Adventure, role playing, and strategy games have all been around for decades before computers came on the scene. I suppose “action” or first person shooter games are “new” inventions, as are full simulations (e.g.: flight or driving simulators): pen and paper can’t really keep do a very good job of real-time responsiveness, which is something computers excel at.

But humans have been playing games of actually quite startling complexity for far longer than computers have been around. We just had to be a bit more patient and willing to put up with certain inconveniences back in the old days

If you have Vista 64, then follow my instructions above and see if that helps: basically, the problem with Vista 64 is that the included copy protection software with Gothic 3 doesn’t run properly under the 64 bit version of Windows. If you are running a different version of Windows, or if my guidance doesn’t help you, then check out the Gothic 3 support forums: there is a link to that in my original post. Use the search function there and see if you can find a post or two regarding the problems you are experiencing- I found a lot of useful information there. You can also post a new entry in that forum explaining the details of the error you are seeing and your configuration (OS version, memory, video card) and hopefully get some help that way.

Best of luck to you in terms of getting the game to work: It was fairly decent once I finally got it going

Just wanted to say thanks for publishing this information. I followed the three steps listed and now Gothic3 runs just fine. Very strange about the font issue, but I’m delighted that you showed how to fix it. I’ve got an nVidia 8800GTX and experienced exactly the same symptoms you described for ATI cards.

Thanks again!

If my hints don’t help, I’d suggest checking out the JoWood technical forums I mentioned in the original post. There are dozens of different problems folks seem to have experienced depending on their hardware or drivers- if you don’t see a post there with a problem that sounds similar to yours, start a new thread. I found the responses there to be reasonably helpful, at least by the standards of internet support forums.

UPDATE: one specific thread from the JoWood forums relates to some users experiencing the Genome failure having some success with disabling (or excluding Gothic3.exe from) Vista’s Data Execution Prevention feature.

I’m running DX10 (Vista Ultimate 64 bit edition), and am not getting a direct3d error on startup: the game launches and plays fine for me once I deal with the problems I mentioned in my original post. In my case, I’m using an ATI X1950XTX video card with the latest (Catalyst 7.3) drivers. However, I’d really expect an nVidia geForce card to work as well or better.

If you aren’t using the latest nVidia drivers downloaded from their site, then try that. If it still fails…well, you could try checking out the publisher’s forums (see the link in my original post). Let me know how it goes!