I've been enjoying playing Gothic 3 until late Friday when a strange problem occurred. The first thing I noticed was the PC and NPC's were moving in slow motion, about 1/3rd speed. As I had the console enabled, I pressed F7 thinking I might have hit it by accident. That only slowed it down more. The more serious problem, I didn't notice at first, was that game time had stopped. For example, the game time display on the Missions page never changed. An unfortunate effect of this was fatigue, which normally slowly regenerates, didn't. So, if you ran your endurance/fatigue down by running or fighting, it remained at zero and never recovered. This was on a 32-bit Win XP system.

I transferred one of my save games to my Win 7 64-bit laptop and it worked fine. So the problem was not with the save game. I uninstalled the game and reinstalled it and, surprisingly, the problem persisted. I did a system restore, but Gothic3 crashed when I tried to run it. I uninstalled it, then reinstalled it after the system restore and all was fine.

I write this so if you encounter this problem you won't spend hours trying to fix it like I did. If it happens: uninstall Gothic 3, but keep the saved games. Do a system restore, then reinstall Gothic 3 and you should be good to go.

I actually ran into something similar on my own recent playthrough. When I started a new game everything was moving extremely slowly (maybe 25% of the speed it should). Made fighting quite easy, but not exactly how I wanted to play the whole game (it's quite long enough as it is, thank you very much). Tried the usual tricks (compatibility modes, core affinity, etc), with no luck. Then tried simply restarting my system, and after that the game worked just as it should, no problems at all. Not sure what kicked off the initial problem, but it's not the first time I've seen some games behave oddly just to have a restart fix the problem.

Bottom line- before going through the hassle of a system restore or the like, try running the game after a clean boot with nothing else running (systems that have been running for extended periods somethings just have some wonky behavior).

DarrkPhoenix, you make a good point. That was one of the first things I tried. Although it didn't work in my particular case, a clean re-boot often does fix things. If you enable the console in Gothic 3, pressing F7 slows things down (about 4X) and pressing it again returns speed to normal.

Interesting. It also seems like a fairly rare bug (or two different rare bugs), as I'd also searched around quite a bit at the time to see if it was a known issue, and didn't turn up any mention of it at the time (in fact most of my searches just turned up the fact that you could slow things down with the console, as you just mentioned).