YOU SHOULD PLAY GOTHIC

Also.

G1 > G2 in comfyness
G2 > G1 in gameplay
Both are equally fun.

Thanks for the links user, i really need to play this series at all cost after i finish arx fatalis.
I don't know how i managed to skip these games all the time even though i always wanted to try them when little

Recently finished a G1 playthrough with the Welt der Verurteilten mod. It allows you to become a Guru and even the Arch Baron (or whatever it's called in english, it's the position Gomez holds). I unfortunately missed the flags in the early chapters to become a Guru because I didn't want to look up a walkthrough, so I only finished as a Templar. If you want to become a Guru make sure to impress ALL of the Gurus in the first chapter, not just the minimum.
Apart from being able to become a Guru and the Arch Baron the mod added quite a bit of unfinished stuff (initiation ceremony for the cultists, for example), improved AI, increased difficulty, filled some of the more "unfinished" areas like empty caves with monsters and balanced the gameplay.
Pretty good, would recommend.

Will probably play G2: NotR as a mage as soon as I can find the time to take a week off. Never actually finished a Mage playthrough, I'm looking forward to seeing how devastating the late game spells are. Planning on going for a dex 1H melee build with the master sword for the early game before I get my spells.
Any recommended mods?

Oh yeah, that was thrilling for me, too. I remember how panicked I was when I made a run for the castle while being chased by orcs. Good times.

Gothic 1 and 2 still have the best german voice acting out of any game ive ever heard. If you can understand german its just so fucking believable because they talk unformal as shit as you would expect from a prison colony.

Nowadays German voices just seem way too sterile and formal to have any sort believability which is a shame.

"Deine Mutter treibt's mit Ziegen!" -"Das tut sie vermutlich wirklich."

Top tier banter.

Even though the English voice acting is bad it has this weird charm to it because of the American accents. It's refreshing to for once play a WRPG that doesn't have any pompous faggy fancy talking elves and scottish dwarves and shit like that.

Both of those arena fights completely rip apart your asshole though if youre not prepared. Its one of the things i love about gothic. Its not hard for the sake of being hard but its hard because you start out as a fucking pleb, of course the wolves and trained arena fighters are gonna murder you. But if you stick through and learn and actually get armor you eventually get to murder them back. Gothic has a very good feel of progression.

I think i tried the english version once and it just didnt fit. I guess im too used to the german VAs because ive been playing it that way since i was a kid.

Getting new armor in Gothic is just orgasmic. Other games like Diablo feed you with dozens of items, most of which useless, and sometimes you'll find a piece of armor or weapon which has slightly higher stats than the one you're using now. But when you get new armor in Gothic, when you've been saving up for it the whole time and worked your ass off to get it, it PAYS OFF. Getting a new armor set means entire new worlds of possibilities open up as your armor can deflect more hits from those asshole wolves or Orcs, and allows you to explore deeper without dying. On top of looking cooler as well, it's just so great.

"Verlass dich auf jemanden und du bist verlassen."

Wisdom.

Thanks for the links and info OP, i've been meaning to try this for a while since it gets so much praise.

Any tips for someone completely new to the game to get it to run properly and get the best experience?

The German voice acting and translation "scene" seems really awful in general. They often enough have no understanding of the source material.

"Ein neuer tag und NICHTS hat sich geändert"

Those random chatter lines going on in the camp really helped set the mood too.

I also love how youre not this goody two shoes hero that seems to be so popular amongst shitty writers. First of all you were thrown into a prison colony so you start off with having done something to net you jailtime whatever that mightve been. And then during the actual game you dont have to be the good guy just because youre the protagonist. But its not black & white pure good or pure edge evil either. For example that one guy in the new camp you can beat up to make him fuck off out of his house so you can sleep in it.
Or the New camp guy in the Old camp youre supposed to get rid of but can also make a deal with instead.

I love it.

You've got it all wrong. While what you say is true German is the original language of the Gothic games. The English version was always released one year after the German one (except for Gothic 3 i think). I think this is why they never got too popular outside of Germany (except for eastern Europe, holy shit poles are obsessed with Gothic).

I remember the question which puzzled the fuck out of me when I introduced one kid to the game: why is it called Gothic? There's nothing related to architecture or that faggy style in it, right. So why?

Gothic 1 and 2 are my childhood, what the fuck happened with 3? I don't mean just the bugs, I mean most of the story and level design. Why the fuck are the Orcs much more intelligent in 3 than they were in 2? Why did everything seem so bland? I can remember almost every place from 1 and 2, but I can't remember a single fucking thing about any place in 3.

Because it was done by Pajeets…?

I didn't like it. Morrowind is a better game imo.

After all these years of weebdom I get to be the one who understands the obscure game with awesome gameplay in its native language

EAT SHIT JAPAN

The explanation for that seems to be that the Orcs sent to the island of Khorinis were just idiots while the Orcs on the mainland were doing all the thinking.

Uh, I know? I'm German myself. Gothic is one of the few series with good voice acting and, naturally, good dialogue. I don't know anything about the English translation, I was speaking more about the English -> German translation work we get around here. It's shit.

That's just the standalone Gothic 3 expansion, which is absolutely terrible and bizarre. Gothic 3 was made by Piranha Bytes.

This. When you joined a camp in G1 and G2 you really felt like you were part of a brotherhood. All those camp exclusive features and quests. Gothic 3 was literally kiss one faction's ass long enough for them to sell you their armor and let you meet their leader and then kill whoever the leader wants you to kill. Probably one of the most boring video game storylines of all time. The only good things about G3 were the music and the environments. Myrtana was pretty boring but Varant and Nordmar were god tier when it came to comfyness.

also posting the G3 Forsaken Gods video by Durmin Paradox because it's really funny. JoWood really didn't give a fuck, and I'm glad they never got around to making all their planned Gothic games, including an MMO.

I had a ton of fun with Gothic 1, replayed it several times, but for some reason, I can't get into Gothic 2 as much, I think it's because they made the begging of the game way more tough than Gothic 1, and in the first game it was already pretty brutal, I don't know why they had to make it even more brutal.

so what is the new game Piranha Bytes is making?
some kind of post apocalypse sci-fi rpg?

I don't know but reading up on it a lot of what it promises sound like total bullshit.

i aprove these kind of threads, its obvious this place was flooded by casual kids thats started playing on the last gens of consoles and dont know shit

Have you tried playing Gothic 2 Vanilla instead of NotR? Vanilla is a lot easier.

I thought Gothic was the game where you assemble a party and walk down a path slaughtering everything for hours and hours?
What other mid-late 90's RPG was that?

Oh yes, Gothic thread.

If you have played the games countless times and know them pretty much by heart, I can recommend you "The Returning / Die Rückkehr" mod for G2 NotR.
It adds a shitton of new stuff, quests and areas, among others you can go back into the sleeper temple and get Uriziel, choose the remains of the brotherhood as your guild, and free Khorinis from the orcs after you come back from Indoril.
It also makes the game a lot more challenging, so expect loading a lot.

It took me 300+ hours for a playthrough, and I could probably play the game blind.

I very much doubt the original talent still works at Piranha Bytes, seeing how Risen 2 and 3 turned out. Not interested at all in what they're currently developing.

Dungeon Siege? Icewind Dale? That's not a whole lot of information there, user. Are you thinking of a 3rd person Action RPG or an isometric RPG?

Nice, that's exactly what I've been looking for, thanks.
Have you played the "Welt der Verurteilten" mod for Gothic 1? I mentioned it earlier in this thread, it's probably similar to the mod you're talking about. Might want to check it out if you're looking for an excuse to revisit Gothic 1.

3rd person, I guess. You would assemble like, 1-8 guys and just walk down a path.
It looked like a pretty simple game, but I know I've heard of it around here before.

Dungeon Siege! That was it, sorry, I had to google it.
For some reason, I thought you meant Dungeon Keeper.

Not yet, but I've been meaning to replay the first game and definitely will give it a try.

How does NoTR change the game?

Dungeon Siege was a lot of fun for how broken it was. Played it a lot in MP, there's a completely original game world for multiplayer games, although you can probably also solo it.

It generally just makes the enemies a lot tougher. It was intended to be a challenge for seasoned Gothic players who already completed Gothic 2. NotR is manageable if you know the ins and outs of the game, but I suppose it might be a bit too hard for someone who hasn't played the game yet.
NotR also introduced a completely new mid-game area and if I remember correctly a new type of enemy that appears during the second chapter and completely rapes unprepared players.
You're not missing out on much if you play Gothic 2 Vanilla, the game is perfectly fine on its own, and leaving NotR for a second playthrough gives you an incentive to replay the game and join another faction.

