Gothic III

Let me describe my experience with this game:

I installed it no problems, then started a new game. I am shown a cut-scene of some dudes on a boat, then they get off and walk to a village. I imagine this probably makes more sense if you've played the previous games, but it would have been nice if you were given some clue what was going on.

Once they get to the village, we're shown that it is occupied by orcs. Then, the combat starts. My framerate immediately drops to about 5, which is surprising considering that the graphics in this game are significantly inferior to those of Morrowind (and I do mean Morrowind, the game from 2002 - not Oblivion) and my rig is more than capable of running modern games on high settings. As my NPC companions kill off the orcs and the local townspeople are slaughtered, my framerate improves to the point where I can actually control my character, I join into the melee. When the game started, I was given the tip to "click your left mouse button to attack", so I do so.

After some furious clicking, all the opponents are defeated. I figure out how to pick up their loots and then explore the village. The first thing I notice is that one of the buildings appears to be on fire. Upon further examinations, I realize that this is actually just the fire sprite from the fireplace inside CLIPPING THROUGH THE FUCKING WALL AND SHOWING UP OUTSIDE. This just screams "cheap and crappy" to me. I mean, if I noticed this within two minutes of starting the game, then certainly their playtesters must have seen it? The only explanation is that it was left in intentionally because they developers were too lazy to go back and fix it. That is a bad sign.

I finish exploring the village, and then go to speak with one of my companions. His armor is HUGE and puffy, causing him to look like a little man in a puffy fat man's coat, and his weapon is clipping through it. The textures are decent, but the shape of his armor is just awful. I guess that can be marked down to taste, though. Anyways, I talk to the guy. The voice acting is awful, and the dialogue itself is amateur at best. I am not exaggerating when I say that I could have easily done a better job on the writing. He tells me to go find some rebel camp and talk to them. Ok, no problem - I'll give it a try. I go and talk to the other NPC's that I arrived with. Their dialogue is all equally awfully written and acted. I leave the town in disgust, hoping to find fun in exploring the world.

The landscape sucks in both design and texture. Like I said, the graphics are inferior to Morrowind - a game that came out over four years ago. I get attacked by some wierd dinosaur/bird thing. I kill it. I then decide it might be a good idea to save my game. I try to hotkey "F5" which is the quicksave button in most RPG's - it works. However, the game locks up for about 30 seconds while it saves. Not exactly a 'quck'save, is it? Whatever, I continue on.

I kill another one of those dinosaur things, and then I see a third one standing on a ridge in the distance. I pull out my bow and shoot at it. It tries running straight at me, but there is a ledge in the way "about a 3 foot drop", which it cannot seem to conquer. It just runs against the dropoff as if it was running into a wall, effectively making it standin place. I nock another arrow and shoot it again, and then a third time to kill it. Spiffy, my third fight in the game and I've already found a pathing bug.

I continue down the road, and I see a camp with some orcs in it. It was never really explained to me the relationship between orcs and humans, so I assumed that they were mortal enemies. I pull out my bow again and decide to shoot them from a distance. They give chase, and I run behind some burned-out house while I am reloading. One of the orcs runs directly into the front wall of the house, and then somehow warps up into the rafters of the house, where he gets stuck. I loop around and go in the front door of the house. At this point, the orc falls out of the rafters and starts running into a wall. I walk up behind him and pull out my sword. I then hit him 7 or 8 times while he just stands there, running against the wall and not defending himself. He dies. I then go outside to deal with the other three orcs, who are all clumped on top of each other and firing crossbows at me. Unfortunately, I lost this fight and they knocked me out, stole my gold, and took my sword.

At this point, I realized that I don't have to fight orcs at this point, and I can just leave them alone. I load my game and decide to explore in another direction this time. To my right I saw what looked like the ruins of a city encased in a large magical bubble (basically a ripoff of Dalaran in WoW). I decide "ok, I'll go check that out". Before long I encounter some large dragonfly-looking thing called a Bloodfly. I pull out my sword and prepare for battle. He gets the first hit in, which causes my character to stagger backwards. Before my character can regain his balance, the bloodfly struck again and I was again staggered backwards. The bloodfly hit me 6 times in rapid succession, staggering me each time, and then I was dead. I never had a chance to defend myself or respond at all, because I was staggered the entire time.

I sat there for a few seconds in disbelief of what I had just witnessed. I had gotten completely overpowered by a monster found about 100 feet from the starting city. If I had wandered into a very high-level dungeon and gotten owned there, I would have understood, but this happened right at the starting area. I then logged out and uninstalled the piece of shit.

I've played pretty much every RPG to come out on the PC in the last decade, and this is one of the worst. Complete garbage.