The ending of GK3 *SPOILERS*

[LimpingFish]

On a more thread-related note, I think I read somewhere that you could get an "extended ending" if you manage to find all of the game's easter eggs. Not a different ending (Grace still left). I'm not totally sure though; some googling might help?

GameSpot have a fairly in-depth guide here. They also have a downloadable PDF guide, but you have to be a GameSpot member to access it.

What if you like GK2 (So far) and think GK3 is more boring than spending a week staring at a wall? Where is the divide?!!

I really like GK1, but the sequel underwhelmed me.

It's okay Limping Fish, I was taking you too seriously.  It's just been one of those days of mine where every little thing sets me off.  (Male PMS or something.)

No harm done.

[Dave Gilbert]

I liked GK3 for the most part.  I think it broke lots of ground and would have pushed the adventure game genre forward if the mass market still liked adventure games.   That said, it's hardly perfect.  Some of the puzzles bordered on the innane (the cat/candy/mustache puzzle is now famous), and the character of Mosely turned into stupid comic relief. 

As for the ending, I liked it.  It would have been a good setup for a fourth installment, if Vivendi had any interest in making it (which I hope they don't, cuz they'd mess it up).

-Dave

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I'm firmly on the list of people who thought GK3 was one of those trainwreck scenarios.  You knew something bad was coming but you had to keep watching.  Even through the ri-damn-diculously bad visuals that looked like some third year graphic arts student did them and the often silly puzzles and bad dialog I hoped there would be some glimmer of the greatness that was GK 1.  Yes, I too fell for the old nostalgia and was kicked repeatedly in the teeth for it.  I don't think it was as sleep-inducing as GK 2 was, however.  I think that is the only adventure 'game' I ever returned.

[auriond]

I think GK2 was ahead of its time and suffered from trying too hard to push the limits. GK3, on the other hand, suffered from not living up to the potential that the technology of its time offered. But then GK3 was fairly weak all round: characters were one-dimensional and not terribly memorable, storyline wasn't very interesting. The best part of it was the mini comic that came with it, and I'm speaking as a die-hard GK fan.

I love GK with a passion. I played the first GK when I was too young to even understand the innuendo that passed between Gabriel and Grace, and it (the game, not the innuendo) shaped my taste in games. GK2 was definitely different in flavour, but it was a good difference. GK3, however, is inexcusable. It could have been so, so much - the 3D environment could have been so immersive, and the premise of the Holy Grail is obviously an intriguing one as shown by the Dan Brown craze - but it was let down by the graphics, and the characters, and the crazy puzzles. In short, nearly everything that sets the adventure game apart from other genres.

Despite all that though, I still love GK3 because it's GK. And in a way it was ahead of its time too - ahead of Dan Brown anyway. Hah. And the ending did scream for a GK4, which I'm still patiently awaiting.

[Eigen]

I think Postmortem: Gabriel Knight 3 sheds some light on why things turned out like they did with this game.

Overall, however, I believe that the majority of the problems on GK3 stemmed from two things. First, that the team was building a new game engine and most of its related tools and content development processes from scratch. And second, that they severely underestimated the time, cost, effort, and experience base required to do this. The starting team was not at all equipped for this task.

Most of the game's non-art content was being hard coded â€" any story sequences (even a simple dialogue exchange between two characters!) were actually written as C++ code. This was a nightmare for a couple of reasons. First, engineers were creating content instead of working on the engine. Engineers generally suck at creating good content, and tend to be very slow at it besides. GK3 was no exception. And second, it required a recompile to change the tiniest detail, such as which line of dialogue was played or what animation to play to open a window. This made the content development process unbelievably inefficient. Artists would potentially have to wait weeks in order to see their work integrated into the game. This resulted in engineering resenting artists “chucking art over the fence” and probably inspired similar resentment on the art side.

This was an ambitious, massive project that required experienced engineers to develop, and the original team was simply not up to this task. GK3 was initially built from members of the Shivers 2 team (one of the last games built with SCI), and had practically no 3D experience in any department. Engineers under the venerable SCI engine were basically scripters â€" putting them in charge of building a game engine from scratch was like feeding them into a furnace. To make things worse, developers that were in over their heads didn't ask for help, which gave management a false sense of progress.

Engineering never had an accurate schedule. The ones we had were so obviously wrong that everybody on the team knew there would be no way to meet them. Our leads often flat-out lied to management about progress, tasks, and estimates, and I believe this was because they were in over their heads and simply reacted badly.

The end result of all this was that once a model was created, it could never be changed. GK3 shipped with a lot of bad art that the entire team was dissatisfied with, yet had no choice but to use. An example of this was the Mosely character (sometimes not-so-fondly called “T-Rex man” internally), whose arms were about a foot too short. This really affected morale, and had a lot of us thinking the game was of poor quality: “the art is bad and there's nothing we can do about it” was the bottom line.

I still liked the game though ..

[auriond]

I read that before. And much as I'm the type who's very forgiving towards the creators of the things I like, in this case whoever was making the decisions screwed up, sad to say.

[Domino]

Bought it a couple of years ago on eBay, played it for a while and haven't touched it since i moved 2 years ago.

I enjoyed it for the most part, even though never got far. I will have to start it up again and try to finish it.