Improving skills costs more LP, monsters and especially NPCs get much stronger, most good stuff is more expensive and has higher requirements to wear. NotR makes the game pretty hard at times, especially in the beginning when you're weak as fuck.

It also adds a whole new area with mayan-style ruins, new factions and tons of other new content.

Wait wait wait look the gothic games are among the very best in the world to this day but

This isn't low fantasy.

The mage path in gothic 2 is the hardest, but it is also the longest.

It gets easier the more you progress through the game. Especially if you are a mage.

It's called Elex and looks like a Fallout clone. I don't really like the sci-fi setting of it. Would've rather wanted Gothic 5 or Gothic 1 & 2 remake instead.

The thumbnail looked like "Grinch 2"

PB have been making Gothic style games for a while now, and you've probably seen how the Risen series has turned out.

This game blows, it isn't Gothic at all.
I even went and put on some Eastern Germanic music so I had something to listen to while I play and that was the most Gothic part of the experience. Where are the romans? Where are the Visigoths? I give this shitty game a rating of 0. It isn't Gothic and that's false advertising, I'm going to sue.

The only new thing about Elex is that vertical exploration is supposed to be a thing, though I'm expecting something along the likes of Mars: War Logs shovelware if PB considered Risen 3 as a return to Gothic basic. Seriously, almost nobody at PB has a clue what they are doing or what made the originals so good ever since the old guard left.

The first risen was pretty good, but the later games went really down in quality.

I could still enjoy them, since I'm a sucker for pirate stuff, but they're not great games.

The people at Piranha Bytes have this mentality that they wanna "progress" with every game they make. Sadly this leads to games like Risen 2 which i consider to be their worst game yet. They should find back to their roots intead and make something that can compare to Gothic 1 & 2

About time a thread was started on here about G2. My all-time favorite RPG and considering I've been wasting my life playing them since I bought Ultima Exodus in 86, that's saying something.

People bitch about the combat, but the rythm is so easy to pick up and it's so god damn exploitable that even a dolt could finish it once they read an FAQ or watch a video. Don't let rumors of shitty combat ever scare you from G1 or 2.

Here, have one of my Gothic 2 videos, which I've attached.

Another thing I liked was how you could have nudity and gore and sex and slavery and women made up as servant girls and no one gave a shit. It was a raw, nasty, unforgiving world where you entered as a prisoner, got your ass beat to death less than a minute into the game, and had nothing but a stick and some rags until you hit level 5….which you could grind to by doing non-combat quests in the first camp.

Plus it had hookers:

youtube.com/watch?v=SdSoJtHg1BY

If it came out today, SJWs would be spitting fire over it, but thankfully they don't play games so not a single one of them knows it exists.

The problem is that the people that work now at Pirahna Bytes aren't the same that worked during Gothic I and II. They can't find their roots since they don't have them.

I'd bet money that "vertical exploration" is parrot form from Risen 3 except it goes up.

It's not a bad mentality at all, except they've mostly fucked up really bad like you mentioned. The "progress" from Risen 2 to 3 was making a playable, if mediocre(for PB) game instead of a trash fire.

Actually G1 & G2 combat are much better than G3 combat were you just had to click everything to death. G1 & G2 also had the best atmosphere. Entering the crypt in G2 for the first time gave me goosebumps. youtube.com/watch?v=p7riMb1XQUs

This thread inspired me to start another playthrough of Gothic 2. I'm going to finish NotR for the first time. It used to be too hard for me because I was too stubborn to realize you weren't supposed to fight a lot of the enemies that you could beat at the same level in vanilla Gothic 2. That's why I always quit when I had some real trouble killing seekers because I thought I had leveled my character wrong and fucked up the playthrough. I now realized that the devs wanted the seekers to truly be feared. They were a joke in vanilla Gothic 2.

Anyways, here's something for the newcomers. No spoilers here. Just remember that I never finished NotR so some of this might not apply to that game.

Go with a melee build on your first playthrough so that you can fully grasp how you should use your learning points. You can fuck up your entire playthrough by leveling the wrong skills making the game very frustrating or even unbeatable. The safest way is to only train a skill when you know that you absolutely need it. This way you will always have extra learning points.

You will notice that your character causes very little damage in the beginning of the game but sometimes causes a shitload of damage out of nowhere. This is a critical hit. It is tied to your weapon skill. So if your one handed skill is at 30% that means that you will have a 30% critical hit chance. Fighting becomes a lot smoother and the animations change when you level up your weapon skills. You also learn some crazy combos. Weapon skills go up to 100%. This means you will do a critical hit every time. A critical hit is all the strength points you have invested in + your weapon's damage combined. For example, if your weapon damage is 65 and your strength is 50 your critical hits will cause 115 damage. If your enemy's armor has a 20 point resistance to weapons that means the total hitpoints lost will be 95. This works the same way with a dexterity based weapon like a bow or crossbow. Critical hits will be bow/crossbow damage + dexterity. If you're going with a melee build you will be killing orc commanders in like 3 hits if you level up correctly. All hits with bows and crossbows are critical hits, even at a low skill like 20%. If your bow or crossbow skill is at 20% it means that 20% of all arrows/bolts will hit and the rest will miss. Bow and crossbow skills also increase shot distance. You will be almost untouchable in the final chapters of the game because of the range and power of a correctly leveled archer.

Don't go with strictly an archer or mage build (don't know if this applies to NotR). Archers are the most powerful in the endgame chapters and mage spells are cool as hell but ranged combat with no melee combat involved gets tedious as FUCK in the final 2 or 3 chapters (you can't free aim in this game, you can only lock onto enemies like in the early console GTAs). You will also be spending a ton of time in the inventory screen chugging mana potions between fights (don't worry, it doesn't pause like in Skyrim). Archers get off easily because there's a really good dexterity based one handed sword that is pretty good even in the final chapters. Make sure you only train your one handed skills if you're an archer because all the dexterity based swords in the game are one handed. Bows and crossbows in vanilla G2 are dexterity based so you can have a good dexterity based sword + the best bow/crossbow without having to spend any points on strength. 60% one handed skill should be enough if you want to be the strongest archer you can be (you will be OP as fuck in the final chapter, trust me). If you're an archer with no melee skills and you run into any kind of a golem, you will not have a good time. In NotR crossbows are strength based. That means you can be an archer but also have a really powerful melee weapon (two handed if you want).

Explore the world and kill absolutely every monster that you can, come back for the really difficult ones later. Every XP counts. It's very anti climactic to have to pause a quest in the middle to go kill monsters in the wild because you are too weak to progress in the quest.

This game allows for some really good roleplay if you're into that. There are so many ways you can treat the different NPCs. NPC's that are required for the story to progress are unkillable, but there are very few of those. In my last playtrough I tried roleplaying in a video game for the first time ever in my life. I played as a fire mage (they are kind of like irl buddhist monks except they know magic) and I tried being a really good guy. I never screwed anyone over. I even forgave the ones who tried to screw me over. I never looted graves or other people's chests. I ratted out all the criminals in the town. Didn't kill any sheep. You get the picture. It made me feel really good even though it's just a video game.

One handed weapons are the fastest. Combat feels much more responsive with one handed weapons. Two handed weapons have more reach and cause more damage. Two handed weapons look really badass. One handed weapons are more fun IMO but I sometimes like to roll with a 2 handed build. Bows are faster than crossbows but crossbows cause more damage per shot. I haven't tested it out myself but I read somewhere that bows are more powerful in the long run because of their speed.

60% weapon skill is required to unlock the best combos. Bow and crossbows firing speeds increase as you level bow and crossbow skills.

In NotR if you level your dexterity to 90 you will automatically unlock the acrobatics skill. It lets you do rolls to quickly get away from an enemy. Excellent for archers, but it can be abused like in Witcher 2 which really pisses me off.

Make sure you go to the control settings and change the combat to Gothic 2 instead of the default Gothic 1 combat. Gothic 2 combat lets you attack by just right clicking when your enemy is in range and block with the right mouse button. No more of the clunky left click + movement keys combat that Gothic 1 had. Changing it to Gothic 2 combat lets you move around much more easily. When changing it you will by default lose the ability to do those left and right sweeping attacks. This can be fixed by binding them to Q and E. Well timed left and right sweeping combos are very useful for some enemies.

When you have your weapon unsheathed holding or tapping S will make you leap backwards. While leaping you will automatically block any incoming attacks. This is an excellent way to create some distance between you and your enemy.

