Game News Everything you've ever wanted to know about Gothic 3

[Gambler]

PB does not do "template" quests.

Give food to all the apprentices? Sweep the floors? Kill an ork? Find a herb? Maybe not template, but they do generic quests sometimes.

 

[Direwolf]

550 is too big of a number to be good. No way any team can handle creating 550 individual meaningful quests for any game. MMORPGs can pull that many quests off only because all of them are based on 10-20 different templates. So we must presume that PB are either full of crap regarding the number of quests, or there are only 25-50 hand-crafted quests and the rest are template based ones.

Naah. PB does not do "template" quests. My guess is that they when they give the number "550" it really means 550 quest operations. Each quest is broken up into perhaps 1 or more "mini-quests" and they are actually adding up the mini-quests to inflate the actual quest numbers for marketing purposes.

That was another option I was going to mention, but I forgot all about it by the time I actually started posting.

 

[Elwro]

PB does not do "template" quests.

Give food to all the apprentices? Sweep the floors? Kill an ork? Find a herb? Maybe not template, but they do generic quests sometimes.

Yeah, but for example it's not "Kill an ork", but "bring me a proof that you've killed an ork". If you explore a bit you can do the quest not even coming close to an ork. It's one of the zillion small things in the game that made it so fun for me.

 

[HardCode]

PB does not do "template" quests.

Give food to all the apprentices? Sweep the floors? Kill an ork? Find a herb? Maybe not template, but they do generic quests sometimes.

Yeah, but for example it's not "Kill an ork", but "bring me a proof that you've killed an ork". If you explore a bit you can do the quest not even coming close to an ork. It's one of the zillion small things in the game that made it so fun for me.

Here, here! Multiple ways to solve a quest. I am look forward to G3 a lot.

As far as the voice acting, I've only played a bit of NotR, but the voice quality was fantastic. I was impressed even because I already knew this was a localization (USA version).

 

[suibhne]

I'll keep saying it till I'm blue in the face - Diego v2.0 sucked. We desperately need a rollback to Diego v1.0. :D

With a few exceptions, I thought the VO was fine in both games. If this is someone's idea of "cringe-worthy", they'd probably have a massive aneurysm playing games with really bad VO.

 

[Lord Chambers]

Can I get an example of how the voice acting is terrible in Gothic 2? I'm currently playing through Night of the Raven and am impressed by how good the voice acting is, considering it's a German game.

The ONLY issue I've noticed is that sometimes the subtitles don't match the speech, such as seeing "pub" and hearing "tavern." That is not even worth mentioning though.

 

[Surgey]

And, if the voice acting sucks like the first two games, they can take those 550 quests and reinvest the money into better production values.

Hoy? Which were the badly voiced characters in either G1 or G2? And did any of them regularly change voices mid-speech?

The English Gothics may not have featured the Royal Shakespeare Company, but to say they were deal-breakingly badly voice-acted, and that money should be put into voice acting at the expense of content is either baiting or some fantastic retarditude.

I don't mind the voices being a little different among different questions and stuff, but what I don't want to see is "random" broken conversations among other people.

Nice Person:"Hi there!"
Mean Person:"Go away!"
Nice Person:"Fine then!"
Mean Person (oblivious to his own earlier snap): "So I hear the Fighter's Guild is recruiting!"
Nice Person:"If you're good with a sword you can join them!"
Mean Person:"Leave me alone!"
Nice Person:"Have you heard anything about the other provinces?"
Mean Person: "Nothing I'd like to talk about."

 

[Mr. Teatime]

I tend to feel that if games can't get random NPC conversations right then just leave them out until developers can work out how to do it. Otherwise you get stuff like Oblivion's conversations, and Gothic 1 and 2s which served only as comic relief really.

 

[Elwro]

I think that in the Polish version of G2 the translators strived to make the random conversation bits as vague as possible, and the effect is passable. A crowded market feels like a crowded market and that's what counts.

 

[Claw]

They are meant to be vague, and only snippets, not whole conversations.
I thought it worked pretty well, although sometimes you hear a voice speak several lines at once, which hurts the effect. It seemed worse in Gothic2.
I hope they made some improvements on that.

By damage, (and ignoring Beliar's Claw, which also isn't forged)

1. Berserker Axe (not forged at all)
2. Dragon Slicer (not forged at all) (Note, due to better reach, Dragon Slicer is better even though it does slightly less damage)
3. Upgraded Holy Sword (forged by Harad and then blessed twice, you don't do any forging)
4. Ore blade (bennet teaches you how to forge it)

In straight G2, the best three were (holy sword, ore blade, dragon slicer, so one of the top three was)

Where do you get your numbers? The Great Ore-Dragonslayer (or whatever the English name is) is the third best weapon in terms of damage, and rivals the Dragon Slicer due to its higher range.
In original G2, two of the three best weapons were forged ore weapons, with the Dragon Slicer far behind.

It is however unfortunate that only mercs get to make the really good ore swords, and that normal weapons are so easy to come by.

 

[Crichton]

Where do you get your numbers? The Great Ore-Dragonslayer (or whatever the English name is) is the third best weapon in terms of damage, and rivals the Dragon Slicer due to its higher range.
In original G2, two of the three best weapons were forged ore weapons, with the Dragon Slicer far behind.

I stand corrected about the best merc blade, I thought it was just a little worse than the best pal blade, but it's actually better and the 2nd string ore blade is actually better than the dragon slicer in vanilla G2. (I only play archers as mercs so I've never forged an ore blade)

So the actual order is
Berserker's axe
Dragon Slicer
merc's ore blade (Large Ore Dragon Slayer)
Holy sword (Holy Executioner)

So 1 of the top 3, not 1 of the top 4 is forged.

