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Welcome... to Gothic 3! Gothic 2 was an interesting ride. It had a lot of things to recommend it, particularly in the early game, even if the Night of the Raven add-on twisted the balance all to gently caress, but ultimately it kind of fell flat at the end, with a sequel hook in place of a proper ending and a good deal of wasted potential. But I like to think everyone who followed the thread had fun(if you still followed the thread even if you weren't enjoying it, please see a therapist). So I said I'd do Gothic 3, too. Which is kind of also a thing I'm doing for me, see, Gothic 3 loving sucks, it's super busted, was practically unplayable on launch and even now if you ask a Gothic veteran how to play Gothic 3, you're going to be recommended a laundry list of community mods that are mutually exclusive unless they're installed in the right order and, in some cases, have their own unofficial community patches. Because Gothic 3 is still super busted. And for this reason, I never actually completed it myself. There are absolutely things in here that I don't know. There were things I didn't know for Gothic 2, too, but that was fine, because this nice German site has helpful English-language versions of its super-detailed Gothic 1 and 2 stuff. But lmao, there's no English translation for Gothic 3, and the Gothic 3 portal is comparatively sparse even in German. In deference to people apparently being concerned for my mental and physical welfare, I will be running the latest version of the Community Patch(version 1.75.41 or something?), but I won't be installing anything else, like the Update Pack, the Parallel Universe Patch, the Questpaket, the Content Mod or the ominously named "Consequences." In part because I don't really trust additions and what they do after loving Night of the Raven, but also in part because I want to give as original and unvarnished a show of Gothic 3 and its issues to the watching audience. I'm therefore also not using the "alternate balancing" that the Community Patch has an option for(after reading up on it, it honestly seems kind of stupid and huffily upset at the idea of people having FUN or being POWERFUL and you know what? gently caress that. After Night of the Raven I want to be powerful at the end of this.). The only other change I'm making is that I'm using Gothic 3 Cleanup(a fun utility that's only documented in German! Whee! I'm getting my money's worth out of my grade school German lessons) since Gothic 3 still, uh, has performance issues and needs all the help it can get(G3CU mostly deletes un-necessary files and cleans up extra translations you won't be using, since that apparently helps make the game run faster and more smoothly). So with that speech out of the way, let's rejoin this goober and his adventures:  Don't worry, like 90% of Gothic's human population will still be male humans with a bit of a beard, even if our protagonist now looks somewhat less like a stick insect. We've also got...  Better graphics!  A more open world!  The last thing you'll ever see!  Caves and mines that aren't always just narrow tunnels that make it impossible to get good screenshots and gently caress with your camera!  Dogs!  An ocean we can venture somewhat into without instantly being eaten!  Stealing weed from dead guys!  More than one biome!  And friendly cats! I expect to update every one to two weeks, I mostly kept a weekly schedule for Gothic 2 and towards the end it was a bit too much pressure on myself. Since there's no well-parsed dialogue dump(see the lasts posts of the Gothic 2 thread for my fun adventures with StringTable.ini) and I'm sure as hell not transcribing a small fantasy novel's worth of dialogue, I'm going to be liberally rewriting the game. I'm not going to start writing fanfic(except when it's funny) and all the original meaning will still be there, it's just that or going insane. With a more free world, there will also definitely be some thread input, since our choices this time around are actually somewhat more impactful than in Gothic 2, one of the good things that can be said for Gothic 3.
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Feb 7, 2023 22:44
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Post Index Update 01: It Begins Update 02: Training Montage Update 03: Decisive Action Update 04: The Best Place in Varant Update 05: The Skeleton Wars Update 06: That Is My Plan Update 07: Let's Fight Everybody NOW! Update 08: Orknarok and Roll Update 09: The Duds of the Gods Update 10: A Nice Temple Update 11: I Am Experiencing Regret Update 12: I Hate Sand Update 13: Return of the Orcs Update 14: Errand Cleanup Update 15: Monsters and Mines Update 16: The Decider Update 17: Gotha Update 18: Trolls and Trials Update 19: Worst Town in Myrtana Update 20: Great White North Update 21: Somewhere to the North Update 22: Incoherent Screaming Sounds Update 23: It's Finally Over PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Oct 3, 2023 |
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Feb 7, 2023 22:45
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This should be... Interesting. Coming from one of those forsaken European places where Gothic 3 actually WAS the Oblivion killer, in terms of spread, I still have a soft spot for it, but I can hardly imagine how it is going to be for a new player after so many years.
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Feb 7, 2023 22:56
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Gothic III posted:Dogs! Ah, but can you pet the dogs?
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Feb 7, 2023 22:59
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Jesus, even in Poland where Gothic is basically state religion you can hardly find anyone claiming that Gothic 3 was good game. Good luck, you'll need it.
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Feb 7, 2023 23:12
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From the heights of magical skeleton conjuring power to getting torn apart by the local wild animals again. Sounds like fun for our protagonist! Best of luck in conquering Gothic 3 to you.
