Gothic 3: Should I buy another RPG I won't get to play?

Hey Danda,

What's up in Spain?

The last week or two have been particularly uneventful in terms of gaming and I think I only played Mass Effect for an hour or two and that was it. I've been busy with some stuff and on some evenings I decided to just watch a movie instead and so I have little to report.

Nevertheless, I read today on www.dvd-spiel-film.de, a cool site that reports on what games and movies come with magazines here in Germany, that the magazine PC Games has Gothic 3 this month, and it's only 5,50 EUR.

I've been a big fan of Gothic 1 & 2 back in the day (when I was in college and had all this spare time on my hands), and I thought those games were awesome, even though I played them in reverse order. Now, Gothic 3 is a different story.

When it first came out I was tempted to buy it as soon as the price dropped a little, but then I read all these reports that the game was no fun because of all the bugs. So I didn't get it and forgot about it. Now my interest was re-awakened by this newest offer, and since I'm not as impulsive of you, I decided to research whether it was worth those 5,50 EUR. I came across a German video on YouTube that demonstrates many severe bugs that make the game sound awful, as did a scathing review by GameSpy.

From what I understand, the game was rushed to be released quickly, which is why there are terrible bugs that range from bushes flying in the air, to NPCs that are incapable of walking over bridges, to your character not appearing after loading a savegame, to quests that can't be completed, to constant system crashes. It's a shame, really.

However, there is supposedly a very good patch out by now, the Community Patch 1.70, which fixes many of the bugs (it's 880 MB in size!) that improves the game greatly and fixes a lot of what was broken. So even though I don't really want to support a developer that would release a faulty product like Gothic 3, I think 5,50 EUR for the game (with the most recent patch already included on the DVD) is too good a bargain to resist, even though I might only get to play the game in 2011.

Over and out,
-- SuperViv