According to Piranha Bytes, the faction system has caused the development team to seriously reconsider the way it organized the game's quest structure. Unlike previous versions of the game, no one's off-limits in Gothic III. Vital quest NPCs can and will be killed in the course of the game; kill enough members of a faction and all members, and eventually entire cities, may become implacably hostile to the player. My demonstrator reassured me, however, that the player would never be completely stymied. It is fully possible for a player to murder every NPC in the world and still finish the game -- although they stress that this is way more difficult than it sounds.

At this point, our few reservations about the game rest in the combat system and the translations. The version we were shown has an elaborate system in which players can use combinations of mouse buttons and special keyboard commands to perform specific moves and combinations. Unfortunately, while it's impossible to judge the system without extensive playtesting, the few minutes we had with it felt a bit mushy and random. There's also the issue of the game's voices and translations. Gothic III is heavy with spoken parts, and the version we were shown had both poor text translations and German voiceovers, either of which could badly damage this game. Aspyr took pains to assure us that it's taking enormous case with this process and have just recently completed rerecording all of the game's dialogue.