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Feb 7, 2023 23:28
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Mind you, when it comes to being awful, this is but a prologue to the expansion. I actually have some memories of having fun with this. They are sparse and interspersed with lots and lots of getting permastunned on the way from point A to point B.
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Feb 7, 2023 23:39
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You're on Gothic 3 already? I've just barely made time to start reading the Gothic 2 thread! gently caress! Looking forward to how this train wreck actually plays. I played Gothic 3 a few years after launch and it was such unvarnished garbage that fit the rest of the series like fist fits nose that I uninstalled after like three hours (I was younger and more patient with video games back then, especially Gothic games). Where 1 and 2 where insanely immersive and really had you feel immersed in the world, Gothic 3 felt like a AAA RPG checklist with combat so busted the game was drat near unplayable and certainly unsatisfying, even before you get to how weak the story is (at least what I've seen of it). steinrokkan posted:This should be... Interesting. Coming from one of those forsaken European places where Gothic 3 actually WAS the Oblivion killer, in terms of spread, I still have a soft spot for it, but I can hardly imagine how it is going to be for a new player after so many years. For all the poo poo people give Oblivion for being generic and cookie-cutter I can't believe anyone would prefer this dumpster fire over it.
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Feb 8, 2023 00:13
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Hi, I'm the person you can't believe. Gothic 3 has exactly three things on Oblivion: 1) it's not completely and utterly soulless 2) it doesn't destroy the legacy of one of the greatest RPGs ever 3) it's actually fun to explore its world (once you find away to kill animals from afar) It's obviously subjective, but as far as I'm concerned that's enough. I wouldn't call either a good game, but I found Gothic 3 much more enjoyable, warts and all. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Feb 8, 2023 |
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Feb 8, 2023 00:28
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Visually, this game looks rather sharp compared to 2. I look forward to the train wreck.anilEhilated posted:Hi, I'm the person you can't believe. Gothic 3 has exactly three things on Oblivion: That's a good term for Oblivion: soul-less. Morrowind had tons of good qualities, but the game engine is major turn-off for me.
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Feb 8, 2023 00:35
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In the name of your well-being, please don't hesitate to abuse the command console.
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Feb 8, 2023 00:44
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Purple, can you read German at all? Danish/Norwegian etc are technically Germanic languages, but so is English and I can't read German for toffee. My other language is French, though, and I can read Italian quite well, so I really don't know.SIGSEGV posted:In the name of your well-being, please don't hesitate to abuse the command console. Also this. Games that abuse the player should be abused in kind.
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Feb 8, 2023 01:07
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JustJeff88 posted:Purple, can you read German at all? Danish/Norwegian etc are technically Germanic languages, but so is English and I can't read German for toffee. My other language is French, though, and I can read Italian quite well, so I really don't know. Oh, yeah, I'm pretty alright at reading German. Don't ask me to analyze a German text, but unless it's something highly technical I can usually riddle out the general meaning. German, like Dutch, is kind of like halfway between English and Danish, since a lot of words have the same roots in either language, plus I had German as a subject in grade school(not that I was great at it). Having had some Spanish in high school and understanding the ideas of common word roots also lets me puzzle out simple French and Italian at times. Plus at work we've got a bunch of German-language suppliers, so that helps keep it somewhat fresh. As for the console... I will try to keep it minimal, but I'm 99% sure I'll need it at some point because something breaks.
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Feb 8, 2023 01:24
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Well, at least the game looks pretty good graphics-wise. If it's going to be a complete trainwreck at least we'll be able to see it clearly. 
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Feb 8, 2023 09:24
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Well then, I shall be the dissenting opinion haver in this thread and say I really like Gothic 3 and will further claim that it is a good game. I even replayed it last year and had a good time with it and it's the sort of game that's really good to play whilst listening to podcasts as well. Because it's pretty light on plot. It's not perfect, far from it. But it's fun and cool. There's some Russian dude on Youtube who makes videos about why its his favorite RPG so I'm not completely crazy in liking it either. It is pretty jank though, and if I could only make one change to make the experience less of a pain, it would be to make reloading much faster. You'll be doing that a lot. God speed Purple, this is not a short game.
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Feb 8, 2023 11:11
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I actually liked Oblivion and I suspect I'll eventually get to like this game* as well though it's important to note that I only go into these games after they've been fixed and modded by the community to a degree that they're not the same game arguably. *I must have got it on some cheapo bundle deal since I can't remember buying it and I definitely wouldn't have paid anything resembling full price for anything this jenky. Also I enjoy the whole lengthy modding process as much as the gaming itself because I'm a weirdo like that.
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Feb 8, 2023 16:30
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By popular demand posted:I actually liked Oblivion and I suspect I'll eventually get to like this game* as well though it's important to note that I only go into these games after they've been fixed and modded by the community to a degree that they're not the same game arguably. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=922996693 This looks to be the generally agreed upon path for community patches and updates.