Experienced NPCs will very seldom use the slow ass charge attack when running towards you. Instead they will stop just in front of you and do a lightning fast left or right sweep attack. Attacking them first to stop that attack before it hits you is possible but very risky. It's much better to block that attack and then immediately do a well timed counter attack. You will notice what I mean when you fight Bullco at Onar's farm. Some orcs do this too. Skeletons with 2 handed swords do this ALL THE TIME.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING. Most of the people who complain about the Gothic 2 melee combat being terrible are impatient casual left click spamming normalfagshits. Try spamming the attack button and see what happens. Then try clicking a bit less often and see what happens. The character will start performing a combo. It's all about timing. The perfect timing will become second nature to you after a while. Watch that pleb Angry Joe play Risen 3 on Youtube and you will see what kind of people are complaining about Gothic 2's combat. Risen 3's combat system is different than Gothic 2's but the timing system is exactly the same. The timing system makes the combat extremely satisfying later in the game when your weapon skills get higher (higher weapon skill means better, faster and more fluid combos).

Fuck, only after writing this and reading through it do I realize how hardcore Gothic 2 really is. Not for pussies. Like I said, I could talk about Gothic 2 all day, but I'm hyped as fuck to play it now, so that's all for now. Make sure you copy this shit to a text file if it's your first playthrough. Someone should make an infographic out of this for future threads. I don't feel like doing that shit right now. This is VERY useful info that will save you a lot of frustration. I've learned most of this myself just by playing Gothic 2 at least once a year for a decade.

For me it's the sleeper temple background.

It sounds so mysterious and ancient, and with the reverberations from every sound you make, it really felt like exploring a vast underground temple for me.

I installed it years ago and got exploded by mosquito's I believe. Didn't know the controls so that's a given, managed to learn them with some looking around and figured it out easily and beat a few before turning back due to them still causing me to explode. Got to the camp, talked to the guys then that's it. Lost the HDD on the old laptop I had it on. I'll install it sometime but I'm going through E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy at the moment as my old save became glitched and I never finished it.

In G1, use a bow for the bloodflies, it's nearly impossible to hit them with melee weapons.

The part after 1:00 always makes me sad for some reason. Poor orcs dindu nuffin. They are just dumb animals who got fucked over by the Sleeper.

I managed to kill a few with the beginning pickaxe but backed off due to them hitting hard

Like I said, just use a simple bow and shoot at them point blank. They're dead in two or three arrows and mostly just try to fly circles around you.

It was years ago and I'm going through a few other games at the moment so maybe later.

I finished gothic 2 like a week ago and it was one of the best ARPG i ever played, the low-poly models with some decent texture work an give the game a cozy feeling (especially at the at the city of khorinis and the pirate camp.)

Somehow i liked the secondary characters (diego, lester, gorn, milten, lee, etc) a lot more thanks to gothic 1. The game is more enjoyable if you play the first game, thay feeling of coming back to the valley of mines and getting your ass chased off by orcs and snappers mixed with the memories of first game is pretty unique.

Sadly, gothic 3 shitted over all those charactes and the lore itself. It wasn't a masterpiece of writing, but it was pretty entertaining story with interesting characters.

I'll get around to this game some day, but I fear I won't like it.

I also have G2 Gold, which is the expansion version right? Can I not install the expansion to avoid the difficulties?

The NotR expansion is pre-installed with the Gold version.

I should just play the first one first anyway right? That's NotR does isn't it, make the game harder for newcomers?

NotR was meant as a challenge for Gothic veterans, though it should be doable for anyone who has played Gothic 1. You should play Gothic 1 first anyways, since it lets you appreciate the recurring characters, and you'll get to see the mining colony in its original state, as you will revisit the mining colony in Gothic 2 where it has been entirely ruined.

Finally a Gothic thread. I love the shit out of G1 and G2, but could never get into Risen. I've only tried to play the first one and drop it all the time. The combat is very stiff compared to Gothic. Don't know how is it after reaching Harbor-Town, but the beginning of the game is such an absolute bore I just can't get into it. The original Gothic games engaged me right in the beginning.

Also, Gothic 3 Community Story Patch never ever.

I'm still mad over how the recurring characters were handled in G3 - they come back for a crappy secondary quest and then they're gone. I don't know who to blame - JoWood for rushing PB or PB for biting too much and spending a lot of the budget only on music which gets extremely repetitive in an hour.

know that feeling mayne, just played through gothic 2 als ein Söldner, weil ich die Jungs von damals so sehr mochte.

Diego, Lester, Lee, Gorn

when in doubt:
"Ich glaub du brauchst mal wieder ein paar auf die Fresse"

Söldnerlager bestes Lager

standing dazed infront of your bathroom mirror after a long gothic sessiion about to brush your teeth when you realize you have no toothpaste anymore "womit denn?"

this.

because in gothic a new armor is always bound with a new rank in society and the game will react vastly different to you if you are a mage instead of a marauder at onars hof

their humour was great, especially the no name running gag

as you are moving your hero, sometimes you think about why you were thrown in the colony in the first place and what your name is

and everytime a npc asked who you were and the hero was about to say his name, the npc cut him right off before you could say his name

I always figured you were thrown into prison because you broke some locks or tried to break into some place. In Gothic 2, when all your skills were drained, you had to learn how to lockpick before you could actually do pick locks, while in Gothic 1 you could pick locks from the start even though you wouldn't be really good at it. I don't know if that's just pure coincidence, or a secret nod to the players by the developers.

Seeing how I stole everything I could, punched people just because they gave XP and generally was an asshole to most except my friends, I never really wondered how I got thrown into the colony.

Ohne den richtigen Schlüssel kriege ich das nie auf…

Risen has a beautiful soundtrack that fits the game world perfectly but it all fell apart because of how boring the quests and characters were. Enemies were pretty lame as well. And the semi cartoony inventory pictures for the items, the animations, characters and monsters didn't fit the game at all IMO. I've actually finished the game twice and I can't remember a single NPC except for the bandit faction boss and the dude with the weird magic glass eye whose face is all over the main menu. Everything about the game is so forgettable. The only memory I have of that game (it's a fond memory though) is that bandit quest when you get trapped in that underground temple with those other bandits and you have to find your way out. That was really cool.

The thing I remember most from Risen was that I was specializing in swords, and then the fucking mainquest forces me to use a hammer.

Just wanted to say thanks especially for this, it cleared up a lot. Back when I was a kid I didn't really understand what the fuck I was doing and why the combat was so impossibly hard for me, so I resorted to cheating. Getting some background info actually motivates me to try in earnest now.

I'm playing through Gothic 1 right now. It's pretty good but, honestly, I liked Morrowind better. I hear Gothic 2 is the shit though.

Some more tips:

Don't use permanently stat boosting herbs and potions until you've maxed out your skills (only drink HP boosting potions whenever you want because HP has no limit and your HP will increase the same amount every time you level up (I think it's by 12 or 14 points). There are skill caps in this game. 100 points for each skill in the vanilla version (200 in NotR I think). You can go above that with permanently stat boosting herbs and potions. Alchemy is a very useful skill to learn for any build because it lets you make permanently stat boosting potions out of permanently stat boosting herbs. Herbs give you a 1 point boost while potions usually give you a 3 point boost. Mana doesn't work the same way as HP so save the mana boosting potions for when you've reached your mana skill cap.

In NotR the extinct ancient civilization that inhabited the island of Khorinis before it was wiped out by a flood left some permanently stat boosting stone tablets behind. These are in an ancient language. Fortunately the water mages can teach you to read this language for a few learning points.

In vanilla G2 your weapon skill training will require double the amount of learning points when one skill is a certain percentage higher than the other (for example two handed and one handed). I think it's by 30%. The devs thought that since you're getting good at for example one handed combat naturally some of the aspects of it will translate into two handed combat, so your two handed skill will rise as well. Problem is that it automatically distributes learning points to the two handed skill (which makes no sense really but there is no way around it). The trainer NPCs will tell you that it's a good idea to train both types of combat to prevent this, but it's useless. Just focus on one type of combat. The exact same amount of learning points that you will spend training the other skill will get spent automatically anyways if you ignore the other skill and just focus one one. If you just focus on one skill you will not risk miscalculating the percentages and accidentally spend too many learning points on a skill that you don't even use. If I remember correctly this system is removed in NotR and replaced with an even more cruel system (it's hardcore guise). When you go above 30% weapon skill you'll have to use double the learning points for that particular weapon skill and once you go above 60% it triples!

