Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods – New screenshots and first performance impressions

Contrary to the main game that was developed by Piranha Bytes in Germany, the add-on, developed in India by Trine Games, has a smaller world which therefore is more populated with NPCs. Furthermore Trine Games set a high value on giving NPCs an independent life. There are a lot of changes on technical matters, too. The basic technology is still the Genome Engine.

New animations and new shaders for dynamic shadows and effects like heat haze will improve the detailed optics of Gothic 3 even further. There are a lot of changes to the combat system, too. Because of the heavy critique on the catastrophic performance, the Indian developers reduced the overall geometry rate and the range of visibility to receive a better performance.


Since Jowood’s Community Manager Johann Ertl gave us the technical specifications of the demonstration PC and we were allowed to run Fraps on the system, we can estimate if the optimization work was successful. On the system with its Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93 GHz), a Geforce 8800 GTS (512 MiByte) and 2 GiByte RAM, Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods was running with 30 to 35 fps on average at a resolution of 1,024 x 768 with all details and quad anisotropic filtering. In areas with few NPCs or objects like trees, bushes or houses the framerate went up to 45 fps. On the other hand it dropped to 25 fps if a lot of objects and characters are visible.

The loading lags when entering a new area of the game, are still there, but show up randomly only. This is one of the things the developers have to improve a little. They still got some time until the scheduled release in November.

We put a lot of screenshots in the gallery so you can get your own impression of the add-on’s graphics.