http://www.rpgdot.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2475568
"It's hard not to feel a little sorry for the creators of the Gothic series. Few gamers are aware that a surprising amount of what made Bethesda's Oblivion so great in early 2006 - loads of voiced dialog, elements of its combat system, and its life-like AI routines that allowed NPCs to go about their daily business in a lifelike way - had already been done brilliantly in Gothic 2 back in 2003. Clunky controls and an unwieldy UI led to relatively weak sales of G2 in the US, so there will be plenty of gamers coming to Gothic 3 this fall thinking it's merely an Oblivion knock-off. Oh, how wrong they'll be. In fact, Gothic 3 is shaping up to be the Oblivion many of us wish we'd gotten.
G3 is a first/third-person RPG set in a fantastical open-ended land filled with over 50 unique monsters, 50 spells, countless weapons, armor, loot, and quests. Its class-free character development system lets you train your character in a wide variety of physical combat disciplines and magical powers. Sounds familiar, right? But unlike most RPGs, G3 places you in a land after it has suffered a major defeat, one that has no relation to anything you did in earlier chapters. Orcs have invaded the world and made mankind their slaves, and you're one of only a handful of free humans remaining. It's up to you to decide if you want to go out of your way to save your fellow humans or your own hide.
What I found most interesting and surprisingly invigorating as I played an early build of G3 is the absence of a sense of impending doom. The worst, it seems, is over, and rather than running around in a panic, closing "dimensional gates," I felt like a real adventurer in a real medieval land, taking missions at my own pace without feeling like I was being forced down a path.
That's not to say that the world was sitting around waiting for me. In stark contrast to Oblivion, if you don't finish many of the quests in G3 within a certain period of time, events will play out on their own. For example, you may be asked to help the humans storm a castle that has been overrun by orcs. You can go along on the raid with your AI buddies and help turn the tide, but if you don't, and you go to that castle later, you may find that the battle has already happened and that either the humans or the orcs have won.
Graphically, G3 is up there with Oblivion - a little worse in places (e.g., low-res ground textures), but a little better in others (e.g., draw distance) - and the world has a grittier, dirtier, more lived-in feel. One aspect where it has Oblivion beat hands-down is load times: Once G3 starts up, there are none - the world streams in seamlessly.
As someone who loved Oblivion and appreciated its huge variety of voiced dialog, even I must admit that the game's limited number of voice actors made NPCs seem generic, but Piranha assured me that G3's 20+ hours of voice dialog are being recorded by a whopping 25 actors, hopefully ensuring that the game's hundreds of unique-looking NPCs also have distinct personalities.
With its controls and UI finally up to modern standards and the series' revolutionary features blinged out like never before, Gothic 3 is poised to give ravenous RPG fans their largest, juiciest meal since Bethesda fed them at the start of the year." - Greg Vederman