Get a job, you bum! Even if you plan to join the monastery or Onar's mercenaries you can still get a job in town working for one of three employers. These jobs last until the final chapter and they make you a lot of money. The bowmaker will give you a great price for any animal skins (make sure you get the skinning skill). The blacksmith will pay you for all the player crafted swords you give him (you can buy the materials for a fraction of the price that the finished swords sell for). The alchemist will give you money for every mushroom that you bring him. This one requires no skills to be learned, and mushrooms are found everywhere in the world.

You can get laid at the town brothel. Just talk to the owner and then pay him. Follow one of the chicks into a room and a very awkward sex scene will play.

DER
LETZTE
SCHEISS

I've played a bit of Gothic 1 and wasn't that impressed, I liked how combat progressed from being a fucking piece of garbage to being the biggest dick on the colony but for the life of me it just felt like I was saving/loading way too often and dealing with groups of enemies was always a colossal pain Seriously those groups of Orcs are some serious bullshit, don't get me started on those lizard fuck things on the path to that tower too

All in all, it wasn't that bad, it just didn't get very fun once you progressed passed being a worthless piece of shit who can't actually swing a sword properly. Then again I sort of stopped at around Chapter IV and haven't really gotten back to it since.

Does Gothic 2 make the combat less awkward?

Papa Durmin has a pretty good theory what happened.

Oh and that part with the skeletons in Gothic 1 was just bad, seriously was I really supposed to let the fire mage dude just cheese them for me like that?

There's some gameplay in this video, albeit the wuality is pretty bad.

...

Fps maniac here. 99 % of my games are fps and I shy away from RPGs, but Gothic is the exception. First 2 games plus the night of the raven expansions is a excellent action rpg adventure with some funny dialogue and quite advanced systems for such a early game. Totally recommend !!!

How the fuck do you get Gothic to work on Steam?

There's a Polish mod for Gothic 1 which is similar to night of the raven for Gothic 2. That is, it adds a lot of stuff on too of the vanilla game. You get way more items and spells, new camps you can join, more quest, new chapter in between the vanilla ones. New types of items like helmets and shields. It's also way harder than original. Some monsters were replaced with their stronger equalivant (for example there's a quest where you need to collect some item from a cave. In vanilla game it's filled with normal goblins, in this mod it's black goblins and they spawn constantly, you just need to run inside pick your shit and run away. Also the skill system is more like in Gothic 2. The name is mroczne taken nice (the dark mysteries) you should be able to find download with Google, but I'll try to find a working link… it's very old mod, but so fucking good and huge ! Also, new dialogue doesn't have recorded voice. You need to read the text.

We had polish voice over for Gothic one and two and it was superb ! Amazing. As a kid I though it was a Polish game hehe.

Btw here's my tip for the newbies about controls. Go to the options and there's an option of 2 control schemes. Standard and some other. Select the other one. It makes you walk with wasd, when you hold left mouse button over an enemy and you have your weapon out you attack with w a or d (you can attack from the front, left, right and block) very easy. There's no other way for me to play this game.

Played all three a couple years ago at the recommendation of some polish friends.

I liked it. I liked all of them.

However, I was overall forcing myself to play it.

The description that you're a nobody who gets shit on constantly in the beginning but some-what somebodies only to crawl out of your hole and become somebody.

That is not accurate. It's just not. I still don't understand where people get that idea. Maybe purely from a narrative-story perspective it's somewhat true, but I never did something and felt I was rewarded with less than I was due in one way or another. I was never robbed by stronger fellows in the prison camp nor put in life and death situations without my explicit choice in the matter that I can remember. In this regard I was pretty disappointed. It is not a harsh game at all.

in fact, the combat, hell the game overall, feels like a slog. It's practically impossible to deal with more than 2 enemies at a time, and only 2 if you are experienced with the combat. you will fucking die. but that doesn't help that you can die in literally two hits if you're not careful. While enemies, even with great gear/skills can take large multitude of hits. Nevertheless, it is possible to completely reduce the world into a wasteland. I personally slaughtered every single orc on the map besieging a castle, although it took several hours of rinse-repeating the same combat of luring a couple, dispatching them, moving on.

The story, the premise, it's all there really is to the game but the voice acting and sequences are all boring and monotone throughout the entire game. Even the points that would be fun/funny feel forced.

An impressive part of the game though was as mentioned, the lack of quest markers. Thankfully. They are not needed and do well without them.

It probably sounds like I'm only ripping on the game. I said, I liked the game. But i'm not sure why it became a cult classic in all honesty. Fallout 1/2? yes. arcanum steamworks and magick? yes. Morrowind? Yes. Jagged alliance? yes.

Gothic? I don't see the wonderful magic. I just don't. I see the potential, but it's not executed well enough.

However I was really impressed with the world-building, the landscapes, level designs. Gothic 3 was actually really shining in that regard. Massive continent that you're put on to traverse. No loading screens. Probably one the best singleplayer world/landscape I've ever experienced. Sure as fuck beats the hell out of everything bethesda has ever shitted out since morrowind.

The mod I mentioned in

Makes people way more hostile towards you. Guards can beat you up if you try to talk with them wrongly. There's also a random pirate that will appear after you wake up and he will try to rob you. So at least there's that.

I ended up winning by jumping in a river, climbing up the cliff face, and letting them spend the rest of the game paddling around screaming.

bump

Does it crash and give you that debug screen when you press "New game" in the menu? If so then just go to the gothic2.exe file in steamapps and change it to always run as administrator.

Playing through Gothic 1, is the combat system supposed to be this atrocious?

The combat system is actually pretty solid, though the controls aren't really a huge help. You need to learn how to do combos and when to parry/backstep instead of mashing the attack button, or if you're doing jack damage, level up your skills before fighting dangerous monsters.

IF IT CRASHES CLOSE CHROME AND ALL REALTED PROCESSES

I REPEAT THIS TOOK ME AGES TO FIND OUT BY CHANCE

CLOSE CHROME AND ALL RELATED PROCESSES

It might sound crazy but in certain configurations it doesn't work when chrome is active. I don't know how why or what but it just doesn't.

Fuck, man, Gothic was the shit back in the day. When Gothic 3 came out, nobody even gave a fuck about Oblivion over here – it was really disappointing to see it so unfinished afterwards. It even starts out pretty good, going low-key, slowly undermining the orc society… but then the sandbox side collides with the story side and orcs start attacking you on sight before you even entered half the cities and the Desert and Arctic parts are underfleshed as fuck - there's fuck all to do in them, especially in the north where it's just 'kill a thousand orcs'. It needed some fleshing out and something to tie everything a bit tighter together.

I'm jumping into this. I always wanted this game back then.

I just started a new replay of Gothic 1 a few hours ago.

I love this game, although it's really easy when you know what you're doing.

started a replay too. Am now 30 minutes in, still playing with the settings – I completely forgot how bad the controls were

Thanks for the thread, i had planned to play the Gothic games for a long time now but always forgot.
A few thoughts about the Risen trilogy that i had while finishing my playthrough:
Risen 1 was the best of the series hands down, as OP said the later versions are marginally worse.
The inventory and character system that the first one had was just great, allowing you to move while using them, 2nd and 3rd risen changed that to a system that pauses the game and is just awful to use, clearly meant for consoles.
I absolutely hated the pirate gimmick, ship battles were pretty boring and repetitive (not to mention bloody easy).
Beat the third one with a musket that i got like 2hrs into the game, muskets just kick ass. That made the cutscenes look silly when characters say something along the lines of "oh wow that sure was a tough battle, i still can't believe you beat Crow", while the whole ship battle took like a minute and Crow went down in 3 shots without even reaching anywhere near me. Voice acting was mediocre, but the worst offender is the main character, who sounds way too tryhard.
In the third one you could notice a ton of reused animations (especially during ship battles), while the second one reused plant models from the first.
Second and Third one ran like shit as well(fluctuating ~30-40fps) and my rig is well over their recommended specs.
Pic is one of the later boss battles in Risen3, because why should you make the player actually think for a second.

also who the fuck decided that it was a good idea to rename all the plants from risen1, sometimes even going as far to changing the models to another plant

I don't mind them, but I set it so I could move with WASD in addition to the arrow keys.

makes it a lot more comfortable.

Oh yeah, and looting or trading high stacks is a real pain in the first game, I wish it had the faster stacking from the later games.

I think Gothic 1 (or just two) lets you move the entire stack by holding Alt and moving it.

I tried to play Gothic 1 but the controls were so fucking bad I just gave up on it. Is Gothic 2 better in that regard?

Gothic 2 allows for mouse control, though I did not find G1 controls to be as bad once you got used to it.

I hear mixed things about whether gothic 3 is worth playing or not. It it a good game or is it casualized?