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Feb 8, 2023 16:44
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PurpleXVI posted:https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=922996693 that performance patch is huge. wish it'd been around in 2020 when i did a play through. 
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Feb 8, 2023 22:35
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I remember a similar thing with that Vampire game. Some chap did a fix-it-up patch that was very warmly received, but he also did a content & balance patch that was widely regarded as rubbish. Sometimes a well-meaning fan is in fact the greater of two evils.Black Robe posted:Well, at least the game looks pretty good graphics-wise. If it's going to be a complete trainwreck at least we'll be able to see it clearly. It's like a pretty girl, but your mates have already told you that she's as mad as a hatter and you wonder what you're in store for. That actually happened to me. I met a colleague at my current job who want to the same university as I. We both asked out the same girl and she turned us both down, but we realised later that we dodged the proverbial bullet as she was a raging drama queen. JustJeff88 fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Feb 9, 2023 |
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Feb 9, 2023 00:14
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JustJeff88 posted:I remember a similar thing with that Vampire game. Some chap did a fix-it-up patch that was very warmly received, but he also did a content & balance patch that was widely regarded as rubbish. Sometimes a well-meaning fan is in fact the greater of two evils. The basic Community Patch for Gothic 3 at least lets you turn off most of the "Alternative Balancing" and "Alternative AI," very little of it remains in once it's turned off and it really just unfucks things that were clearly bugs and cleans up the performance a bit. The "Alternative AI" in particular makes the enemies a bit too smart, see, Gothic's combat, in all three games, is largely based around the idea that you can really only effectively fight one equal enemy at once. If there are more, you need to lure one away, distract some with summons or launch an alpha strike(of spells or heavy attacks) that immediately knocks the numbers down to even before the melee fighting begins. Gothic 3 has the enemies play a bit into this, slightly more gamely than the ones in Gothic 2 that would happily dogpile you and turn you into pet food, but the "Alternative AI" as I understand it, turns them back to a more Gothic 2-ish AI that makes some encounters very rough. Some enemies also have "rage" modes they swap into if you try to brute force them too much, which I also am somewhat ambivalent on.
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Feb 9, 2023 01:33
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PurpleXVI posted:The basic Community Patch for Gothic 3 at least lets you turn off most of the "Alternative Balancing" and "Alternative AI," very little of it remains in once it's turned off and it really just unfucks things that were clearly bugs and cleans up the performance a bit. As a guy who used to play classes in MMOs that were built around crowd control, I can very much appreciate how important CC is. I can also appreciate how a lack of it can ruin a game if the enemies possess even the basest intelligence.
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Feb 9, 2023 16:08
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JustJeff88 posted:As a guy who used to play classes in MMOs that were built around crowd control, I can very much appreciate how important CC is. I can also appreciate how a lack of it can ruin a game if the enemies possess even the basest intelligence. The most effective form of crowd control is simply killing the entire crowd as fast as possible.
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Feb 9, 2023 16:13
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh, yeah, I'm pretty alright at reading German. Don't ask me to analyze a German text, but unless it's something highly technical I can usually riddle out the general meaning. German, like Dutch, is kind of like halfway between English and Danish, since a lot of words have the same roots in either language, plus I had German as a subject in grade school(not that I was great at it). Having had some Spanish in high school and understanding the ideas of common word roots also lets me puzzle out simple French and Italian at times. If you need any particular translation or help with something in terms of Deutschbaggery, shoot me a PM with it, or with your Discord. I'm a born and bred Deutschbag.
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Feb 10, 2023 16:40
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Lynneth posted:Deutschbag. I've never heard this term before and it is hilarious.
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Feb 10, 2023 17:27
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Man that's one cute-lookin dog.
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Feb 10, 2023 18:56
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Lynneth posted:If you need any particular translation or help with something in terms of Deutschbaggery, shoot me a PM with it, or with your Discord. I'm a born and bred Deutschbag. NewMars posted:Man that's one cute-lookin dog.
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Feb 12, 2023 18:20
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Sweet merciful lurkers, may Innos have mercy on your soul for attempting this madness. 
