It's been a while since the North American release of Gothic 3, and you still see threads pop up on message boards asking if it's playable yet. The fact that it was released in a messy state is no secret, yet there's still a strong community involved with the game, so much so that some have taken to patching it themselves. Gothic 3, like its predecessors, had some great ideas built in and offered a vast and beautiful world to explore. The third game also happened to have rampant stability problems and a flawed combat system, which certainly didn't help the franchise.
With the fourth title in the series, Piranha Bytes, the German developer responsible for the first three games, is not be handling things. Instead a part German, part French developer, Spellbound, has taken up the reigns. For advice on how to proceed forward, the developer has been in contact with the player community still working to improve Gothic 3 and, somewhat surprisingly, the folks over at Pirahna Bytes. Publishing duties will be handled by JoWood (which owns the Gothic intellectual property) in Europe and Dreamcatcher (a subsidiary of JoWood) in North America.
