steps after attacking against animals and beasts like wolfs, wargs and shadow runners or some orc attacks
- for the latter and humanoid opponents also the knowledge about the best moments when to block, revert or attack, reading and anticipating their moves,
- dragging a string of orcs along the wall before the mine valley castle, gradually decimating them with well dosed counter blows/mini-combos (worked at least in G2 classic )
- avoid the deadly lightning fast left-right-left sweep combo of Orc Veterans
and more...


And the level design, carefully distributing those opponents of varying strength across locations helped it a lot.

In a nutshell:
Most rewarding combat system i ever had played.

[ And that´s me, s.o. who´s not that much blessed when it comes to tasks requiring a good deal of manual dexterity (in German called a `Grobmotoriker´ ).
So the timing issue presented me with quite a challenge to master, let alone the tuning between combos and char movement.
But once adapted to it... - among the effort ~100 consecutive fights against arch enemy Bullco on level 3 and without leather armor yet rsp. with and level 6 in NotR - ... there couldn´t be anything better! ]

I know, there probably had been games doing such before, maybe even better.
But they largely had been combat-heavy.
In G1/G2(NotR), however, it blended perfectly with all the other enjoyable gameplay features (story & quests, NPCs & dialogue/language, locations, setting, other skills, exploration, items, great vistas & sound/music, dimensions of movement - walking/running, climbing, swimming/diving, etc.) contributing to a well-balanced, rich CRPG.

Top!

And vice versa disappointing to the same degree in G3, therefore.


Ragon, the Gothic Paladin (2nd run Merc)

 

[Zaleukos]

Due to focus reasons (IIRC you only hurt the enemy currently in focus, unlike in G3, and when grouped enemies tended to run around quite a bit) the G1/G2 combat system could be very frustrating against multiple opponents... Against a single opponent it was an enjoyable system though