Older RPG players will remember that about 10 years ago buying a cRPG meant getting a box filled with goodies. Besides getting the game and a 10lb manual (not exaggerating by much here as some manuals had over 300 pages) the buyer often received items like cloth maps and figurines. With the years and the switch to DVD box sizes such extras became sparse and today getting anything more than a 10 page manual is rare.

For people who liked all those maps and lore books that were also a common extra item this would be a sad time if it weren’t for collector’s editions (CE) of games. These editions usually deliver similar items as the games of the past. When opening a CE box there is an added thrill of laying eyes on cool collectables that users who purchase the regular version don’t get.

One of the selling points of Oblivion was that all of the NPCs had advanced AI managing their daily schedules. Gothic games had this feature since the get-go and the NPCs in Gothic 3 are again surprisingly life-like. They still do stupid things like watch you steal something and just ignore the vile deed, but for the most part they have no problems acting out their roles.

Quests were always one of the strong points of the Gothic series. The quests found in this game follow that tradition and offer a lot of challenge and fun. They range from the classical escort and delivery quests over more uncommon spy hunting escapades to huge battles in which you try to take over a city or destroy a rebel camp. Yes, you heard me correctly – there are two major factions found in the game, namely the orcs and the human rebels. Later on you encounter more groups you can work for and doing quests for any of them doesn’t lock you to that particular group. You can decide to help the rebels in conquering one of the cities and than turn sides in the next city and wipe out a rebel hideout found somewhere near. Because of this the player can go through the game several times without experiencing all the possible outcomes and the end of the game also changes depending on the players actions throughout the adventure.

All of this artistic beauty in the form of amazing music and eye-dropping graphics has its dark side as well. As mentioned before the performance of the game is not exactly stellar. On my machine which consists of a dual-core 4600+ Athlon, 2 gigs of dual-channel RAM and a 512mb Radeon X1800XT the game performed quite well, but nowhere near what would be expected on such a machine. The constant stuttering due to the game accessing the hard drive is one thing, but having the game run out of memory when saving (thus corrupting the save game) on a machine with 2 gigs of memory shows that the game is actually far from finished. Checking around the internet also reveals that this save game corrupting issue is very common and that even people with out of this world machines are experiencing it.

As if the fairly common memory related crashes weren’t enough the game is full of annoying bugs and glitches. One of the most annoying ones is the bugged up combat system where it is possible to kill even the most tough enemies just by using button-mashing techniques. But even the most experienced fighter like the player doesn’t stand a chance against the wild animals (especially the wild boars) which are capable of wiping out entire towns and than beating the crap out of the player character for desert.

From the looks of it, it will take Piranha Bytes (the game developers) quite a bit of work to get this game to a state expected of a finished title. Some people are saying that the European market is playing a beta version of the game, and judging from my 30 or so hours with the game they are absolutely correct.