 

[merry andrew]

But how can the designers working on generating quests take away time from whoever is in charge of sitting with the voice actors? That's like saying the textures sucked because the QA people spent too much time looking for bugs.

 

[Atrokkus]

I played Gothic 1 with English VO and Gothic 2+NoTR with German. Well, I can say that German is better (as all original VOs are, generally). In retrospect, I found Protagonist's voice worse in English VO than in German.

Oh and the seekers sound positively bad-ass in German.

my only gripe with Gothic VO in general is that some voices are just way too much alike -- much due to the fact that several actors voiced multiple characters

 

[The_Pope]

Give food to all the apprentices? Sweep the floors? Kill an ork? Find a herb? Maybe not template, but they do generic quests sometimes.

None of those are generic. Most of them don't involve killing anything, and are thus not epic enough to be in an RPG. As for just the orc, a generic quest would be kill 70,000 orcs. Killing just one is quite original.

 

[Gorath]

But how can the designers working on generating quests take away time from whoever is in charge of sitting with the voice actors? That's like saying the textures sucked because the QA people spent too much time looking for bugs.

Generally speaking seemingly unrelated parts of a project can get in each other´s way if you have to outsource several tasks and the money is limited. To follow your example: the core team is busy. Management has 2500$ to spend. What do you buy, a man month of QA or a certain number of better textures to replace the mediocre ones currently used? (Answer: 10 QA man months in Romania )



I wouldn´t worry about the quest quality too much. PB has always been one of the better developers when it came to quests. I´ll be happy if the quests hold G2´s standard.
UPS quests, etc. are unavoidable. What makes the difference is the story behind them. 1) A farmer needs you to get is valuable sword out the huge dungeon downstairs. You get it for him and he rewards you with - the sword and furtheron ignores you. As seen in Dungeon Siege. It obviously sucks.
2) Guild leader needs his sword back, he knows where the thieves hide. This sword is the symbol for his power, it´s unthinkable the guild leader goes to the meeting tomorrow without it. You get it and receive something valuable, but not the sword. Now this guild likes you. Similar quest, much better.

 

[Twinfalls]

Just an opinion, dude - you are retarded.

Youre acting like the Oblivion kiddies on the ESF forums. Get overt yourself and your precious Gothic 3.
Im looking forward to it myself, but thats no reason to react on every critique like a 12 year old ESF regular when someone says something bad about his holy grail.

Context, motherfucker. Ohnoez! I made a jibe specific to Teatime getting all hippie with what was a little de-rigeur Codex comment. Moderator! Someone get Summer over here!!!

I actually agree with the Teat-man about many Euro games suffering due to bad VA. Gothic just isn't an example of this.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

Just an opinion, dude - you are retarded.

Youre acting like the Oblivion kiddies on the ESF forums. Get overt yourself and your precious Gothic 3.
Im looking forward to it myself, but thats no reason to react on every critique like a 12 year old ESF regular when someone says something bad about his holy grail.

Context, motherfucker. Ohnoez! I made a jibe specific to Teatime getting all hippie with what was a little de-rigeur Codex comment. Moderator! Someone get Summer over here!!!

I actually agree with the Teat-man about many Euro games suffering due to bad VA. Gothic just isn't an example of this.

Who cried for a moderator bitch?

I dont care for the fucking context, I'm just seeing that people like you turn the Codex from the nice place I knew where every fucking game was bashed and eyed criticly until it had proven its worth into a retarded fanboy hole where retards like you can do pre-release cocksucking.

 

[Twinfalls]

where retards like you can do pre-release cocksucking.

We were discussing Gothic 1 and 2, not Gothic 3:

And, if the voice acting sucks like the first two games

Hoy? Which were the badly voiced characters in either G1 or G2? And did any of them regularly change voices mid-speech?

The English Gothics may not have featured the Royal Shakespeare Company, but to say they were deal-breakingly badly voice-acted, and that money should be put into voice acting at the expense of content is either baiting or some fantastic retarditude.

If you're going to wade into others' arguments, you really ought to actually fucking read them first.

So who's the retard?

 

[[Jez]]

[pre-release cocksucking]WOW 550! This is gonna be the best game evar!![/pre-release cocksucking]
I've been looking forward to this game too much to be impressed by numbers I just want it now

 

[Seboss]

And, if the voice acting sucks like the first two games, they can take those 550 quests and reinvest the money into better production values.

Hoy? Which were the badly voiced characters in either G1 or G2? And did any of them regularly change voices mid-speech?

"Let me do that again.." R00fles! that's so inconceivably lame. Yeah with 50hrs worth of voice overs, you're bound to have some blunders, but this is one is hilarious.

 

[denizsi]

For the 250.000 dialogs 62 different voice-actors were used. That is about 18 hours of spoken dialog

Not to turn it into a pissing contest of OB vs G3, but how many voice actors did Oblivion have? Comparing the number and the sources ( dealing with 62 people just has to be more time consuming and harder than with 10 something , right? ), PB seems to be doing a pretty good job on resource management.

 

[Claw]

IMDB only lists twelve voice actors for Oblivion..

 

[merry andrew]

Generally speaking seemingly unrelated parts of a project can get in each other´s way if you have to outsource several tasks and the money is limited. To follow your example: the core team is busy. Management has 2500$ to spend. What do you buy, a man month of QA or a certain number of better textures to replace the mediocre ones currently used? (Answer: 10 QA man months in Romania )

Ah, I guess I don't think of PB as such a cut-and-dry corporate setup.

 

[Direwolf]

IMDB only lists twelve voice actors for Oblivion..

That is pretty sad. No wonder all the characters sound the same.

 

[Gambler]

None of those are generic. Most of them don't involve killing anything, and are thus not epic enough to be in an RPG.

How does "epic" relates to "generic"?