I've actually been having quite a bit of fun playing Gothic 3.

For those that don't know, I guess you can think of it as something along the lines of Oblivion, except better. Graphics wise, and pretty much everything else wise, except maybe for the bugs. But I'll get on that later.

Anyways... It's awesome. Far more fun to explore than Oblivion, as all areas, indoor and outdoor, are seamlessly connected. You see a cave? You just run right in, and start clearing it out. No load times, no strange doors to go through, nothing. And some of them are actually rather large and complex. Same goes with buildings. All of them are open. And I mean... ALL.

Not to mention the sense that the world is alive. Things happen a lot more when wandering around in the outdoors. You may come across a little bandit camp. What are your options here? Well, they are many and varied. You can always go up and kill them, or you could see if there's any wildlife around, and lure it to them. Or, you could always watch as sometimes some of the game's more ornery animals attack them of it's own accord. Happened to me once. Came across a group of three bandits camped out at a broken down shack, and all of a sudden, this boar comes running up, and starts attacking them. Of course they fight back, but it kills pretty much all of them. Then I killed everything left standing. Good fun ^_^

Then there's the actual landscape itself. Very unlike Oblivion's nice smooth landscape. You see, Oblivion was created with heightmaps. Not bad, and makes developement quicker and easier, but makes things a bit... Unrealistic. This game, however... The landscape seems to have been modelled by hand, every bit of it. And it shows. The way hills look, the way the land works, with little cliffs jutting out and such, and how everything fits together so well... It's just... Breathtaking, really.

But of course, there are bugs. For example, the boars. They will kill you. A lot. As they tend to attack you so rapidly that you don't have a chance to recover, and therefore you die. Some people have also reported graphical bugs, though I haven't seen any besides the lens flare when you look at the sun making the screen almost entirely blue. And there does seem to be a bit of a memory leak that does seem to cause crashing once in a while...

All in all, though, I'm finding it to be an incredibly fun game.

But yeah. That's just what I'm playing.