Right, I've been playing Gothic 3 for a while now, as stated above. I have the urge to rant, so here goes. This is after around 10-15 hours of gameplay. Gothic 3 is a flaming pile of shit, or perhaps more eloquently brought, an unlucky crossbreed between designs from Far Cry 2 and the original two Gothic games. Let me elaborate.
The game is as open as Far Cry 2, with the same design philosophy that roaming around the world killing things is supposed to be fun enough to last throughout the entire game (in short: an incredibly boring enemy-filled world without any point, character or purpose). Killing things with a sword is pretty hard, but as long as you keep fights one-on-one, they are actually enjoyable, with (community) patches. Archery is better though, but requires the usual hit-and-run tactics. As a matter of fact you can't play Gothic 3 without hit-and-run tactics. And as you will, not just frequently, but constantly, encounter groups of enemies, pulling right is pretty much 25-30% of the game. After that you will tediously and slowly dispose of each single enemy.
In the grand scheme you're supposed to side with either orcs or humans, and kill the others. As both sides possess bases all over the freaking world, you'll end up killing countless orcs/humans. For each village about 20-40 at least I would wager, and each time you'll have to kill them one-by-one. The other side hardly provides any help at all and you're pretty much supposed to single handedly conquer the entire world.
I've been playing for around 15 hours and there was NO STORY progression whatsoever. At all. Nothing. I've seen the intro and know I'm supposed to find Xardas because he's supposed to be an evil bastard. That's it. That's all the story you get for the first...oh I don't know, probably for the first 30 hours or so. All I've been doing is kill wildlife and orcs. The game is, actually, a pretty neat hunting simulator when killing boars and deers. And I've probably killed around 50 orcs. Then it got too boring to go on and I stopped. I just can't bear it any longer. The gameplay itself just isn't strong enough to carry an empty shell. Only a game like Mount and Blade can pull that off.
There's no point to the game. I can run around and kill stuff, that's it. Perhaps at hour 40 or 50 I can find some elements that resemble interesting parts of story. But that just isn't worth it. This is no Gothic game.
Edit: Also, on the 'what am I playing' note: I've been trying to play through Mass Effect a second time, so that I've got a save for the second part. Well, I just can't bring myself to get through that boring fragfest one more time. I could've gone through the game on evil-mode, but even that just isn't interesting enough.
Perhaps I'll play through Alpha Protocol for a third time. I still haven't played a complete asshole yet.
EDIT 2: Turns out, Gothic 3 has no story. You get the intro in the beginning, liberate/enslave the entire world, go to Xardas, and get an ending vidoe with a slide-show showing the consequences of your choices and how your friends from previous games find their place in the world. So you play for 50-80 hours or so, and all the story you get is in the first two minutes and the last two minutes. Like hell will I play that.
also Alec, if you play only offline You can consider the Plugy upgrade which adds bigger stash, shared stash between characters, online items and runewords are available in single player as well as the uber quest. Unfortunately at this point PlugY supports patch 1.12 but new version for 1.13 is nearly complete :http://phrozenkeep.hugelaser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=133&t=56210
