Gothic 3 add-on fix coming this year

JoWooD has told Eurogamer that a patch to fix buggy Gothic 3 expansion Forsaken Gods will arrive "within this year", although it has been nearly two weeks since the original and quite severe problems were reported.

"At the moment our producers, the quality assurance teams and beta-testers are working under high pressure to create a satisfying and high quality patch for the game," JoWooD told us. "This update will be released within this year."

The company had to issue a public apology for the state of Forsaken Gods, and added today that "we might have released the game too early" in order to satisfy fans.

Naturally there are larger ramifications, such as what the state of Arcania - A Gothic Tale (Gothic 4) will be, coming from a series mired by the prevalence of bugs.

"That fear is comprehensible, but entirely unjustified," said JoWooD. "For Arcania - A Gothic Tale, we have implemented a better development process and quality assurance tools right from the beginning, which have simplified the continuous quality protection and will guarantee the correctness of this product.

"The collaboration with Spellbound, one of the best German development studios, is very professional.

"At this moment we can proudly state that the project is on track and in time," added the publisher.

Arcania - A Gothic Tale carries no release date, and is in development for PC and consoles, as the first of the series to be multiplatform. This will also be the first Gothic game created by Spellbound, as JoWooD and series regular Piranha Bytes fell out last year.

Piranha Bytes has since teamed with Deep Silver to work on a game called Risen, which follows the story of a man arriving at the foot of a mysterious volcano. Role-playing territory, we presume, but concrete details are scarce.