You have saved your home island from the forces of evil in Gothic I and Gothic II. Now it is time to travel to the realms of the mainland.

Invading Orcs have enslaved the human kingdom. There are but a few free humans in the icy north and the southern desert and a handful of rebels hiding in the forests and mountains of Midland.

You may either join the rebellion or serve the Orcish Usurpers but you will ultimately tip the scales and decide the outcome of the last war to save humanity.

There is no simple linear story in Gothic III - every game will be different and unique - but all will ultimately lead to you deciding the fate of humankind and of your own survival.

Here are some key features of "Gothic 3":

· Specially designed easy combat system
· Clear main goals - story driven yet dictated by player's choice
· Huge free-roaming world - virtually no boundaries
· Advanced human behavior AI for hundreds of individual characters with full audio dialogues
· Countless side-quests for the player to choose from
· Over 50 different monsters and animals and dozens of human enemies
· Over 50 different powerful spells and over a hundred different weapons
· Unique class-free character development

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

Fixes made by the community:
· The hero's death will not cause a "Quest failed"-message anymore.
· Frozen NPCs and creatures will unfreeze after a while in any case.
· Rune and Zapotek do not attack anymore when the player picks up ham or wood for a quest.
· To decrease the amount of unusable quest items in the inventory, quest items like barrels of fish, firewood, etc. disappear from the game when you delivered them.
· NPCs in charge of relevant quest items do not flee anymore after a city's liberation but keep fighting.
· The hero does not "stab" NPCs anymore when they already lost their last health points.
· NPCs who the player is asked to follow will walk to their designated destination instead of standing around after they get knocked down.
· Chests are now being closed after NPCs used them.
· When a ranger is being attacked by the player, the rangers nearby will approach to help him out.
· Krush Tarachs, spears and halberds dropped by NPCs are now "worn".
· After the message "Not enough reputation" the amount of missing reputation will be displayed as well.
· Tutorials may now be deactivated permanently.
· Fleeing NPCs after a revolution will now die instantly when you remove their last health points.
· Whetstones can now only be used after the player learned "Hone blade".
· Quest related dialog choices concerning part deliveries of goods have been corrected.
· Dialogs concerning success or failure of a quest are now put into the mission log as well.
· Menus can now be closed pressing the menu's key even if the player had magic "equipped" when opening them.
· You cannot invite more than one NPC into the arena at the same time anymore.
· Whenever a "Guru" appears, a log will be saved automatically.
· Chest name's colour now indicates whether the chest is emtpy or not.
· Accepting a "follow quest" will automatically cancel any other active follow quest. Those quests can be restarted via dialog later on.
· The hero may sell Sanford out to Marik even if Sanford attacked after being uncovered.
· Unnecessary Marlo dialog option "continue" has been removed.
· Mission log entries for some quests added.
· Logic of dialogs with Folleck corrected.
· Kor-Shach does not appear as a teacher too early now.
· One of Emet's sentences is now played.
· Porgan's dialog order has been corrected.
· When the hero kills the three patrolling Orcs from Faring, he won't trigger the liberation of Faring by this.
· Buggy respawn was deactivated completely.
· Armor values for "paladin's shield" and "light rebel armor" have been corrected.
· Hunter merchants will pay twice the price for dark snapper leather and fire lizard leather.
· Gold value of some ancestor stones has been corrected to 50 gold.
· Torches now have a buying value of 3 gold, selling value is 1 gold.
· Thief merchants will pay twice the price for golden necklaces and rings now.
· The value of necklaces has been adjusted to 250 gold.
· Icons have been cleaned up.
· fmodex improvements, update to newer version.
· Several internal improvements.
· New texture fpr Angar's head.
· Flag "application can handle >2gb addressets".
· Post processing cartoon shader (for graphic cards with shader 2.0 or higher)
· Missing wood texture added.
· Slight revision of enemy selection during fights to reduce the number of uninvolved NPCs.
· NPCs using ranged weapons or magic search for a new target when the current target gets out of sight.
· Sort order of dialog options for increase of life force corrected.
· The hero is able to damage his own summoned creatures.
· Experience points for "Rakus the Fire Mage should go to Okara" adjusted.
· Perk "Orc hunter" works now.
· Pointless "level up" notifications while the hero is transformed into an animal eliminated.
· The hero keeps his level when transformed into an animal, so he isn't too weak as animal.
· Experience points the hero gained while being transformed into an animal will not be lost anymore after transforming back.
The following fixes will only become effective when a new game is started, but not in already existing savegames:
· Strafing speed of ogres and goblins has been adjusted.
· Female slaves do not wear weapons or shields anymore.
· The Orcs in Al Shedim now react to the death of one of them with aggressive behaviour even if the player already handed all five artifacts to one of the gods.
· Some orcs now sell orcish weapons as well as their standard equipment.
· The perk "orc slayer" now works
· No unnecessary level up messages are being displayed anymore when the hero is transformed into an animal
· Experience the hero gained while being transformed into an animal is not lost anymore when turned back into a human being
Fixes made by Spellbound:
· New memory manager implemented to improve performance and stability.
· Error handling in memory pool improved.
· Fixed memory allocation error when saving.
· Memory is now freed correctly.
· Improved memory allocation for memory streams in filesystem/streams.
· Fixed a potential memory leak which would result when an insert operation fails.
· Fixed memory leak which produces 84+20 bytes leaks for each savegame when entering the load screen.
· Remaining memory impact during save/load reduced from >100MB in some cases to typically less than 1,5MB - thus increasing game stability significantly.
· Fixed memory leak in Script_Game.
· Fixed some potential memory leaks in scripts.
· Several shader enhancements to improve memory usage.
· Fixed several uninitialized memory reads (potentially resulting in unstable or unpredictable runtime behavior).
· Improvements to the memory logging system - giving more detailed protocols of memory allocation activities.
· Improved caching.
· Unload caches before game restart (further reduction on memory leaks while saving/loading).
· Purged all regular caches before loading a savegame - further reducing the memory leak during save/load.
· Fixed access violation exception on program termination - crash during exit.
· Fixed a crash bug where entities were cached out even though they were still in use.
· Fixed crash bug in physics and character controller - occurs potentially during main gameplay.
· Fixed crash bug within entity manager - occurs potentially during main gameplay.
· Fixed one crash bug when using teleport stone.
· Changed control order for PrefetcherJob destruction to avoid deadlocks (and possible crashes).
· Fmodex.dll updated to version 4.10.01 (fixing potential freezes or crash).
· Changes to the filesystem for Fmodex to avoid file format errors.
· Memory performance improvements in the mesh renderer.
· Fixed some memory fragmentation for performance improvements.
· Performance and memory improvements to the container templates.
· Slight performance improvements in ThreadPool.
· Reused vertexbuffer declarations in several locations.
· Error handling in vertex processors improved.
· Created vertex buffers in default pool instead of managed pool if managed pool fails.
· Fixed memory overwrites in the shader module.
· Fixed rendering of zero or less vertices.
· Fixed DX9 issue complaining about different vertex stream strides for lightmap.
· Fixed DX9 issue about impossible MIP filtering.
· Various small cosmetic fixes for the world.
· Some fixes to avoid playing sounds with empty filenames.
· Fixed bug where objects could be off color.
· Looted corpses don't get into the hero's focus anymore.
· Illumination error regarding vegetation fixed.
· More information for user when skilling.
· Ini/dx9error.txt at application start removed.