From its presentation and quest structure – and even control scheme or those incredibly overpowered packs of wild beasts - the strangest thing about Gothic 3 is that it plays and feels like a cross-developed game. It doesn’t reach Invisible War levels of consolitis, but definitely running into many of the same pitfalls. For all of the comparisons to Oblivion, the most valid is the strange false sense of being hemmed in by both interface and interaction.

Yet the Gothic series is a PC exclusive. There isn’t even any official support for joysticks, though the behind-the-head third-person perspective cries out for a console controller and USB interface to make things a little easier when running about the landscape of Myrtana. It suffers from the same “drives like a tank” feeling of the Knights of the Old Republic games, but with the added weight of Action-RPG controls. This stiffness also makes the first few hours of the game incredibly frustrating as one works out the quirks and limitations of combat.

Unfortunately, due to the amount of wildlife and heavy emphasis on group fighting throughout the game, the controls continue to plague one’s experience. For a game that presents you with a large selection of melee and ranged weapons (magic doesn’t really become powerful until you’ve gained a few levels with old-fashioned blunt force trauma) there’s the inescapable feeling of being forced back into a bow-bow-block-strike-block routine during most encounters; the additional headache of wolf attacks that seemingly can’t be blocked constantly knocking your character down, especially during the early stages of exploration. While hardcore fans suffer (often loudly) at every tweaked interface or “dumbed-down” approach to statistics and tactics that hits a popular PC franchise, this is one game where taking a cue from the “stupid” world of third-person 3D console games could have made a world of difference.

You play the part of a nameless hero (whose official name is “The Nameless Hero”) who finds his goateed self stuck in the middle of a post-bellum kafuffle. Orcs have taken over key cities from the human government and have the rebels on the run, giving the player a setup for “choosing their fate.” Like every game that promises the chance to “choose your fate,” there are actually very few choices to be made. Quests can be done for the occupying Orcs or the rebelling human factions, depending on your reputation with each group. It’s entirely possible, if somewhat tricky, to play a large amount of quests from each side, up to a certain point in the game, without unduly angering either faction. Don’t expect your two-faced behavior to elicit any additional responses beyond your current reputation, though you also can’t go running around murdering citizens willy-nilly without some violent comeuppance. The prize for continued goodwill comes in the form of missions and rewards (but not too many escort missions, thankfully), and after a while it begins to feel like a treadmill due to the lack of consequence in many cases.

While there are no overt limitations on class and abilities in Gothic 3 – hunters who dabble in magic or mages with big swords are both possible – there is a catch; just like with every other “choice” in the game there’s not a lot of room for improvisation. Spreading around skills too thinly leaves you with a Jack-of-jack-squat, a useless dilettante whose lack of dedication makes moving forward painful. But even despite careful planning, building a powerful magic-user is the hardest path one can pick; Gothic 3 is largely a tank’s world (with a hint of magic). In all fairness, this imbalance issue affects even the most legendary entries in the RPG world, but like Oblivion, when a game is sold on the premise of “choice” it seems like a case of deliberate cruelty to so narrowly force a choice on the player.

One overwhelming positive stroke is the actual game world. It is a lush and enjoyable landscape to run about, with just enough glossy shine to give it that “next-gen” gleam without overdoing it. Waterfalls trickle and the forests are dense and comfortable. Myrtana is a beautiful place to see and to be - at least until nature decides to eat you.  More than the inhabitants, and a lot more than the wildlife, the world of Gothic 3 is the most compelling element in the game. The sound design is quite crisp and notably more polished than the voice acting and more interesting than the overload of heroic string passages that dominate the soundtrack. This combination of sound and vision helps the world come alive in a way that regrettably few game elements do; even rush of liberating a town from Orc control doesn’t have the same engagement as just wandering around under the stars.

One key marker of this age of gaming is the ubiquity of voice acting in a text-heavy genre, having moved from novelty 15 years ago to what has become the laziest part of the industry’s “next-gen” package. Gothic 3 has its share of terrible or out of place vocal work, often lost somewhere between “Lord British and his +3 Cape of Melodrama” and “Angry Foamcore-and-Rubber TV Beastman.” Random merchants and clerks have about the same amount of affection for your character as some of your long-time companions do. (Though it might help if they had a name by which to call you.) There are a few bright spots, and it’s hard not to feel badly for the occupying Orcs, with their asthmatic wheeze and relatively laissez-faire approach to occupational governance, in spite of their lackluster characterization.

On a final note, while the latest patch seems to have alleviated a great deal of the crash-to-desktop failures, judging from the official forums there are still a number of people suffering from balance issues, disruptive bugs, quests that can’t be finished and game-crippling technical issues. As with most PC titles, one should be prepared to spend some time tweaking settings and making small changes to.ini files to optimize the experience. Unfortunately, one should also be prepared to have both of these steps not pay off. Having over 1GB of system RAM appears to help, as does having an Nvidia GPU, but neither is a substitute for what appears to be blind luck.

And because the Gothic series lacks the large and diverse modification-building community, there’s less of a chance that some glaring gameplay holes will be fixed anytime soon; it seems much less likely that fans will see the plethora of cosmetic overhauls and seemingly endless tweaks that continually build (and complete) The Elder Scrolls games.

But for starters, a patch to remove all pack wildlife from the game would be nice.

Overall: 6/10