Gothic III is probably the best game of the Gothic series. Unfortunately, it's also the buggiest game of the Gothic series. This can mean something of a love - hate relationship. When everything is fine then the game approaches greatness. You have a vast, free-form world to explore, plenty to do and see and a number of quests to participate in for various factions. When it goes wrong, it can leave you gnashing your teeth in frustration, particularly when you find out a bug has rendered the game unfinishable and you have to start again. Save often, and try not to overwrite is necessary advice. The combat is a little unpredictable. When it works, as it does against most humanoid opponents, it is one of the most enjoyable interactive systems in an RPG to date. Unfortunately, because animals cannot be parried you can often find yourself breezing through a combat against an entire orc platoon and struggling to survive against a simple boar. This leads to a difficulty level which unpredictably swings up and down. The community patches resolve a lot of issues and get the game to a reasonably playable state, however quite a few problems still remain. If you can persevere then what you have is a rewarding game of exploration and adventure which will likely keep you occupied for many hours to come.

I gave this game 4 stars, because, although there is excellent open-world rpg gameplay, this game's difficulty, combined with the bugs found in it, present a challenging front. The combat, at least in the early stages, requires a high level of tactical capability, and if you let them get a hit in you will DIE. I have never seen wild boars that molest you with their tusks for 5 seconds straight except in this game. But I digress. This game is an excellent rpg in terms of exploration, storyline, and actual roleplaying. The graphics are generally solid and the varied regions you can explore will keep you coming back for more. Overall, Gothic 3 is an excellent game, despite the difficulty (which can in fact by remedied by changing it to easy in the options menu) and minor graphical bugs. It is an excellent romp for any action-rpg fan and is surprisingly addictive and, less surprisingly, full of replayability as you try different skill and morality paths.

Just to let people know; If you want to play this game, you WILL need community patch 1.70 or newer. It fixes alot of the bugs that are present in the game, and adds new AI content as well. Anyway, I will recommend this game to anyone who likes open-world RPGs like Oblivion. But do not think this game is easy. I played the game on medium difficulty and I never made it past the 2nd village. Because it takes extreme tactical capability in the early stages of the game. And don't even bother with the hard difficulty, unless you know what the hell you are doing. The game has one of the most deep and engaging storylines I have ever seen in a game. And just for this, I recommend you to buy it. The graphics are actually alright. It's not the best, but it doesn't look like crap either, despite it's age. When you play Gothic 3, you should be concerned about the gameplay and not the graphics. So if you're a hardcore graphics enthuiast, this might not be for you. Gameplay reminds you alot of hack'n'slash, but the combat system brings you a way to block incoming attacks, and with the community patch, your opponent will be smart as hell to block your attacks, so you cannot just go blindly spamming the attack button. And also, you do not have god-mode on, so you can take about 3-6 hits depending on the enemy and your class specifications. All in all, I think this game is awesome, but it is for the very diehard RPG fans, that like the old-school way of RPGs. If you like WoW, this might not be for you. If you like Oblivion, it's only the open-world theme that will drag you. If you liked Risen, this will rock your world.

With the latest community patch this is a really good deep action RPG. The world is beautifull and interesting and filled with quests. You can join alot of different parties. Only downside that even with the community patch the game still has some bugs and isnt to stable (and i have a pretty fast PC)

I've been following the Gothic serie since the first one, and i have to say that gothic 3 is one of the best game i've played. Like always, there always bugs, and like the others said in their reviews, the game is very demanding on a graphic point of view because of all the details and the size of the map (which is more than huge). This game is very plesant to play, and you have a huge liberty of actions, just the other Gothics. If you like RPG, it's a must. If you don't, you'll stop playing after a few hours because of all the bugs. Except of the bugs, it's the best RPG i've played.

Warning!!! Do not buy this game if you have onboard integrated graphics no matter how good. I received an Exception Access Violation and I am running Intel 965 chipset which is one of the best onboard graphics cards in my opinion. They should also list this in the requirements.

Initially I refrained from purchasing Gothic 3 because of the myriad technical problems. But when Community Patch 1.7 was made available, that made this game both viable and enjoyable. The cinematics display well-rendered graphics; however, I found myself wishing for a bit more polish with the in-game graphics and animation. Nevertheless, the graphics coding is GPU-specific for nVidia GeForce users, and Gothic 3 has the nVidia Logo prominently displayed during the opening credits, along with nVidia's "TWIMTBP" (The Way It's Meant to Be Played) rating. The fact that the developers of Gothic 3 took the time to crack open the books and write GPU-specific coding speaks volumes about the game and the people behind it. Gothic 3's executable has shown a marked improvement in performance with the issuance of Community Patch 1.7. I put the game to the test, and the program responded flawlessly - nary a CTD to be found. Gothic 3 joins Drakensang: The Dark Eye in the list of RPGs that won't crash a PC running XP SP3. It's also nice to be have selectable Anisopteric Filtering and Anti-aliasing. I like the World Map, but the Quest Log seems to be a bit bland, in my opinion. The Inventory layout is very workable and well thought-out. I was annoyed at having to do extra clicks to access functions such as displaying the screen showing the keyboard assignments: aside from the standard WSAD movement keys, not too many others are where you would expect them to be in a RPG, which means a slightly steeper learning curve for the game. . This game has a few nice touches of realism added-in, such as clicking on a campfire, and you find your character roasting a chunk of meat over the flames. It's the little things like that which can make or break a RPG, and it's a welcome change to see these touches of creativity within the genre. Gothic 3 is a good deal overall - well worth your time, effort, and your cash.

you probably already know whether or not you love gothic iii, so this isn't a review per-se. i'd just like to let gamersgate members know that this version *is* compatible with the newest (huge, massive and wonderful) 1.70 version of the community patch. if you are a first time buyer of the gothic series, or just haven't played gothic iii due to its stability issues, there really isn't a better time to try it out - the 1.70 version of the patch is really very good.