It's not casualized, just unfinished and unbalanced. The Community Patch makes it playable, and you might like some of the new things Gothic 3 tried to do.

Ich steh auf diese ganze Scheiße!

Damn I watched all of his videos.
He raised a very good point.

Modern games fail at character progression from story standpoint.
There is no longer this fell of being a scrub or working for something. The fact you were fucking pathetic at beginning of G1&G2 is actually amazing.

Go try it.
If anything G3 managed to be one thing and this is comfy. It is essentially Elder Scrolls: Gothic, it is to do list simulator.

You will either like it and enjoy it or realise this is not shit you want and drop it before you wasted a lot of time on it.

No fucking way.

I've been playing this game countless times since it came out, and now, after 15 years, I learn that I don't have to move stacks of several hundred units one by one.

Thanks for the help. I guess I can go play it after I beat the second one. I have been on an rpg kick lately and replayed the first one. I never had the time to play the second one until recently due to my backlog.

How is that forsaken gods standalone game? I only hear negative things about that one, but I thought I should ask.

If you press the action key (ctrl by default) and a movement key (such as right, when you're buying), you move 100 pieces at once

also shift

I am ashamed that I pre-ordered Risen 2 because I loved the first one so much. I still feel regret at how garbage it was.

It was still awesome when compared to the shitfest of Risen 3. What happened to Piranha Bytes that they got so much worse?

Newfags who grew up playing Oblivion and Mass Effect joined Piranha Bytes as the veterans who actually knew what they were doing retired. Risen 3 is what nuPB considered going back to the roots and listening to the fans. Either the fans were chockful of bullshit, or nuPB has absolutely no fucking clue what made Gothic 1 and 2 so good. In Risen 3, you could transform into a parrot, and when you'd try flying to another unexplored island, you'd be blocked by a fucking invisible wall. Imagine how the old Gothic designers would react to that. On top of all that you had Deep Silver probably being the one responsible for forcing nuPB to make the new Risen games for consoles, and then you end up with a hollow shell of a company.

the first thing i tried to do when encountering the lava river was to fly across it, just stopped midflight and couldnt continue.
they couldve handled it way better, ex. having the heat burn the wings of your parrot and kill your parrot form or even add a bullshit magic barrier there that damaged you

Looking at their page, they're developing a new game entirely, so I guess they gave up on Risen? Might be for the better. The premise of the new game looks pretty good, but I wonder if they can pull it off

The idea that risen 3 is so shit that it makes Risen 2 look good really shows how far Piranha bytes has gotten.

UNF! I completely forgot about how awesome the skill system was, and it's making me moist now.

I managed to finish Risen 2. If you got past the pirate retardation and managed to forget that this was from the guys who made Gothic, it was a fairly decent RPG - mediocre in almost every way, but playable.

Now Risen 3… I don't know what exactly pissed me off about it, but three hours in, all I could think about was how I wish I played something, anything different than that. I think it was a combination of the story taking a turn even more retarded than the pirates ("Now it's pirates FIGHTING DEMONS! :DDDD") and that everything looked and felt extremely consolised. Even more than Risen 2

I played and enjoyed Gothic 1 then stopped at 2 when I realized how stupidly difficult the game got with the Expansion. Spending several hours and save scumming to hell just to kill an enemy I had no choice but to kill wasn't my idea of fun. Even though I had light dragon armor and a decent 2 handed sword it was painfully difficult. Not to mention shitty critical implementations. Literally turning the game in to an RNG grind fest.

I'll have to go back and play the game without the expansion. It's just to hard otherwise. And not in the gitgud sense either. I did every mission I could and stacked as much leveling as I was able and still got fucking killed by a single skeleton. I'de like to know how anybody here was able to beat the game from a new game to the end with NotR installed. Maybe I just did something wrong.

I tried to install Gothic 2 from the GOG installer, but I keep getting a false positive from my antivirus. Even when I add the installer to my whitelist, it does not work.

Run as administrator.
That or offline and disable your AV.

Thanks. I just decided to run as administrator. I forgot to try that first for some reason. I sometimes have that happen with GOG and it seems to be a common problem.

I don't know what to feel

Well on one hand, He knows stupid shit but on one hand, he's a fucking moron to compare Gothic to Skyrim.

So, hug him and than Slap the taste out of his mouth.

This is what it feels like to be raped.

they bit of more than they could swallow. If they had made the map a third of the size and left varrant and nordmar out the game could have been great.
the orks are another story though. ive watches a few interviews about gothic 3, one with their concept artist where he talks about how the original designs for orks were completely different from what they turned out to be. much more like gothic 1&2, but with even more focus on their shamanic and religious tendencies. Apparently the publisher wasnt happy with it and wanted them to change it to something more "relatable", meaning generic.
its a real shame what happened with the game.

i usualy play a mercenary and abuse the shit out of the scrolls you can buy from mages and alchemists. you can kill almost anything with a dragonsnapper or shadowbeast transformation scroll, firerain and thunderstorm are great against groups of bandits and if you want to be cheeky you can use the downscale enemy spell against foes you have to kill but arent strong enough.
and the freezing spells are fucking op against single enemies.
that way you can level quite easily until you reach the point where you can slaughter almost anything in melee combat.

Can't devs just tell the publisher "No"? They're the ones making the game, without them, the publisher has nothing.

and without the publisher the devs dont have any money and go out of buisness. unless they find another way to fincance themselves, but things like kickstarter werent realy around at the time and probably wouldnt have paid anywhere near enough. and i imagine it would be pretty tough to find other investers, since gothic 1&2 were barely profitable.

Tbh I liked Risen 3 better than 2, but yeah the first one was better.

Also kinda related to Gothic. There is a medieval 2 mod that features Khorinis and the continent of gothic 3.

Its makers are german but they have a english translation. I played it in german and its quite nice even though Varant is a bit op.

Here are some links:
forum.worldofplayers.de/forum/threads/1132572-Gothic-Total-War-Mod-für-Medieval-2-4

twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?362213-Gothic-Total-War

totalwar-forum.de/index.php?thread/4817-gothic-total-war-download/&postID=297074&highlight=gothic#post297074

it just seems like an one-sided deal to me. The publisher exerts zero effort, except for marketing, while the devs do all the work. The publisher then gets a share of the profits. That alone would be okay, but why does the publisher in any way involve himself with the development process?

welcome to the wonderfull world of investors.
whatever it takes to make a bit more money and fuck everyone else.

Because they know better than the developer what is more profitable, obviously

Are you new here? Wanna be friends?

I murdered that guy in cold blood in front of the Old Camp gate guards. Fuck that annoying shit and his undead form.

i had alot of fun killing that guy in all kinds of ways.
i had alot of fun with the guy.

He's a furfag too.

He has an incredible amount of lines

Are there other cases where developers put such effort into fucking with the player?

...

polanspeak is adorable

In G1 I noticed that I fall right down when I climb some ladders. Is that a glitch due to the systempack mod?

I don't think so, I remember there being a few ladders that just didn't work right.

also, rolling for Risen 1 replay
0/1 - Sword
2 - Axe
3/4 - Staves
5/6 - Bow
7/8 - Crossbow
2/9 - Magic
dubs - replay Gothic 1 instead

i never got the appeal of playing with bow or crossbows in risen or any of the gothic games. melee combat is so much more fun and magic has so much more possibilities.

Gothic 2 has so much love and attention to detail put into the mapping that it makes me think it's a real world, that and the characters themselves and the music.

Anyone else here just feels lost in that world when playing? This is how you do world building.

Imagine a reboot of G1 and G2 with todays standards.

You forgot some of the following:

>there are games sporting all those features

I fucking hate normalfags

Holy fuck stop you're triggering me.

Holy shit, it's like they made the controls this bad on purpose. I can take clunky but this shit makes Martian Gothic feel like Metal Gear Rising.

I love it!

You're probably going to call cancer on this, but how would this game play with a gamepad? Maybe through Xpadder.

It's mostly because the keys aren't bound for QWERTY.

What are they bound for? QWERTZ

*QWERTZ?

Today OP was not a faggot, 10/10

I don't remember.

It would probably work pretty well if you define the buttons the right way, the games only require a few keys.

Arrow keys, ctrl and alt.

Just rebind them. My setup is WASD for movement, E for action key, and the rest default. Also, leave CTRL as action key too. Picking up objects and casual interation is easier using E, while combat is better with CTRL.

I actually prefer the original bindings, but I'm probably just too used to them.

...

also,

at times like these i imagine how good witcher 3 could have been if they had just left all that shit out and instead focused on making the quests playable WITHOUT retarded helpers like that.

you know, im pretty sure one of the slave girls in the old camp is called anita.

