Gothic 2 Gold Edition

Today, Gothic II may look like the ugly duckling, with a graphics only subtly better than its predecessor's, but you'd be a fool indeed to let that keep you from experiencing this unique game. Building upon the story, atmosphere and dry humor of the first game, Gothic II features a deep story, varied quests, memorable characters, meaningful character progression, crafting and a significant replay value due to its three distinct career choices. Combined with the Night of the Raven expansion, deftly integrated into the main game and bolstering its features and storylines, Gothic II easily delivers more than 50 hours of gameplay in a single play through.

I give this particular release a low score because it doesn't have an option to play classic Gothic 2 without the expansion. In my opinion the base game has better pacing and difficulty level and after playing through NotR once I don't feel like going through the additional chapter again. You can mod the game to be reverted to G2 vanilla, which is 5/5 game and I highly recommend playing it, but there should be an option to do it when you install or launch the game, without looking for some obscure mods. There are some enhanced games on this service which also come with the installers for classic versions, this one needs it as well!

Everything about this game is set to discourage you from playing. The terrible controls. The extremely annoying combat. The bugs. The sub-par graphics and animations. The abysmal voice acting (and the voice-over addons coming with the DLC which stand out like a sore thumb). And yet... there is just something about this game, that you let it all slide and once you look past it's many, many flaws, you can't help it but fall in love. The game is extremely rich with content and its world just feels so alive. This game surpasses even such story-rich powerhouses like The Witcher III in terms of making all of the inhabitants of the world have a life and some agency - and the game is a rushed product from a small studio from 2005! There is just so much to uncover here. Every named character in this game (and there are hundrets of them) has something to do, a quest, a story (there are literally thousands of those quests, and all have some background, some plot, none of that "exclamation mark - the rats became such pests in my basement. Bring me 10 rat tails for reward" shit. And the hiddent content! Like when you decide to say: screw you game, i will not do your quests to get into the first city. I will do my own thing, jump down a cliff to get past some overpowered monsters and find a ledge missplaced by the devs that lets me climb up a wall along the coast that has a small spot to jump down safely into the water so that i can actually swim to the city from the harbor part and break the initial quests, and... and then one of the characters in the game congratulates you on doing all that and you get an XP reward! This is just incredible. Love it, for all it's flaws, for all it's shortcomings, this game is just part of gaming history. For it's current price, you just can't not have it.

While I certainly have many more ARPGs to play before I can form a definitive answer, I will say that of all of this genre that I have played - including such games as the entire Elder Scrolls series, Fallouts 3, New Vegas, and 4, the Witchers 2 and 3, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Deus Ex, System Shock 2, Prey, and likely others - this one sticks out above all of them. I have been playing games since I was 5 years old, and here I am now in my twenties - 15+ years of gaming - and getting to the end of Gothic 2 was the first time, in all of my time playing games, I can EVER recall actually feeling kind of sad that it was about to end. Gothic 2 is one of those wonderful sequels where I would say that it improved on its predecessor in nearly every way, increasing the scope of the series without sacrificing quality. Compared to Gothic 1, there are many more paths to explore in Gothic 2. The factions you can join don't have the same quests like they do in Gothic 1, meaning each faction is actually unique in terms of quests, along with other perks like armors, weapons, skills and other benefits. The game scaled wonderfully in my 39-hour adventure - at the beginning I could hardly kill Goblins without nearly keeling over, and by the end I was cutting through Lizard Men with relative ease. Whether your interests lie in magic, ranged combat, or melee combat, Gothic 2 ensures that you have steady and constant progress, regular iterations where your leveling up feels tangible. On top of this, the combat and magic systems actually take some getting used to and do NOT reward button-mashing or brute-force, so you are actually improving at the game while your character gets stronger, and it's wonderful. The game is relentlessly difficult and does not hold your hand - but it's a satisfying experience all the way through. I could go on too about how the wonderful player-character, the organic story, the distinct characters, etc., But I'm out of room. This game is great!

An absolutely grandious game. In my opinion it is slightly worse than Gothic 1, because the balancing and pacing are slightly worse, but the gameworld is just a marvel to behold. Especially the Maya-Inspired world of the expansion is designed amazingly well.