My my… Gothic 3 is turning out better than I had hoped! The best description I can give it is – imagine Oblivion, but hardware graphic requirements aren’t as high. You can make do with even a GeForce FX5700 series cards and it’ll still look pretty darn good!
With Oblivion, I play in first person mode exclusively. With Gothic 3, I play in 3rd person view. It’s just so satisfying to see your character on the screen swinging away with his sword and defeating his enemies. Here’s another thing about Gothic 3 – key NPCs do NOT die when you “defeat” them. They are merely knocked unconscious, and will get up after a little while. You can of course loot them while they are unconscious, so that when they wake up, you’re holding their weapons MUAHAHHAHAH!
But, for the more bloodthirsty among you, when your opponent is knocked out on the ground, you CAN execute a “killing blow” and take his life. The thing is, this seems to work only for NPCs with names, not those generic “Orc” or “Scout” NPCs.
The best tip I can give you in the early game is this – quick jabs with the swords work very well. They tend to keep the enemy reeling backwards and thus, they don’t have the chance to counterattack you. I learnt this very painful lesson after numerous reloads on a particularly difficult section of the map, where I had to fight seemingly countless bandits. Also, tricks you learn in an MMORPG work here too – early on you get a “henchman”. Use him as a tank. He doesn’t seem to get hit as often as you do, even though he’s wearing the same armour and using the same equipment as you. What I do is I tend to stand back away from the action and shoot arrows at the enemies 🙂
Also, “pulling” works too… and not a hard pull.. do a soft one, ie, walk into their detection range and turn back and run like mad when they are coming for you. As long as you don’t attack, your henchie won’t too, and you can lead a few enemies at a time off to a quiet corner and kill them, separate from the rest of the main bunch without aggroing them. Doing hard pulls like shooting an arrow at one of them will aggro the whole bunch and they will ALL come for you! Not only that, your henchie is dumb enough to actually run headlog into the thick of it and die.
Magic in this game is pretty different from other games. Even levelling up is different too… you get skill points, but you don’t assign them on a character sheet like other RPGs. You really need to visit “trainers” who will teach you stuff, and they usually ask for both your skill points AND your money to teach you stuff.
Naturally, in the earlier parts of the game, you are downright poor – you are so poor, you need to kill Wild Boars for food! A good alchemical knowledge to have is how to make healing potions – each healing potion costs an average of 250 gold for my current character (that’s cos he sucks at haggling and I have no money to train him in this particular art, although I have already found a couple of teachers for this). By knowing how to brew your potions, you literally save a lot of money! Herbs and plants are available everywhere in the game world…you just have to pick the right plants, have the right recipes, and head on to an alchemical workbench to make your potions.
As usual, my first run through in any RPG is a melee fighter type of character. And lucky too, because in the beginning of the game I don’t see how a player who intends to play as a mage can survive long enough to actually find the required shrines to learn magic! Wild animals will take you down pretty dang fast, and in this game, you are a sword-wielding mage (because you start off with a pretty special sword – one with an Orc Slayer enchantment on it)!
The most glaring thing “missing” from the game is a “vicinity map”. The only map you have is one of the whole world. You don’t have a map of the current city so you know where you are. I was literally stumbling around lost in every city, town and village I came to, cos I have NO IDEA where the various NPCs I need to talk to are. I spend a lot of time wandering even a tiny village just to locate a particular NPC.
Quest Journal needs a lot more work, in my opinion. Right now, it just lists a heading, like “Bring food to Jim” and below it, it just shows the entire conversation you have had with Jim. It is unlike other RPGs where you get “I need to go to this place and locate some deer, kill them and bring the meat back to Jim” kind of entry into your Quest Journal. Or perhaps I just need to get used to it, I dunno.
Oh well, enough rambling… time to get back into Gothic 3! I can’t wait to see what else is in store!
