Quests in Gothic and Gothic 2 were never that ground-breaking, in the grand scheme of RPGs, but they at least gave you a reason to care about them, or a plausible reason within the context of the world for why you would be doing those things. There are no meaningful decisions to make, either - nearly every quest follows an entirely straightforward, linear progression from beginning to end with completely mindless gameplay amounting to nothing more than cliche errand boy fetch quests. There's no interesting story behind these quests, no narrative or worldly context for them, and no reason to care except to satisfy an obsessive compulsion for completionism. Things like "kill 5 wild boars" or "collect 10 healing plants" or "escort so-and-so to such-a-place" - pointless objectives for random people you've only just met, who serve no purpose in the story or even in the world itself except to hand out busy work to the player, who'll become completely obsolete once the quest is complete.
Virtually every town is filled to the brim with simplistic MMO-style quests, which consist entirely of tedious objectives meant to give you a repetitive bunch of tasks to do so that you can grind experience and faction reputation, and so the back of the box can proudly say that it has "over 500 quests" to complete. Exploring the world, therefore, feels like you're categorically checking off boxes on a list instead of actually exploring the world, and it makes the world feel incredibly fleeting because you only ever really see a place once, and then move on to the next area once you've completed the previous one. Once you "complete" an area, it may as well cease to exist, and most of the towns/areas only exist in the first place to pad the game with repetitive stat-grinding as you complete mundane tasks for a minuscule amount of faction reputation. Each town is pretty much self-contained (sometimes an orc-controlled town is tied to a nearby rebel-controlled outpost), meaning what you do in one town won't affect anything in another town (except to block quests in the other, opposite town/outpost, if you take too strong of a side in the orc/rebel conflict, say, by liberating a town and killing all of the orcs within it). What's even worse is that the world is designed to be done in sequence, going from one town to the next, completing each one as you move across the map with no real need to return to previous areas. Even though it was made by the same developer, Piranha Bytes, Gothic 3 feels like a different game by a different group of people who had only a vague understanding of what the Gothic games were, and who were told to make everything "bigger and more epic" in order to compete with the likes of Morrowind and Oblivion.
Gothic 3 world map series#
I've barely mentioned it in any of my Gothic articles because I don't even like to consider it part of the series it doesn't connect to Gothic 2 very well, and the whole gameplay formula is a radical departure from what made Gothic and Gothic 2 so great.
And yet I harbor virtually no love for Gothic 3. Gothic and Gothic 2 are two of my favorite games of all time, being two of the games that had the most influence on my young and developing mind when I first played them in the early 2000s. See the updated post here for the updated version.
Gothic 3 world map full#
Note: this article has since been updated with extra sections, more elaborations, and a full video.