Gothic 2 Gold Edition

Do not bother with negative reviews, they just do not like old games in general. Gothic has it's charm and issues (aren't all games like that nowadays?), it has incredible music, amazing story, multi-class/multi-guilds, weapon making, unique type of magic system (scrolls and runes) and much much more and keep in mind it is a game from 2005! Graphics are old, combat system is weird and clunky but millions of players loved it for immersive world, dialogues and main character. If you are still unsure if you should buy this game just wait for sale.

Be warned! If you play Gothic series 1+2 you will become addicted to RPG Gothic style. All RPG games you will play next will be compared by your mind with Gothic. And you will be forever unsatisfied because this game is perfect in its genre. It is the best of the best !

I am never playing this game again. Simply because after the first time I completed it, I felt the visceral urge to complete it again on Hard mode almost immediately. Heads up to new players who have just finished Gothic 1: Gothic 2 Gold Edition is Gothic 2 + Night of the Raven expansion preinstalled. What is Night of the Raven? It's the expansion that added a new zone to explore and ratcheted up the base game's difficulty, because the game's core audience of Polish masochists criticized the studio of German sadists for the game feeling too easy (from what I gleaned, Fire Magician specialization was too OP in vanilla release). Which is why it feels more brutal than Gothic 1 when you first boot it up. Take my advice and contact GOG customer support and they will send you a link to download Gothic 2 without the expansion, this will be on Gothic 1 difficulty. Once you've beaten it, it wouldn't surprise me if you feel like playing it again, that is when you should give the updated game a shot (new game plus, as it were). Troubleshooting aside, I do not exaggerate when saying that Gothic 2 felt more addictive than any other video game I have EVER played. If you liked the original, you will love the sequel as it takes everything that was so swell about Gothic 1 and improves upon it (without feeling like a radical departure). Adjusting from the vanilla release to Night of the Raven might still feel jarring to many players, so one final suggestion from me is to read up on enemy weaknesses and resistances on World of Gothic site. For example, if the Seekers (hooded cultist mages) feel unbeatable, take note they have no resistance to Wind spells, so Fist of the Wind is your ticket to downing them. Gothic 2 Gold will punish you, but you will still feel compelled to best it, a quality that I have not encountered in that many games. It is hard but not frustrating and obnoxious. Dark Souls is for boys, Night of the Raven is for men.

Very few reviews mentions the insane differnce of difficulty betweens those two games. Gothic 2 was my first game in the series, played it tenths of times... literally... I know all caves, corners and nooks like a back of my hand. And there is Night of the Raven add-on, which adds a lot of new content, but increases difficulty drastically. So everyone who finds Gothic 2 Gold Edition too difficult, try to get your hands on vanilla game. Game is still a challenge, but not a punishment like NOTR. A few tips to newcomers. I played both games without cheating and with a lit a bit of cheating, I explain why. Gothic 2 is hard at the beginning, but you develope your character much faster. And it isn't really important which faction you choose it's becomes pretty easy in the end. But to rank factions from easiest I would say: 1. Mages (summoning spells are very powerfull) 2. Paladins 3. Mercenaries. But in Gothic 2 NOTR the deck shuffles and rankink looks like that: 1. Paladins 2. Mercenaries 3. Mages. NOTR makes mage faction almost unplayable, and that's where "small" cheat saves the day! As soon as I turn on mana regeneration on reasonable rate, game becomes fun to play as a mage again. You don't need any mods btw. Mana regeneration is integrated in the game, just turned off by default... Playing with sword in hand you don't need any cheats, the games becomes easy enough in any case...

None of the original bugs (thanks to the Piranha Bytes guys) were fixed - on the plus side this means that you can still exploit bugs like the fire dragon godmode flag, the black ore permanent speed boost bug or the destroy undead spell exploit (not going to explain how exactly these bugs can be taken advantage of. At least not in this post). New issues: NO base game only installation anymore: the current installer won't allow you to install Gothic 2 only without NOTR. So you either play the game in hard mode (more expensive learning, tougher enemies, etc) or don't play at all. Also, window border remains visible throughout the game (covering the targeted creature's health bar, so good luck guessing how many attacks you need to kill/KO your enemy). Ok, this sounds terrible, so why 3 stars? Well, Gothic games are known for their immersiveness and the number of possibilities offered by their open words. Even despite the bugs, it's still worth playing. Just don't forget to save often. And save your game into 2 different slots at a time because the game may crash during saving (corrupting your save file).