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Feb 12, 2023 23:45
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Update 01: It Begins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YqK0kve7UE Welcome... to Gothic 3. Since I know not everyone likes videos, I've screenshot the most important parts of the intro so I can interject my bullshit alongside it.    We start by watching the lovingly rendered ocean surface as the credits and the game title fade in, the music is low-key but ominous.    Pan up to the ship we stole at the end of the last game and three of the usual suspects looking grim at the railing.  Hey, what the hell? Where are my robes? My sword was bigger than that! Shhhhh, Diego's gesturing at something out of sight, I'll also note that all of this is completely unvoiced, and then we get to see what's got everyone's attention.  Ah, poo poo, I guess Myrtana's gonna need saving, too.   Hard cut to orcs walking through the woods. They now look less like brick shithouses, and more like Shrek's cousin with those weird little ears(I thought they were horns at first).    The orcs appear to be having a rave outside the walls of a large city or fortress, having breached the walls but apparently decided that storming the breach is less important than waving their swords and axes around outside.  We cut back to a brief shot of some of the goons on the shore. Gorn, Hero and Diego are joined by Milten and Lester, with Lester having swapped his armor for a robe and Milten having been drastically de-aged, shaved and dyed his hair blond. Gorn has the exact same pose as on the ship, our hero and Diego look somewhat focused on the mission, while Lester and Milten look confused about where they are and why they're here.    Wizards are doing some bullshit...    ...that causes a massive dome to explode out of the besieged city. Those little flashes are where the dome sweeps over orcs, presumably blasting them to ash more or less instantly. Metal.   The C-team walks up to the walls of some village(and Gorn STILL has the same loving pose, lmao the animators were real proud of that one).    And it looks like orcs are pushing the locals around and enslaving them.  Quick cut to a close-up of the lead orc's face.  And a quick cut to a close-up of the hero's face, smirking back at him.  And then BOOM, GAMEPLAY, with a huge "hint screen" blocking our view of what's going on, a sudden objective popping up and everyone around us rushing into a fight. Holy hell I sailed back here to get away from orcs!    These orcs are generally chumps, but on normal difficulty it's actually quite possible to get yourself horribly murdered by the game's very first mandatory combat encounter. The combat system has also gotten a good overhaul, there's no longer swings and lunges, instead you've got normal attacks and power attacks, and quite a lot of fights can be solved by just spamming the hell out of normal attacks as several of these orcs learn to their detriment.    At least this quick-bar is nice.We kind of had a quick-bar before, in that we could quick-key things, but we couldn't actually SEE what was on the bar when we had our inventory closed, so I'd argue this is an improvement. It certainly does herald a more obtrusive UI, though, in Gothic 2 we really only had our health and mana bars and nothing else. The yellow addition in the middle is predictably stamina, which seems to mostly get used for sprinting.    Enemies can also knock you on your rear end now. I have no idea what triggers it as opposed to just a normal attack, and there doesn't seem to be any way to avoid it other than just not taking the hit(or blocking weapons), nor does it seem to get triggered by, say, low stamina or anything. The first time it happened I got super confused since only one very specific button actually makes you get up again, so I thought the game had bugged out on me. Thankfully the clown team drew aggro while I figured out how the hero's legs worked.   ...and then since the slaves and the goons are distracting the enemies, I decided I might as well loot the gently caress out of the town behind their backs while no one's aware enough to get upset about me stealing their socks and rooting through their beds.    Almost every house seems to have a chest in it, orange names mean they haven't been looted yet, red means they're locked. And yes, that does appear to be loving Comic Sans, which pops up every time I take stuff or look at an interactible. What the hell? I think someone mentioned this was a Community Patch thing. I think my only reply to that is: lmao, why.   ...y'know, I should probably feel a bit bad that we apparently got all the humans here killed by the orcs.   While I'm looting a tower, I take the outside stair up and snap a few screenshots along the way. That big glowing dome in the distance is probably what we saw in the intro.    At some point while looting, the last orc warrior finds me and runs up to pick a fight. Killing him immediately makes the last human survivor(except for us, the people who started all this poo poo), start talking to us.  Cheer up, now you're free! Well, the ones of you still alive. Well you, you're free. And alive. Look, if you and your moron friends would like to keep me alive and free, head along to Reddock and ask the rebels to help me out. Sure, seems like a thing I might do eventually. Where's Reddock? No idea, but your friend Gorn looks like he might, you should ask him.Not quite word for word, but still a BAFFLING interaction in the sense that he expects someone who just hopped off a ship to know the local area better than him. I mean, he's RIGHT, but it's still stupid. Of course I continue stealing his dead friends' stuff before I do anything else.   Bookstands no longer contain actual books with text, but instead either do nothing, give a brief voice clip or give a bonus to Alchemy or Ancient Knowledge. In this town there's a +5 to Alchemy, raising our base 10 to 15 and a +5 to Ancient Knowledge, raising our base 0 to 5.   