You are no son of mine.

I was mostly reffering to the other guy. I used to play on arrow keys too when I was little, but I just can't get into it again now

meant for

...

What the fuck am I reading?

I just checked, sadly there's no Anita.
Also it seems the newer versions of the game are censored, I remember the bathing girl being naked, now she keeps her underwear on.

tl;dr: he said its a good game but its shit compared to the old gothics

...

He didn't say that. He said it's "different" from the old Gothics and then went on to say that the game is really challnging, because 6 bloodflies mobbing him can kill him

Fuck Gothic 2, spent all that time running away in the colony, quicksaving/loading for hours just to get to the fucking old camp and then when I finally get away from that hell and move to the next act:

Fucking gamebreaking bugs again, already had to watch out for them in Gothic 1.

Just playing Gothic 1. What bugs are you talking about?

Stuff like learning lockpicking/sneaking before the NPC tells you to makes him unable to realize you did it. Luckily it was apparently fixed by one of the many mods I downloaded before playing.

It's a hassle to look all that stuff online so you don't accidentally fuck yourself over permanently, as has now happened to me in Gothic 2, no way I'm restarting that thing all over again and getting to the same point just to have Hagen disappear again.

At least I learned that mobs do not aggro if you make yourself a monster, so hypothetically getting to that old camp is now piss easy if you have some scrolls with you. Too bad I realized that after hours of shit fucking god damn I am so GOD DAMN MAD HOW CAN A FUCKING IMPORTANT NPC JUST DISAPPEAR LIKE THAT JESUS FUCK

Will you marry me, OP?

thats weird, i played both games many times and never had any big gamebreaking bugs.

Well, if you have any saves that are around the start of act chapter 3 with

Then I wouldn't mind continuing, but I don't know if importing/exporting saves is even possible, not to mention the hassle with compatibility.

Looked up more gameplay footage of it.
The combat looks dangerously similar to the click spam from the risen games.

do you have any mods installed? if you dont it should work without trouble, if you do its worth a try. but im not sure if i have a savegame like that, i'll have a look.

I guess the really major mod I'm running with is that L'hiver graphical overhaul.

shouldnt make a difference, but i dont have a save either way. i guess i didnt bother to save them when i reinstalled windows about a year ago. all i have is a level 10 mercenary (which is the superior faction) whos currently in the process of looting the secret stash of the thief guild.

I actually think it probably does, the mod seems to 'rebalance' and 'add items/weapons'.

Anyway, my savegame is: jii.moe/EJyznYDEW.zip

If anyone can somehow find and talk to lord hagen, or at least somehow progress the quest, I'd be really grateful.

That has never happened to me, but the "vanished" NPCs are relocated to a small plain you can't reach without using cheats, somewhere near the temple ruins where the water mages are.

Look it up and visit it with cheats, maybe he's there.

I remember the rape boars and that dragons can't climb stairs.

Is this the mod?

worldofgothic.de/dl/download_148.htm

Don't know about all that German jumbo jambo, but it's this:
moddb.com/mods/lhiver-en-edition

Damn, that looks nice.

G1 question, why do some hits not deal any damage? I stood right in front of the Minecrawler queen and attacked her at different animation frames, it didn't seem to make a difference. Once only 1 out of 20 hits was effective, once 3 times in a row.

Only your crits manage to get through her defense.

You can finish the quest by just taking the eggs, killing the queen is optional.

These things are easy as fuck to kill 1 on 1. You just have to hold W and let it come close to you. As long as you hold W you will be invulnerable to their attacks. As soon as you hear the sound that they make when they attack you counterattack and then go back to holding W.

They're a nightmare when there's a pack of them and you can't lure them to you one by one.

That's not a Razor, but a Dragonsnapper from Gothic 2.

Those things are rape on two legs. And you can get a quest very early too kill one of them, resulting in instant death most of the time.

I know it's a dragonsnapper. They're a joke 1 on 1 if you know how to fight them. Just like the trolls.

Song language is old fashioned Swedish sung by a German.

Talking about the announcer, kurwa

See that percentage next to the skill of the weapon in question you're using? That's the critical hit rate. Crits add your strength total as damage on top of weapon damage, while non-crits are just weapon damage.

Just a warning, in gothic 1 there might be problems if you have mouse look enabled. If the game crashes, the cursor gets stuck in the middle of the screen and the game won't shut itself. Trying to TAB+Enter with task manager doesn't work either (at least in win7).

To avoid this, disable mouse look. The game might crash but you'll be able to close via task manager.

...

I've read that the game adds your STR/DEX to your weapon's attack value and then subtracts the enemy defense ratings to calculate damage no matter what. Wouldn't more STR be pointless when not dealing crits? I've had the impression that the crits double that bonus instead.

When not dealing crits, STR/DEX are indeed pointless, but all weapons have a certain STR/DEX requirement before you can wield them. And later in the game, if you level up your skills enough, your crit rate will be high enough to the point where you can nearly always crit.

...

I played like 60 hours, defeated Raven, got the sword of fucking shit up of beliar, made the eye of Innos powerful again, I have to defeat the dragons and STILL the fucker from the town won't teach me how to pick locks.

When the hell does he trust me? There are so many chests that I can't unlock…

making him trust you is always the first thing i do in town since my autism wont let me walk away from a locked chest.
help out greta by paying her debts to matheus or whatever his name is. if thats not enough, beat the shit out of the money lender, get his book and give it to torben.

but honestly its a bit shit that you cant learn lockpicking from other people, like cavalorn, diego or lares, or some mercenary.

I already missed that mission sadly, can't complete it anymore. And I can't join the thieves guild either or whatever it was, the door near the ship is locked. I know no other way to learn lock picking, I assumed SOMEONE in the bandit's camp would teach me but nope… even there there's no one to teach me lockpicking.

Is it safe to assume that I just need to start a new game for that?

are you sure you cant join the thiefs guild? have a good chat with the bartender at the harbor if you havent done that yet.
or did you kill someone important?

no ty i'd rather play real games

Bartender has nothing new to say. There was a mission with a package from some thief at the bar, and I had an option to deliver the package to keep it to myself. Knowing the mission was for a theif I kept being a dick and kept the package to myself and selected the option to tell him to fuck off.

Maybe he was supposed to get me into the thieves guild if I would had helped him, but I don't know…

I just downloaded the first one with the link OP gave, the game won't start though. I've got it running as admin in XP/3 comparability, but every time I try to run it it says, "gothic has stopped working."

what do?

RTFM . Third attempt.

installed the patch and such, doesn't seem to have helped anything. I'll keep looking through the wiki tho

hes part of it, i thought hes the only thief you realy need to work with, but apparently not.
but either way, there are a few members of the guild in town you can either help or work against. if you help a few, you get the key to the sewers, if you piss them off they send an assassin to kill you, who also has the key to the sewers. either way you get there and should get a chance to join them.
the fish merchant is another thief. if you go out of the southern gate, up the stairs to akils farm and turn left, you will find a cave with low level bandits and a note. bring the note to the fish merchant.

I think one of the pirates teaches thief skills, or just either do all of those quests or tell the city guard about all of them:
- Chasing Rengaru (the guy who stole from the merchant at the market square)
- Find the message in the fish at the bandit cave near Lobart's farm and tell Halvar about it
- Ask the barkeeper at the harbor for illegal work and do the quest for the guy he sends you to

I think there's at least one more, but I can't remember now
When you're done with those, the barkeeper will send you to Atilla, who will either give you the key or try to kill you, depending on how you treated the thieves

I forgot how easy is to cheese orcs with one hand swords, spamming left and right swings force them to backup and do the long-ass charge animation.

I installed Gothic as per OP's instructions, but can't find the language setting. Anyone know how to change it?
I can just play in English as it is now, but since I speak German perfectly fine, I figured I should really enjoy the original voice acting.

Let's say you're talking to a friend and try to recommend him Gothic.
If he retorts
What would you tell him?

Either:
or

But if one only plays Skyrim and TW3, the dated controls will be too much of a barrier for them

Grab the closest piece of table ware and start stabbing and hacking until nothing but a pile of Fleischwanzenragout is left.

I'm afraid you'll have to download the German soundfiles and overwrite the ones in your game folder. They're easily found via google though, and it's no problem at all.

Alright guys, I'm gonna try again with the fish merchant or bartender to see what they have to say. I know I talked to them a long time ago and finished all their quests but maybe now there's a new option.

I probably found some note in a fish but I don't remember showing it to Halvar, actually I forgot who the hell was Halvar.

