Gothic 2 Gold Edition

Gothic 2 is probably my all time favorite game. I've played it to death over the years, but currently forget how to move on from Chapter One to access the key (and gateway) to Jharkendar. I've gone from Cavalorn to Lares to Vatras and back again for numerous hours now, trying to remember how to solve the Arms Dealer quest with sufficient proofs. And hence my complaint: RPGs are great for entertaining quests, but when the means to solving those challenges is obscured, and one is left to trial and error without a clear recourse if clarification is needed to resolve the quest, the game becomes too much like reality: hard work with empty results for thankless effort. Playing is no longer fun! It's like trying to pay mundane bills when you don't really owe anything yet, but your credit card is due and the payment must be processed or you get penalized and can't move on--or something like that. At least gamers have places to escape for answers on GOG and Steam.

Improvement over gothic 1 in every way

I have heard from several sources that Gothic 2 is a classic must play rpg so I decided to try it out. For the first third or so of the game, I enjoyed myself, sadly that didn't last. First of all, this is one of the buggiest games I have ever played. Getting stuck in the enviroment, AI failing to pathfind, sound and music hitching, freezes, crashes etc. These got worse as the game progressed and I am amazed that these problems are seldom mentioned when talking about the game. But even besides the bugs, there were huge issues. The climbing in the game is unpredictable and clunky. In one part of the game, the jumping was so bad that most forums adviced to use a glitch to get up instead. Getting stuck in the enviroment and/or enemies getting stuck in the enviroment, happened more often than not. There was not a single session that I played without getting stuck atleast a couple of times. Concerning the combat, I actually like the mechanics of how you attack, dodge etc but the calculation of damage and the leveling of skills baffles me in its obserdity. The game also requires you to grind which I seldom see or appreciate in singleplayer rpg:s. The main "bosses" are extremely frustrating and for many builds, requires huge amounts of cheesing to beat. Even by reading several forums and guides, the bosses were unnecessarily frustrating. They only have two attacks so there is no complexity in learning them and the same goes for all enemies in the game. The only real redeeming factor is that the quests, story and diversity in how to tackle problems is pretty awesome and is very unique to this game. I would have wanted to recommend that you play without the expansion so the frustration of the bosses can be avoided but by doing that you also miss out on the added quests and story. By the 40 hours or so that I played the game, too much of my time went into dealing with bugs, frustrating fights and backtracking so I do honestly recommend to not buy this game.

Only slight wrinkle is a severe case of "early game hell" caused by the addon. If you power through however, you'll be rewarded with an action RPG bonanza.

The world of Gothic 2 is vast, but it's naturally limited by high-level monsters at first. Little-by little you orient yourself and discover more and more places where you feel comfortable. You will go back and forth to do more stuff, which will make you intimately familiar with this place. It's just a lot of running; I wish the Sprint potions were more common. This game is exceptional at making you do tasks. Not only you will do them without being hand-held by navigation markers, you will memorize places, shortcuts on how to get to them, characters that are knowledgeable about certain topics, and so on. The game also doesn't assume you will complete every task immediately. Some of the side quests require you to wait for an opportunity until later in game. The combat is a bit stiff, but it has an admirable sense of flexibility. The spell scrolls, which every character can use almost freely, can work wonders on tough enemies, and knowing their use can cleverly resolve some supposedly unbeatable encounters. Fire Rain, Ice Block, Ice Wave are my favourite. Sleep is a thief's trump card. The levelling system is steep, the amount of points you have to spend to increase the stats grows up. Combined with the tough monsters, this makes the game very hard unless you have a thorough attitude and patience. There is no autoscaling, so beating every monster you can beat and doing every quest you can feels mandatory at times of scarcity. The permanent bonus items that you find make exploration very rewarding. After finding one, you have to make a decision whether you want to use it - as using them later saves you Learning Points, indirectly. The game interface is a bit clunky, so I recommend to install several quality of life mods, like Union Advanced Inventory. I found several game breaking bugs regarding quest scripting, so I recommend making multiple save files throughout the game, if you don't want to screw your game 30 hours in. Use cheat codes if you miss something.