Shrines of Innos now aren't just for giving away money and hoping for random bennies, instead it's where we level up several core stats. Levels no longer come with free HP, we have to level it up along with mana, and statues of Innos let us learn the ten Dominance magic spells if our Ancient Knowledge is high enough... and if we can pay for it, it usually costs thousands of gold for each spell.   Looping around to the front gate, I reach this table that the local orc boss was hanging out at, which contains a teleport rune for Ardea, this town. Since Gothic 3 doesn't have an explicit chapter-based structure, we don't get blueballed on things like fast travel until the second half of the game.  And now that I'm carrying around like ten swords and half a pharmacy, which is what it takes for me to feel like I'm playing a Gothic game, we can take a look at our stat sheet.  So on the base stat side of things, One-Handed, Two-Handed, Crossbow and Bow skill ratings are gone, and we have some new stats. Thievery is involved in some sort of random inscrutable roll when trying to pick locks, rather than it being a minigame, while the others mostly seem to exist to gate learning skills. Each of the squares represents a skill we can learn, like figuring out how to pick up big weapons, fire crossbows, use advanced magic, mix illegal drugs, loot animals of their skin, etc. The Orc Slayer skill in the top right of the Fighting Skills is active because our starting melee weapon gives it to us, and it gives us a vague bonus to hurting orcs. I can do a rundown list of all the individual skills if someone is interested.   Our starting weapon and a random other weapon with the Worn attribute, weapons you find on enemies all seem to come with the Worn malus to allow the game devs to give them tougher weapons than you have without all of them being an immediate upgrade. I think the weakness is something like half of what the original damage is.  There are also shields now. SHIELDS! And polearms. But we're too stupid to use a pointy stick or a piece of wood to avoid getting stabbed in the face for now. Hey, you wouldn't drive a forklift without a license, I'm not gonna swing a spear without a license. Magic is now split into Dominance(Innos, Fireballs), Summoning(Beliar, all our cool skeleton bros) and Transformation(Adanos, ?????).  We also have a world map and... the world is pretty big! Though I feel it clashes a bit with establish Gothic lore that Myrtana is kind of a narrow state squeezed between others, when it's been portrayed as kind of an imperialist power in the past, going on bloody crusades just for the king's greed and vanity.  Lastly there's our quest log and current rep with the game's factions. We automatically get a bit of Rebel rep for dealing with Ardea like we're forced to, and because the game devs are a bunch of dorks, the smaller map in the quest log actually contains a couple of unlabelled locations that the main map doesn't. It doesn't take a hyperbrain ultragenius to figure out that Reddock is the one just west of us, but let's pretend we haven't figured that out yet.   gently caress, I hope not. Why would you even say that? Orcs were enough of a pain in the rear end back on Khorinis. Anyway, could you tell me where Redd- I sure hope we can find Lester soon. If he ran away it just means he's smarter than us, now about Redd- I sure hope we can find Lester soon.Despite being told to ask Gorn about Reddock, he will refuse to talk about it until we find Lester, we can't even argue about it and the hero doesn't even try to bring it up.   One thing that's weird and janky about Gothic 3 is that no one can EVER stand still during conversations, everyone's always fidgeting and shifting around like everything about them is itchy, it also occasionally causes some goofy-rear end mid-frames like Milten's hilarious pose here. Aside from Lester, I happen to notice you didn't blast those orcs with any magic. I also notice that I didn't blast those orcs with any magic, what's up with that? Oh, we forgot to tell you, but we presume that Xardas somehow turned off all runes, so now we have to rely on the ancient magic instead. The ANCIENT MAGIC? I presume that's magic without using runes? Yep, fell out of fashion once they figured runecrafting. ...so you're saying that a type of magic you could learn entirely from reading books and then throwing money at a divine vending machine, fell out of favour compared to a type of magic that required extensive schooling from specialists and rare magical ingredients? Well, when you put it like that, you make it sound kind of boneheaded. I really do, don't I?So that's the game's reason why we don't have whatever magic we learned in Gothic 2, also for some reason every NPC assumes Xardas did this. He might have, but we really have no reason to think he did at this point, so it's kind of weird. Maybe Xardas blogged about it on his crystal ball or something.   Diego's one of the more on-point characters at this early stage, though I want to show off how goofy the game's proportions are from certain angles and with certain armorsets using him as the example since Mondgesange catalogued it from a perfect angle:  He's like a loving Space Marine! I mean, we do all hate the King, don't we? Sure, but that doesn't mean I want to be sucking on an orcish bootheel for the rest of my days. I think our first order of business should be figuring out how tight their iron grip is on Myrtana.  Ardea has two exits, and after talking to the goons, I decide to take the back exit which doesn't lead to Lester first, since I wanted to poke around a bit.   Detail distance aside, it really does look a LOT better than Gothic 2. More colourful and the outside areas really look like places you'd want to explore and hang around in. Plus, we've got a lot more peaceful animal life now. Back in Gothic 2 it was really just the sheep, but here we've got wandering herds of deer! I'm gonna hunt me one.   Appropriately for a prey animal, when I don't fell it in one shot(and note that ranged weapons no longer lock on, they're now wholly manually aimed), it starts running the gently caress away. Just need to wait for my moment and hit it with another arrow...  Erm.  