Found a shitload of expired links and a lot of other Germans looking for the same thing in several forums, but not a single one solved the problem so far. Mind giving me a site name so I can narrow down my search?

Also, sites like pic related that automatically create pages from search queries are weird.

Halvar is the fishmonger at the harbour.
Once you've read the message in the fish, you can blackmail him, narc him out to the guards, or give him the message for free (I would recommend this, he now sells a few stuffed fish for the price of a normal one)

Give me a moment, I'll see if I can find it.

Sweet, well thanks for the tips, gonna play the game and see what I can do now. I WANT to rip open all the chests

I'm sorry, it seems this method only works for the first game.

You could get a German mod that doesn't change much about the game, I think I did that once and it changed my English game to German when I was playing the mod.

I dont really like Gothic 1 solely due to the controls.

Can i still enjoy Gothic 2? It sounds like it's control scheme is alot better.

Thanks for trying though, user.
I seem to have found a workaround in the meantime, someone actually uploaded the German version and linked to it via a Youtube video description.

Here's the link to the video. I used jdownloader since I still had it lingering on my system from back when I downloaded massive amounts of songs for Phase Shift.

Because both of those game especially Skyrim have plenty to learn from gothic.

Yeas but I higly recommend, at least suffering trough Gothic 1 because the 2 is a direct sequel.

Nice.

But this really bugs me, I know for sure that I had a language pack for Gothic 1, because I just this weekend replayed it after seeing this thread, and since I was to lazy to look for my CD, I downloaded and patched it.

Isn't there a mod to make Gothic 1's controls better then?

Probably not, maybe you'll get used to it while playing.

that's the thing. In what aspects exactly is it superior?

They both have a fuckton of bugs and AI stupidity though.

Mm, let's say i complete both Gothic 1 and 2, where should i go from there? Gothic 3? Risen?

It doesn't really matter, Gothic 3 does continue the story and adds a bunch of new (unfinished) mechanics, while Risen is more like a fleshed out vanilla Gothic 2, though it feels less inspired and the latter half is mostly a dungeon crawl. Risen 1 starts off the same premise where Gothic 3 ended despite being different IPs (gods were banished from the Earth, here come the Titans), so it's not like you're missing much out on story, though you will see a ridiculous amount of similarities.

Ah. Right now, i have no idea if my game has glitched. I went to sleep in a random bed i've found and now i only hear NPC's talk and i can't wake up?

Usually you automatically get up. Have you tried reloading a save?

I despise gothic 3, even now that most of the bugs and the combat is fixed. its a half finished game with a bad story, bad quests and bad gameplay.
That said, there are peopel that like it, even to the point of declaring it their favorite game of all time. And i can even understand it. Its basicly oblivion with a more interesting world and more glitches. And i fucking hated oblivion.

risen 1 on the other hand is more like gothic 1&2. I realy enjoyed it, but its pretty short and you can just tell that they wanted to recreate the gothic world and just couldnt quite do it.

And whatever you do, stay away from risen 2&3 they are shit.

if reloading the save doesnt help try the cheat mode. go into the stats screen, type marvin and then f8. normaly that gets you out of anything.

The worst examples of absolutely terrible German voice acting are Gears of War and Halo 3.

It's always baffling hearing the same fuckers that did voiceacting for years for movies, TV shows and games and yet still being absolutely terrible.

From what I've heard the reason why it sucks is that they literally put them in a booth without any background information of who or what they voice, most of the time not even having the different voice actors interact.

So it's just one person with a script and nothing else.

I just tossed Xardas from his tower and got to watch him run away in a very comedic fashion.

MGS is worse.

They sure sounds like it.

They also use the same few voice actors for fucking everything, and often the translations sound really awkward.

The problem is that we get every movie and game with German voices, so a lot of people aren't used to English voices at all and just eat that shit up.

Gothic has the best example of open world done right I've ever seen. The whole map is painstakingly hand crafted, meaning that it's full of content and doesn't contain illogical shit. There aren't vast stretches of land with utter nothing like in ESO and Witcher, and literally every enemy in the game is placed so that they form packs if they're pack animals, are in their respective biomes (shadow beasts are in the forests and caves, not in the open. Fire lizards stay on sandy beaches and in orc lands, trolls are only in highly elevated areas, etc.), and you can just see that every piece of map space is utilised in some way and had been designed for that purpose since the get-go, unlike the ESO approach of generating a map and sprinkling the content on top (with the content often being also procedurally generated rather than hand crafted).

Next thing is the living world. In Gothic 1, every asshole has a day/night routine and his shack, where he goes to sleep, which would be normal, but even the fucking mobs have a day/night routine, and you can see scavengers, for example, sleep at night.

Another thing (which might just be my prefference) is that gothic doesn't respawn enemies, meaning you don't have to kill the same shits over and over again, and meaning that the game is designed around having a limited access to EXP – you can't just farm it, you have to go out and actually search for an enemy to kill (which is one of the rewards for exploration). Furthermore, the whole combat system isn't just about numbers and about how big a level you are. Equipment is extremely important (the good kind being rather uncommon, making finding a better sword that much more valuable), and so is the skill of the player. If you got a rusty sword of shit, you won't even tickle a troll no matter how good you are, but if you're a button spamming faggot, the troll will kick your ass even if you've got end game gear. You need to have a balance of gear and skill (and possibly also stats, as they tend to make everything that much easier, but they aren't THAT important). Compare it with Skyrim, where you just gotta mash left button ad infinity, and if your stats are good, you'll bring down almost anything even with a fucking dagger. Or compare with Witcher 3, where, if you're capable of making rolls, you can also kill absolutely anything provided that you have the patience to hack your way through the sponges (killing some faggot gryphon three times my level took half an hour where literally all I did was roll, hack, and occassionally cast Quen).

Last but not least, the detail. Minor stuff such as NPCs changing the way they address you based on your faction, being able to cook meat, ability to beat someone up without killing him (that's actually a major fucking thing, and I'm glad gothic makes heavy use of it), or even NPCs getting pissed if you stroll into their huts. All that shit combines together to give the world a real feel to it.

coulnd't have put it better myself.

Add to that, that there is no fast travel system you can use from the start. You have to explore the world and find places on foot to begin with. And you cant just take the oblivion rout, look at your questmarker and run straight in that direction. For starters, you dont have a map to begin with, you need to orient yourself on landmarks, secondly if you go too far of the roads you will run into monsters far to strong for you. It makes the exploration very risky to begin with, but also very rewarding, because you can find very usefull items, like spell scrolls ealy on.
then, later in the game you will find teleport stones, which allow you to fast travel between certain points, but only after you did alot of shit to get there in the first place.

It really forces you to get to know the lay of the land. Even if you do grab the map, it looks like someone scribbled something on dirty toilet paper, and won't make much sense to you until you actually went to the areas and looked what's there, after which it makes perfect sense. By the end of Gothic 1, you'll have the entire game map memorised to even the tiniest path, and won't even need to use a map, at which point they'll give you teleport stones so that you don't need to waste time walking through areas you already visited twenty times.

The effectivity of the whole approach is clear when you consider just how much content there is in the game, and how incredibly small the map actually is. It's really tiny when compared with ESO, yet it's so full of stuff that it doesn't seem that way, and thanks to that doesn't need any loading or shit like that - there are literally only three places that need to load separately, and those are the old mine, free mine, and sleeper temple. Compare with Skyrim where you face a loading screen every time you enter a house.

The big open world games of today tend to try to amaze you with their scale, but don't provide that much of content. A great example of that is probably witcher 3 where, I recall, the biggest map (the countryside around novigrad) had three quarters of it absolutely fucking empty. Worse yet, when you actually went to one of the markers on the map, 90% of the time it was just a few random enemies around a chest, and that was it. All of Gothic 1 would probably fit on one of the bigger islands in Skellige, yet exploration in it felt ten times more rewarding than in Witcher despite the scale differences.

I think the greatest stegnth of the game, compared to what we have now, is not that it has the most fullfyling leveling and difficulty system i have ever played I think that the guys at fromsoft took a lot of inspiration from gohic maybe but the fact that it's an openworld rpg which is not built around minimarkers and it makes it soo good.

isn't the Orc graveyard a separate zone too?

Damn, I forgot that one

I am not too sure about that, but I do know for a fact that the guys who made Gothic were inspired by the Ultima games. Also many of the JRPG developers were inspired by the early Ultima and Wizardry games, so that might be it.

Most people outside of Germany and eastern Europe have never heard of Gothic, I don't think Japs would know it.

