Gothic 3 is a fantasy-themed open world action role-playing game for Microsoft Windows developed by Piranha Bytes. It is the sequel to Gothic II.

The player must complete quests and slay wild animals and monsters to earn experience and improve skills. The game is reputation centric allowing the player to side with a faction. While there are six factions in the game, only three are joinable: the Rebels, the Orc mercenaries and the Hashishin. The remaining factions are the Rangers, the Nomads and the people of Nordmar. The player is able to take advantage of missions to allow either side to take over towns. Dialog changes according to in-game actions and behavior. The game places a special focus on the interactivity of the environment. The controls have been altered slightly with a stronger focus on action. Navigation and combat are more mouse-centric, with each mouse button having a different combat action. The Nameless Hero can also now wield dual weapons or use a shield.

Gothic 3 is powered by a custom engine called Genome; it supports Pixel Shader 3.0, has a multithreaded design and includes dynamic lighting (including self-shadowing). Character animation uses EMotion FX 2 and physics simulation is provided by Ageia's PhysX physics engine. It also uses IDV's SpeedTreeRT tree and plant software, Bink Video Technology from RAD Game Tools for the cutscenes, as well as the FMOD Sound System from Firelight Technologies for sound playback.

After a release with many problems and bugs, a dispute between the publisher and developer led to their separation in 2007. The game remained with the last released patch 1.12 in a buggy and unfinished state, and an announced further patch and editor were not finished.

Therefore, the copyright holding publisher Jowood granted access to the source code to developers from the game community to allow the fans at least take care of the significant problems and bugs themselves. In years of voluntary and unpaid work the fan community produced several community patches, with an actual iteration version 1.75 released on April 2012. With this 1.5 GB sized patch significant enhancements and fixes were introduced, so that finally a playable state of the game was achieved. Also, a "Community Story Project" still works on fixing inconsistencies in former Gothic games and on filling story gaps. In 2014 an additional patch and a data optimizer for the 1.75.14 version became available fixing some of the remaining issues.

Gothic 3 was a commercial success, with global sales over 500,000 copies by March 2007. It sold 100,000 units in its opening two days.

The game received "mixed" reviews, according to video game review aggregator Metacritic. Prior to its release in early October 2006, Gothic 3 was nominated as the best game of E3 by IGN. Since the release, most concerns have centered on bugs. Hyper's Daniel Wilks commended the game for its "ton of quests, rewards exploration and approachable combat". However, he criticised it for "system hogging, feeling unfinished and atrocious voice acting".

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