Sorry, but what the gently caress? Did that deer just teleport?Deer are spawning and respawning creatures, rather than permanently placed, so if they flee far enough, they don't just slip the draw distance, they entirely VANISH. So you gotta drop them in one go, pretty much, or they'll almost always manage to escape.    There are also a few Scavengers out here. They're no longer brown and dirt-coloured any longer, they're now much brighter-looking. Also like everything else in this game, it bops me on my loving rear end.     At the end of the promontory beyond Ardea is a lighthouse and the lighthouse keeper is...    ...Jack? Didn't I leave you at the wheel of the ship? The ship with all my loot and magic? That's now mysteriously not visible on the horizon any longer? I don't know what you mean, I'm the other Jack that's a lighthouse keeper. I swear if you pawned all my poo poo, there's going to be a reckoning. I'm the only one who gets to do that to people. Hey now, kiddo, calm down. How about you go murder a bunch of strangers squatting on my stoop? This is feeling strangely familiar. I'll also let you pawn all their trash loot. Deal. In fact, lemme just offload all the garbage from the orcs and everyone's houses before someone comes looking for it... Myrtana's experienced some SEVERE inflation since Gothic 2. 3000 gold was enough to buy endgame gear in a lot of cases, when it was purchaseable and not something you found in ancient ruins or got from quests, it's now considerably less valuable and a suit of endgame armor will run us 150k gold instead. Sure would've been great if SOMEONE didn't happen to lose all their poo poo between each game. In addition to offloading my crap, I also buy some lockpicks and a shovel since I figure the game isn't gonna let me buy a shovel if I can't use it to dig up some treasure at some point. I'm as pissed off about that as you are, trust me, SOMEONE is going to pay for that.  I have another look at the countryside from Jack's lighthouse. The sharp line where the cut-off between detailed and undetailed terrain is, is really nasty, but even with everything cranked to max it still persists, so I'm unsure if I can do anything about it.   On the way down I spot a Bloodfly. Interestingly enough, they now crawl around in a sort of scorpion-like configuration and only take to the air when you get in stinging range.  They also loving SUCK to fight now. See how my health bar has turned green?   That's poison, which drains 5 Health per second, I have 200 Health at max, so enough for 40 seconds of melting, and it lasts about 20 seconds, so if I'm already injured, it's rough. Plus I have no means of curing poison so far. Amusingly...   If it kills me, it applies force to the ragdoll kind of like I just took a blow, and the hero gets launched sideways in this goofy-rear end way, it's pretty comical to watch.     Jack also insists the "bilge rats" harassing him are on the shore, but they're actually on the other edge of the rocky promontory, while the actual shoreline is like a hundred or two hundred feet below.    Aggro has also changed somewhat, it feels like, being more based on vision cones than a 360 radar, as I learn when the FARTHEST enemy, who's the one facing me, charges over to fight me alone. It also feels like enemy groups are no longer tightly "linked" so that if you aggro one, they all want some kung fu, as the others happily let this happen.      I walk around the camp and repeat it, luring out the guy facing me with the one with his back to me only aggroing once he hears his body hit the ground. The killing blow on the second one also features this exciting screenshot of our hero dislocating his own wrist. You just don't get advanced swordfighting techniques. Anyway, time to find Lester. Thankfully he isn't too far away, but you could potentially miss him if you were unlucky.    Once you leave Ardea's "main" gates, hang a sharp left and head down the road towards the beach.    Rather than joining the rest of us, Lester decided to hang out with a bunch of fishers. Don't loving ask me why.  ...what? I seem to remember we left Girion, Jack, Bennett, Lee, Lares, Vatras and a hold full of my skeleton buddies on board! Pirates. Pirates? At this time of year? Situated entirely off the coast of Myrtana? On board our nice ship? Yes. Can I see them? No. Well gently caress, guess it's time to get used to hosing blood out of looted armor again. How about you? Down for another ride? Eh, I thought I was gonna head down south, get some sun, maybe if I get a tan these tattoos won't be as visible and I might be employable.Actually I figure Lester probably stays away from fights against occupying armies because he's considerably smarter than the rest of us.    Seriously, what the gently caress? Any single person we left on board, and most of the skeletons, should've been able to butcher an entire pirate crew by themselves.Sadly, as far as I can tell, Girion, Jack Classic and Bennett have entirely vanished from Gothic 3. I figure what's more likely is that they just realized they were getting into a lovely business and decided to sail off rather than getting involved. Smart play.   The beach is nice, but features little except for some Lurkers, now creepily shiny, which attack me, a hidden chest containing nothing meaningful, and a few dogs. Sadly, they aren't pettable.      Good news, Lester's alive. Bad news, he's smarter than us. Worse news, they came up with a paper-thin excuse to take away all our cool poo poo. Well, probably the only one who knows what's happening is going to be Xardas, I'm going to head out and try to find him, bye now.  I'm going to go poke through their books so I can throw fireballs again, actually hitting orcs by myself feels so undignified. I feel you there, I'm used to having people for that. Skeleton people.  Oh, cool, you psychically intuited where Reddock is? That and I figure you're going to go looking for them, too, and I don't want to see you get mauled in a thicket while I'm not around to pull you out of the fire.    About five seconds out of the gate, Gorn gets into a fight with a couple of Scavengers and it's hilarious that after having hacked his way through like ten orcs, he actually has trouble with these totally normal animals.   