Gothic 3

I can think of a million things to say about this absolute heartbreak of a game but my favorite is the fact that everything in it looks like it was made in Spore, like a shoddy placeholder. After 4 years of development.

It is a common thing to hear the usual tale of the big bad publisher ruining the devs' chances to shine but Gothic 3 is undoubtedly a product of unrestrained ambition.

It's hard to imagine that there were no raisonneurs within either of the two studios involved to assess the absolute insanity of not only taking on a project so much bigger than its predecessor but also throwing away just about every single design decision Gothic 1 and 2 owed their borderline universal acclaim to.

The biggest takeaway from all this, I think, is the fact that Piranha Bytes had never seen their games as this "niche weirdo yurojank" they'd been relegated to at some point but rather, much like any other video game developer, as the best games ever.
And what would be the next logical step for a studio specializing in open world PRGs? To dramatically increase the scope, to escape the "cozy" and the "comfy" for the "grand" and the "gigantic".

I actually think this game is severely underrated. It needs to be patched before playing, but there's lots to enjoy here. Also has some of my favorite music in the series.

this is complete trash compared to the first two parts, but as a separate game it's not THAT bad (but still bad, like Oblivion or Skyrim). someday I will play it with mods

Even with patches, this is still a mess.

Piranha Bytes were really like "Let's make a Gothic game but without anything that makes Gothic good."