Victim of Poor Game Optimization

By: Ashley K. | October 16th, 2009

It looks decent for a game made in 2006, right? Good luck getting it to run.

I’ve had a very shitty week. Storms came through earlier this week and knocked out power for about a day and a half, but that wasn’t the worst half. The worst half was not having internet access for a good four days. That’s what I get for living in Arkansas.

Anyhow, to occupy my time and keep from going crazy without access to the internet, I decided to install a game I picked up but never played due to what I thought was having a poor system. Granted, when I purchased Gothic III two years ago,  it was already a year old. My system wasn’t exactly shitty, but it wasn’t exactly great, either. I think at the time I was running a 256MB nVidia 7600GT card. Not horrible, by standards two years ago.

However, as I was browsing my gaming shelf for something to keep me occupied, I grabbed Gothic III and installed it on my current system. My current system with the following specs:

OS: Vista Home Premium 64-bit
Processor: AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-Core Processor (2.4GHz)
RAM: 6.0 GB
Video Card: nVidia 9800GT 512MB

Now, I don’t remember the exact specs on my former computer, but given the fact that this current system runs Wolfenstein on max settings with no stuttering whatsoever, I figured I’d be able to pick up and enjoy a game I previously couldn’t due to system limitations. Boy was I wrong.

After installing the game and updating it with the latest community patches, all the way up to 1.73, I fired it up hoping to kick some orc ass. What I got was a screen by screen view of a fight which took me near 10 minutes to close because of the choppiness. Wondering if I’d been over zealous in my graphic settings, I went behind myself and lowered them from High to Low, just to see if there was any improvement. There was absolutely none.

This ticked me off, as I realized the game probably hadn’t fallen victim to my mediocre system 3 years ago, more than likely, it was due to poor game optimization. I wasn’t able to look up my issue on the internet until today, and when I did, I found a whole slew of threads dedicated to getting Gothic III running properly on PCs. Many suggestions were made such as using the demo’s .ini file, but the crazy suggestion that worked best for me was completely removing the game’s custom font. Once that font was removed, the game ran piss smooth.

After resolving the problem and having spend three days ranting at the game, I actually lost my desire to play it. I’ve not gotten past the first battle, because of the bad taste the game left in my mouth attempting to get it started. That being said, I wonder how many other games I’ve had on a medicore system and simply concluded that I couldn’t run them due to technical limitations when it was actually the fault of the game developer. Piranha Bytes should be ashamed for releasing such an unfinished product onto the market, and with Gothic 4 in swift development, I wonder if they’ll repeat their mistakes with that game.

Risen is a supposed successor to the Gothic series and I do have it installed on my system and running flawlessly. If this is any indication as to how Piranha Bytes will be delivering games in the future, one can hope they’d take a few more steps to ensure their games don’t run like crap. After all, a system that can run Crysis with no problem should be able to run an Oblivion clone.