His attacks are slow and careful enough that he almost never lands any hits, the only thing that saves him is being an essential NPC that they seem unable to injure.       Welcome to the rebel HQ of eastern Myrtana: a literal dirty hole in the ground.   I'm more of what you'd call a wandering hero type. You know, killing things for money, stealing everything not nailed down. I can see how that would be rewarding. Hey, you feel like killing some animals for us? I've got these boars... Mmmmhm, I'm more about demon lords and orcish legions these days but... what the hell, for old times' sake. Oh, I'm sure you'll still find it interesting. That's ominous.   Dude, what the gently caress? What? I'm trying to warn you about the orcs. No no no, forget about the orcs, what the gently caress are you wearing? ...armor? You look like a giant beetle hosed a space marine and then decided to pop his collar. ...yeah we lost all the stuff that didn't make us look like dorks when the orcs attacked. Anyway, you were saying? Oh, yeah, orc patrols, also they've got human mercenaries working with them, watch out for that, also if you decide to be one of them we'd have to stab you. Noted.Gelford is also a rebel gear trader, so I get a small armor upgrade(despite what we're originally wearing looking armor-ish, at least more so than the ragged shirt we started Gothic 2 in, it's effectively being naked in terms of protection).     The rebels are hanging out in a rickety cave full of mushrooms, it's not very impressive.      The camera's a lot less cooperative in Gothic 3 than in Gothic 2, so only now can I get a decent look at our hero's new garb from the front.  Oh, I'm the local alchemist. Have I told you about how all the runes have stopped working? No, but it's been remarked on. Well, I figure some magic cups will help us learn the ancient magic. Magic cups. Fire Chalices, if you want to be technical. So if I get you ritual sippy cups, you'll help me learn more about fireballs? Even though I'll probably use that knowledge to learn evil skeleton magic instead? Yes. I'll keep that in mind. The dialogue in this image is irrelevant, but it's funny to me how his baggy sleeves just end in a flat brown plane that his hands emerge out of, rather than at least imitating some kind of internal volume.   Marlo here is super irrelevant, he's just yet another merchant NPC, but he specifies that he buys expensive loot and sells it to rich people profiting off the occupation and also that there are bandits around living in caves. Of course there are bandits in caves.    Innos, this place is more of a shithole than the Valley of Mines. Not really feeling good about this rebellion.  ...is that a threat? You can do better. Oh, uh, no, it's just we have an arena down here where we beat the poo poo out of each other because there's nothing better to do, I was wondering if you wanted in. Hmmm, I was thinking of waiting until I have some better gear and can clown on you all in one hit for free XP. Hello beetleman, I met your brother outside. Heard about the arena yet? Like I told your buddy: Not gonna let you pound my face into the dirt for fun. Hm, could you get us some weapons instead, then? Oh, sure, I've got like twenty rusty sw- No no, they gotta be special weapons, neat and packaged in bundles by the orcs after taking them off humans. ...is this just so I can't pawn fifty rusty swords off on you and get the XP right away? ...yes.  Maybe if Rhobar had spent less money on pauldrons and more on swords, he wouldn't have lost his kingdom. Probably correct. Also gently caress you. Anyway, want some work? Please tell me it's not related to your arena. No, I just want you to find us a blacksmith. ...did your old one get killed in the arena? No comment, just find us one so we can arm everyone with something better than sticks.I really have no idea why the continental paladins have so much larger pauldrons than the ones in Khorinis. Maybe it's an evolutionary pressure and they're for mating displays.    It's because of minecrawlers, isn't it? How'd you guess? Because I loving hate minecrawlers and Myrtana seems designed to piss me off. That sounds rough, buddy. Anyway, don't go in here and get yourself killed because then I have to listen to the screaming.   So the rebels clearly don't have their poo poo together in any reasonable way. I think I wanna see the orcs before I pick sides.   Hm, not attacking me on sight. That's a strange experience.  So the orcs just have you sawing wood here? It wouldn't be so bad if I was a woodcutter, but I'm a blacksmith. Hm, if I freed you I could hand you over to the rebels, and they'd be really happy, and you'd be really happy... Oh thank you, stranger, if you fr- Nyehhhh, gonna need to think about it. Later.    The orcs near Cape Dun, the settlement to the south, don't really do a good job of keeping down aggressive wildlife, but as long as you stick to the road, you're safe.   You seem to be doing pretty alright, though. As it goes, I hunt stuff and sell pelts. If you can get me ten wolf pelts, I'll teach you some of it. Hm, since I seem to have mysteriously forgotten how to skin animals, bleed dragons, carve out magical hearts, remove teeth, horns and claws, turn the poisonous stingers of bloodflies into healing drugs, drain the magic meth out of minecrawler mandibles... it would probably be a good idea to relearn some of that.     Gothic NPC's have a bad case of looking rather samefaced, so I wonder if anyone can even tell when I use someone else's face for dialogue portraits for the NPC's who're missing theirs from the wiki. I feel like in most cases, no, unless I point it out. Okay your armor is less stupid than rebel armor, but it looks like you're wearing boobplate without having breasts. Hey, that sort of comment hurts. ...I feel slightly bad now, but only slightly Just go talk to Bufford so he'll give you a quest that'll get you away from me.   