Graphically, Gothic 3 looks stunning with gorgeous environments and a gigantic world to explore that dwarfs the size of Gothic 2’s landscape. Picture perfect vistas are almost everywhere you look with lifelike clouds drifting across the sky. But don’t expect to feast on the game’s eye candy unless you have a high end PC. Even if your system meets the recommended requirements, you’ll probably still experience occasional chugging and frozen screens on the low and medium detail settings. And without the detail levels set on high, the environments and character models don’t look as impressive when compared to other titles with much lower requirements

On the other hand, even if you're lucky enough to have a rig that can run Gothic 3 smoothly, there are still all sorts of laughable graphical anomalies which take away from the game’s otherwise awe inspiring look. In one area we murdered a rather rude orc and watched his lifeless head disappear into the graphics of the chest at his feet while his arms extended through the wall on his right. Couple that with text that runs off the screen in your quest log and flashing white screens when you look at a tree the wrong way and Gothic 3's great graphical front loses even more of its impact. Hopefully, patches are on the way to fix at least some of these woes.

The Gothic series has been praised for its realism and difficulty. But waiting patiently for our mana to regenerate after raining down fireballs of death from a ledge on hordes of orcs that couldn’t figure out how to climb up to attack us didn’t strike us as realistic or difficult. Still, despite our frustrations, we found ourselves returning to Gothic 3 because underneath the frustrating battles and occasional crashes lies an engrossing and deep RPG.