Also the Ultima and Wizardry games were both inspired by Dungeons and Dragons(I am sure that also had different inspirations as well, besides mythology and fables). It's funny in a way, what began with Japs copying western designs and games now has ended with westerners doing the same with jap games(the Souls clones, that FF X clone with a Lord of the Ring theme made by EA) and with some people calling them the saviors of gaming. The same thing happened with anime as the big eyed drawings were inspired by Betty Boop, a western cartoon, and now western cartoons take inspiration from anime, and people(at least on chans) consider anime to be of higher quality than western cartoons.

In case anybody got problems running Gothic 2 on win7, follow this guide: steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=239914776

Souls was mainly inspired by Shadow Tower and King's Field, their previous works, which in turn were inspired by Ultima Underworld

Well I wouldn't bet my life on it, but that's the feeling I've got while playing Dark Souls.

that was such a disapointment. especialy after they said in some interview that they took alot of inspiration from the gothic series.
for a modern rpg it was great, but that means almost nothing. exploration was unexciting and unrewarding and even though turning of the minimap and locationmarkers made it a bit better it wasnt good. and i honestly dont understand what benefit they got from having an open world when they cant do exploration right.
every story they told in the game could have been told better if it was divided into chapters and the maps were smaller and more focused.

It's post apocalyptic fantasy. It's like someone mashed together Risen with Fallout. Honestly I think it might be their last game if it doesn't sell well and it sort of looks like a mess from what I've seen so far.

Yeah, for all its flaws it was still a good game by today's standards. It's too bad that today's standards are so far below the old ones.

most of the time it provided absolutely nothing. You got to see procedurally generated plots of land that looked the same as anywhere else, got to fight a few mobs that had shit loot you didn't need and whom you've beaten countless times before, and more often than not, there weren't even any interesting landmarks or anything. In Gothic, you can't take thirty steps without stumbling across something interesting, be it a cave, a ruin, or some NPC.

Bragging rights about having a big map. It's a big selling point - when you tell kiddies you have a map three times of Skyrim (I pulled this number out of my ass), they'll shower you with adoration because to them, bigger map=more content=better game.

Let's hope this is the case and they're in a swim or drown scenario. If they manage to make a decent game, there is hope yet, if they don't they confirm their worthlessness and will be put out of their misery.

How did your first encounter with an Orc go?

my face when

Probably a group of them in the orcish area.

I blame the elder scrools series succes, I blame skyrim, FUCK YOU TOOD!

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I don't know what to say. The first hour or three of this game are mind numbingly slow, but everyone's right about the progression. Getting decent at combat, exploring a bit, finding a decent weapon, making money, doing quests: it really feels good when you reach a milestone, they did it well. I just bought the map of the colony too, and let me say it is a small map; the world felt huge without it.

The world in Gothic 1 is damn small, but it's made so well you don't even notice it.

So guise, it was on sale so I bought Risen 3, of which I remember the hype trailer from a while ago. Now I have a machine powerful enough to run it, so imma go for it.
Did anyone here try it?
There's a long ass guided section in the beginning, but when you get past it the game gets tolerable.
So far it's not bad, it's just doesn't feel like gothic yet
I still have hope for PB
One day they will get it
One day they will get what made G1 and G2 great

I found Risen 3 enjoyable, I like the pirate setting and it's a lot more Gothic like Risen 2 at least.

Since you got it on sale, I'd say it's worth it.

Gothic 1 is still fairly easy IMO (of course compared to modern RPGs it's nightmare difficulty), as all you have to do is avoid a certain type of enemies until you get better gear and stomp them into the ground, and killing the lower level enemies is usually fairly simple if you aren't a button spamming retard and don't let yourself get mobbed. I went to G2 NotR straight after finishing G1, and holy shit this is hard. Almost everything kills you in 1-3 hits regardless of armor, and you need 10-20 hits to defeat anything bigger than a goblin. Right now I'm just scouring the map for any lesser enemies to get some exp/collect herbs, and trying to figure out how the fuck is it possible that literally any bandit faggot with a bow can kill me with a single shot despite having 40 arrow protection.

So guys, I did pretty much all the quests in all three camps, decided to go with the old camp.
Bought the better armor off Diego and now I can actually kick some ass.
Killed some bandits (the ones near the new camp, in the cave brewing their own stuff), got rid of every single mob in the surrounding forests, barring the Shadowbeast or whatever it's called. I deal no damage to it with my 33 dmg blade.
Hunted down every Snapper I knew about, but still can't take the black goblins. Is there a trick to fighting them or is it just stats holding me back?
I also got sent to the cultist camp - when I enter, this guy automatically talks to me to trigger chapter 2, but I'm only level 9.
Should I dodge him for now and scour the map for mobs, or is it fine to go ahead?
I'm not sure where else to go at this point though. I feel like there's only Orc areas left on the map.
Didn't clear out the swamp yet, maybe I should do that first.

The swamp is probably too hard for now, but you could search the woods between the old camp and the brotherhood, there's a bunch of wolves and stuff to kill there.

The goblins are only hard due too their high numbers, alone they're weak.

Your best bet is to just continue the story, you can do almost all sidequests whenever you like, and the mainquests give you quite a lot of XP through all the enemies you have to kill.

Also, beat some guys up, they won't die and you get XP and all their stuff, even from merchants. Guards you've beaten won't react to you asaulting people, so you can pretty much just work through the camps.

Feel free to proceed. All chapter transition does is spawn a few critters on the map and maybe restock the merchants (not sure there). The only really effective way to combat big mobs, such as black goblins, in gothic is to get better stats so that you can take a bit of their damage before taking them all out. Best way to do that is to proceed with main quest and get some better armor

I didn't even think of that, good call. Time to slaughter my way across the camps.

For even more XP, shoot them with a bow or crossbow once they're up again, but this will get in quite some trouble.

Also, some NPCs have unique weapons, most of them are pretty good.

How will that get me in trouble? Do they die with ranged attacks?
Anyway, I don't like abusing bugs like those - the game never intended for me to have such an insane amount of experience.
Going to lay them down once though.

Yeah, shooting kills them, and gives you XP again.
I don't think it's a bug, since it has been in the game since the beginning and wasn't removed, but I don't use it most of the time, empty camps really bring down the atmosphere.

Ranged weapons and spells kill, yeah.

Can't pass? Just walk in sideways.

So, in G2 NotR, should I go to the valley of mines first or to the addon?

I really, REALLY wish i got this game as a kid
Would've absolutely loved it, I spent good 2-3 years of my childhood doing nothing but playing morrowind, best time of my life.

Christ pretty much nothing 2005 or older will please you.

I think you are pretty much forced to go to the add-on world before you can return to the Valley of Mines.

yea notrl is fucking brutal. what you can do to get a few levels early on is buy a dragonsnapper or shadowbeast scroll and just roam the wilderness for a bit killing lesser animals. but you want to keep at least one of those in case you have to kill something big.

You have the choice when to go to the valley and Yarkendhar.

Once you've joined a faction you can speak with Lord Hagen and get the quest for returning to the valley, but you also get the last key fragment for the teleporter to Yarkendhar.

After that you're free to do whatever you like you just have to complete the Yarkendhar story before you can repair the Eye of Innos, because Vatras needs another water mage to fill in for him while he's at the sun stone.

Okay OP, i never played this shit but vee never fails to suggest a good game. downloading it

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actually that was my stone golem that tossed him down. Poor Xardas completely panicked at his sight.

So this is how games looked like in 2001 right?

Pretty much, but without the shadows and half the resolution.

okay

You went too close to the magic barrier that encloses the valley.
Normally it knocks you back and damages you for a bit, but since you have almost no HP, it killed you, seeing how your health bar is empty.

interesting

That feel when no Gorn friend.

Standar is bae. I had never played this and it just werks.

Still awkward as fuck, but it works.

Is this a regular glitch or something? I pick up the ore from Nek and suddenly my inventory shows a shitton. I'm glitch rich.

Should I simply restart?

I also had a glitch where a scavenger sent me flying above the camp as well. It was rather comical.

That's weird, I never had a bug like this. Are you using any mods?

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK

I've encountered this bug once, but that was like 6 years ago. Sometimes the game loads the wrong textures for the wrong object.

Well, I was using the DirectX 11 mod for a bit, but I got rid of it due to how glitchy and atmosphere breaking it was.

Now that's a flat woman.

You could reload and loot Nek again, or just throw the ore in the river or something.
It doesn't matter much though, the game just throws money at you and you pretty much only need it for buying new armor now and then.

Yeah, fuck it. I'll keep it. I dislike grinding anyhow.

scrolls and runes are pricey too.