There is clearly a good game in here, but it's well hidden behind a ton of bugs, crashes and -horrible- performance. I haven't tried the game after upgrading from 1gig of ram to 2gigs, but with 1 gig and a GeForce 7800GTX it performs like shit even on medium settings. I haven't installed the last patch, but at this point, I'm fed up with the game. Finish your products before you release them or face the wrathe of the consumers!

The first time I played this game, I got through the (fairly long) opening sequence and the game crashed. I reloaded the autosave. I got through the first battle and quicksaved. The game crashed. I reloaded, got through the battle again, quicksaved, left the first village, and was promptly killed by a boar which somehow has the ability to attack about 90 times per second, knocking the nameless hero over every time, such that there is no way to ever kill it.

At this point, I stopped playing.

Three months on, and I thought, "What the hell?", downloaded the latest patch and started playing.

What a difference.

The game ran smoothly and looked good (XP3800+ running at 2.8ghz, 2Gb dual-channel, low-latency ram, 7800GT). I think it crashed maybe four times in the 80-something hours of gameplay that I put into it, which I personally find quite good (not acceptable; no level of crashing is acceptable. However, I only complain if a game crashes more than once every 6-8 hours). There were issues with memory leaks where after 5-6 hours of playing slowdown started to become noticeable, but really, after 5-6 hours I'm pretty sure that the average person should have got up from the computer to do things that involve real life.

Moving on to the game.

Exploration in Gothic 3 was everything that Oblivion should have been. The world is *open*. It's absolutely frickin' huge. And it has one thing that Oblivion lacked: Diversity. At a very basic level, the north of the map is snowy, arctic tundra, the south is desert, and the bits in between are temperate regions. But each of these is then split into other bits, with mountainous regions, plains, forests, oases, caves and crags that make the "mountain, snow, swamp, different colours of grass, slightly different trees" diversity of Oblivion look silly. It feels like a world instead of a game.

The quests are generally quite well thought out, fairly easy to follow affairs. The main storyline quest is very cleverly implemented, such that actions that you take towards the beginning influence the way that it plays out (kill a certain person? No problem; their quest-arc is removed and worked around). It's also very heavily dependent on which side the player chooses to fight for: Orcs or Humans. I've only played through the game on the Human side, but have started a save on the Orc side to see how it pans out, and so far it's really quite engaging.

The game is fairly well balanced at the beginning of the game when your character is weak, and you'll have genuine difficulty fighting off hordes of Orcs (which is how it should be). However, once you level past L15 or so, it all changes and suddenly the game becomes far too easy - killing a group of 15-20 orcs without taking more than a token amount of damage becomes very possible.

The combat system is far too simple, consisting of buttons for fast attack, normal attack and block. Holding the normal attack button produces a power-attack, which is normally too slow to really be worth it. It's quite possible to kill everything in the game by spamming fast-attack and letting them be stunned.

The levelup system is also very...unstreamlined, I suppose. Instead of having a "click a button, gain a power" system, the game designers went for more realism. To learn a skill (or up stats), you either pray to a god at a shrine, or find someone to teach you. This is a really great way of dealing with those super-rare, super-powerful awesome abilities, because there'll be only one person in the game who can teach it to you (and, since everyone in the game can die, quest-related or not, if they die, you can't get the skill. Ever). However, it makes levelling up stats very tedious when you have to go through the same dialogue with a shrine a few times. The game gives options to up stats in increments of 1, 2 or 5, but if you've accumulated 20LP, it can still take 4 dialogue sequences to get rid of them all.

On the whole, a very engaging game with a few noticeable oversights and a poor combat system. If you can overlook them though, it's a real gem, especially since it lacked any real hype.