I played a great game of “Make the Game work with Vista” earlier this week. It was fun! I give it an 8 out of 10. How is the game itself? I’ll tell you in a few days…
The game in question here is Gothic 3 by Aspyr [1]. I collected answers to most of the problems I encountered in the game publisher’s community technical forums (see link below). In an effort to help out folks who might be wanting to install and play this game on Windows Vista (64 bit version in my case), I’ve collected here the things I found necessary/important to make it work:
- Install the Vista version of the tages copy protection tool: Gothic 3 uses a copy protection scheme called TAGES [2]. Unfortunately, the drivers for this included with the DVD do not work with Vista (they fail to install). This means when you try to play the game, you’ll get a dialog saying to “insert the game DVD” even though it is already in your drive. The fix: go to the TAGES site and download/install the updated Vista compatible drivers. You can read about the problem here [3], and get the drivers directly from TAGES here [4].
- Update to the current/latest version of Gothic 3: Although this might not strictly be necessary (the American version of the game already includes most of the critical patches), it is higly recommended. The current version (as of March 7, 2007) is Version 1.12, and is available on the Gothic 3 website [5].
- Delete/rename the Gothic3 font (Gothic3.ttf): This is critical, it seems, at least with ATI video cards. If you leave this font file (found at [game install dir]/Gothic3.ttf; C:\Program Files (x86)\Aspyr\Gothic III in my default case), the game will play at about one frame per second. That is, it will be totally unplayable. You can read about the problem here [6]. Note that, contrary to what the link says, it isn’t necessary to overwrite/replace the file- you can rename it or delete it, and Gothic 3 will use a default font. Yes, I find it very odd that a font can reduce framerate to one frame per second, but…it did for me, and others as well it seems
I found the publisher’s (JoWooD) Gothic 3 technical support forums [7]to be very helpful. I’d recommend browsing the rest of their Gothic 3 forums [8]for gameplay hints and tips and the like as well. A good post to start with is the collection of hints and tips links from the Gameplay forum [9].
As for the game (Gothic 3) itself: it’s an open-ended single player RPG. If you liked Oblivion, you will probably find things to like in Gothic 3. The graphics aren’t quite as rich, but this far I’d say the gameplay is comparably enjoyable. I might write a more complete review later…