About the CPT ...

The Community Patch Team is a gathering of technically gifted players of the computer game "Gothic". In June 2007, after the third part of the successful games series reached the market in a condition, with which many gamers were very disappointed, the Assistant Community Manager of the JoWooD fanbase Glockenbeat made a call to start improving the game: the goal was to build a team together from members of the community, who at this point already were trying to improve the game on their own accord, to support them in this effort.

The most important aspect of this support was the release of the source code, through which it would become possible to assume deeply impacting changes to the game. And indeed - already in August 2007 the source code was received by the team, which - in reference to the game - called itself "Knights of the Twelfth Chalice". A once in a lifetime opportunity for the members of the team to work on one of their beloved games series!

Unfortunately it is impossible with such source code to start making all the numerous changes in the game which in the end found their way into the community patches without problems: some time to work in, to become familiar with the techniques of the game, was unavoidable. And so it became that the next patch, which was bearing the version number 1.50, had to be waited for over 3 months. Though at the same time this patch was the first to bring some very fundamental improvements along: From improvement to the framework (memory usage, removal of the copy protection in version 1.52) through changes in the game mechanics to further quest and item fixes: community patch 1.5 was until this point one of the largest innovations offered for Gothic 3.

The team though, decided that a further patch was necessary; too many unsolved problems were still present which for part of the gamers reduced the game's fun enormously. After a first meeting of the team, together with an emplyee of Spellbound in October 2007, it was certain that Spellbound would help the team and could offer further support. And so it was, that five months later a new patch was released - patch 1.60 . With this patch, also thanks to the support of Spellbound, the first deeply fundamental changes to the framework, the basic layout, could be made. This way it was finally possible to almost completely ban the near legendary "Where is the Guru ... ?" error with accompanying crash of the game. Still also the content fixes did not stay behind - the amount of entries in the change log had again risen to hitherto the highest number.

After the release of patch 1.60 it was already clear for the team: the next patch would be the last which would be offered as a team. As goal it was set to once more siege over as many bugs as possible, to give the patching a worthy farewell. In this was also included, that the numerous world changes made to order on over a year of work were finally passed on to the gamers: the game world was flawed at many points, and offered bugs which with the source code of the game alone could not be fixed. Here further changes were needed, which could only be achieved with direct adaptation of the game content.

Finally after more than a year of development at 21.03.2009 the time was there: patch 1.70 was released to the world, and with that, the patch activity of the Community Patch Team came to an end.

Hereby we would like to thank you for the unbelievable feedback from you, which accompanied us for more than one and half a year!
Only through your motivating support and your interest patch 1.70 became eventually possible.

Much thanks - and fun for playing! Maybe we will see each other at one or another computer game fair ... :-)