Anyone else try the Gothic 4 demo? I quite liked it. Dialogue is almost depressingly simple but I am hoping that is an early game thing and not indicitive of the whole experience. Even if it is though I feel the combat and world are well worth exploring. The aliasing is a killer though, I hope I can force AA on the main game when it releases.

I like how you can customize how many aids you get... turn off the mini-map, quest markers and even anything else you want and play it like the old Gothic games. EXCELLENT. If only Oblivion and Fallout 3 had these options pre-mods.

Also, I found it amusing that the game has an "american or english" setting, and unlike the dialogue changes I thought at first it would be it's actually about making the world look vibrant or muted...

really? That's hilarious :D

I'm playing Gothic 1 for the first time now, and have 2 ready to play. There's so much atmosphere in these games.
I heard 3 was worse?
Anyway, good to hear you can disable things like the mini map, because the lack of those things actually really adds to the experience in Gothic 1..

From a technical perspective at release I would call it broken... fan patches have fixed all that up though to the point I would call it a great game now. Most people try and move on though and will sadly never experience it as it should be.

ok, that's good to know. Thanks!

Gothic 3 was prematurely released because Jowood (the publisher) hat strong financial problems at that time.
In it's vanilla state it's not even a beta... I too heared a lot positive feedback from the Gothic 3 fanpatches though. But haven't tried them out so far, so I can't comment them first hand.

The catch with Gothic 4 is: it's not programmed by the original Team, Jowood just got hold of the naming rights by a ... let's say "clever formulated contract" with the Gothic Programming Team (that Team also invented the Gothic 1-3 setting by themselfes).

There is a new game already out - from the original Team - which feels very much like Gothic.
It's called "RISEN".;)

You might like it a lot if you liked the first two :)

Gothic 1 did a really wonderful job of creating a fantasy world. I was sitting in front of my computer, having a printed map on my desk and my friend was watching my play, screaming constantly things like "punch him, punch him". It was so full of atmosphere. Often I would walk into an area where animals too powerful for my level were situated and just run and run and run and then stop and look back.

This was before monsters started levelling up with the hero.

Gothic 2 was actually longer, a bigger world, but already with more repetitive tasks, with an open ending.

Gothic 3 had nice graphics and a huge world. And it was completely unfinished and unbalanced. The fighting system was completely buggy and resulted in clicking orgies. Death was the common result of fighting wild hogs and still is.

The final fan patch is out since end of last year and its regarded as playable. See this site for download: http://www.g3cpt.eu/ I played with the fan patch and had some fun, except for the fights which are still kind of unpreditable.

There is an add-on to Gothic 3, "Forsaken Gods". Don't buy it, its really bad.

The guys who made Gothic 1-3 (piranha bytes) then produced Risen, which was good average as far as I remember. However Gothic 4 is done by somebody else.

So jugding from the past, Gothic 4 can be really good, but maybe waiting for some reviews.

Btw, thanks for pointing out that there is a demo. :) I might want to try it out.

Hah that is amazing.

Publishers very often retain the IP rights of a series and this sort of thing is not uncommon. I find it hard to get mad about it since it is so common, and anyone who cares knows about it.

Too much games to try out a demo, but if it's just as good as Risen I will be satisfied.

I doubt they tried the highest difficulty settings because it's locked...

Anyway the game is definitely streamlined on roughly the same level as Oblivion. Oblivion was a massive hit though, so I don't think this is a bad thing sales-wise or even customer pleasing-wise.

The highest difficulty available was far too easy though. It didn't actually make the game any harder than medium. So I doubt that the 'Gothic' difficulty will make it any harder. I also find it very strange that they didn't make it available as that is my main concern from playing the demo. It was far, far too easy.

DON'T judge by reading ANY Gothic 4 forums. A lot the fans from the original series who disliked Gothic 3 (not just for the bugs, the game itself) went the "self-proclaimed keeper of everything Gothic" way. Especially on german boards you can't find any news about JoWood without some of those dropping in, bashing them.

And yes, the same guys just LOVED Risen (coming from Piranha Bytes, the actual programmers), dismissing any criticism about dumb quest, the boring and repetitive combat system or being to console friendly.

There are too few quests to judge whether they're dumb or not, but the dialogues and voices are terrible.

The witch.
Oh God, the witch.
I hope she's not a big part of the game.