Slightly off the road in the thicket near Silas is our first shrine to Beliar, who appears to be symbolized by a giant cactus, or possibly a weird pineapple. Despite us having thrown a wrench into Beliar's world-conquesting plans twice in a row, he'll still offer the same level-up services as Innos except he teaches skeleton magic rather than fire exploding magic.    A few extra pieces of gold, some decent armor, a pair of cool swords, a dozen crossbows, a pharmacy's worth of potions, more magic scrolls than a library and... yeah, let's start with the gold. Feel like catching some slaves for me? What? No! That's hosed up. C'mon, man, don't be a prude. Just a little bit of slavery. Hm, just a little bit? Just a little bit! Tell you what, I'll hold off for now, but I'll let you know how the thread vote goes. Also if you were looking for some cool gear, I caught a paladin the other day and the orcs have his stuff lying around here somewhere. Thanks for the tip. You realize I'm going to find a way to rob your orc buddies of it, right? Eh, they don't pay me enough to care.   It's an option on the table. Alright, well, here's the tutorial: what you gotta know is that orcs are all about cronyism. If you get the ear of the big guy in charge, you can get everything you want. So what you're saying is they're people like us, but green, and with goofy ears. And able to tear off your arms and legs if you call their ears goofy. Well, I'll let you know if I want to sign up. You guys seem pretty chill so far, except for the slavery thing and the stupid armor.   So that's the choice, I guess. Roofs, and beds, and not living next to minecrawlers, and slightly less stupid armor, versus living in a big hole in the ground with idiots and paladins who want me to punch them to pass the time. Sure wish I could make a reasoned decision on my own, but someone's got other ideas...That's right, we've got a VOTE! A: Side with the rebels, they ARE the aggrieved and invaded party, after all, and don't keep slaves. Orcs have been annoying us since Gothic 1. B: Side with the orcs, the rebels are losers and the paladins and the king's authority in general caused us a lot of pain in the rear end in Gothic 2. We don't owe them anything. C: Do a few non-committal quests for either side, like killing boars, that don't kill or piss off anyone on the other side and then make the choice later. Maybe go poke at a few caves.
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Feb 15, 2023 14:53
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C gotta play both sides for that sweet XP before commiting.
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Feb 15, 2023 15:12
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Too early to pick a side so I say c Incidentally I'm not sure you can actually die to the orcs at the start of the game. I'm pretty sure they always just knock you unconcious. I don't know if that was patched in later or always the case. The reason you were knocked down by enemies is because they use like a power swing. You can do one too by just holding down the LMB during fights. You can also thrust if you hold RMB and then click the LMB. Annoyingly being able to knock enemies down is more detrimental than helpful as you can't effectively hit them when they're on the ground and they will get an attack of opportunity as they rise to their feet. This makes the master level melee skills kind of bad too, since they allow you to randomly cause knockdowns sometimes. Sounds good in theory, but terrible in practice for the reasons explained. I swear I still think this is a great game.
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Feb 15, 2023 15:27
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Obviously C, what other choice would an adventurer make?
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Feb 15, 2023 15:33
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C For now at least.
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Feb 15, 2023 15:39
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C is for (more) Content. I've played that first fight enough times trying to get into the game that the Hero starting raised eyebrow is etched into my brain.
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Feb 15, 2023 15:41
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Good lord, the animations in the intro are hilariously stiff at times. Also joining in on the C vote. Might as well schmooze for a while longer.
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Feb 15, 2023 17:34
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C. Adventurer gotta do what they gotta do, maybe we'll find less doofy folks out there.
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Feb 15, 2023 18:37
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Cooked Auto posted:Good lord, the animations in the intro are hilariously stiff at times. It honestly looks worse than the game itself does. Kindof impressive really.
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Feb 15, 2023 18:39
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PurpleXVI posted:C: Do a few non-committal quests for either side, like killing boars, that don't kill or piss off anyone on the other side and then make the choice later. Maybe go poke at a few caves.[/i] Oh, and you know how so far the only thing that people have had to offer you for quests have been 'find this guy' or 'bring me X of <random item>'? Get used to it. I don't think they actually implemented anything more complex than that.
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Feb 15, 2023 18:40
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Gonna vote C for now. Also those are some wild armors.
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Feb 15, 2023 19:01
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I have to admit, these changes in gameplay... don't look so bad? I was expecting much worse.
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Feb 15, 2023 19:50
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C, the intended way to play the game. Which of course the game never actually tells you.
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Feb 15, 2023 20:26
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