Gothic

I do love this game and grew up playing it. But it is incredibly flawed. The first 10 hours of this game are amazing, but after that everything falls appart. You can just mow through enemies and have too much money and skill points. I also strongly suspect that they cut a lot of quests because at some point in the story 4 NPCs act like they were this group of friends and you are basically one of them, when you didn't really do that much with those people (except Diego) and it wasn't mentioned before, that those people had anything to do with each other. The power spikes feel great at the beginning, but later, you get power spikes, when you are already owerpowered. I hadn't played this game for about 8 years. I was surprised that the mid and late game are this bad. I can't really recommend this game, even though I love it. Play the sequel.

First off, as many have mentioned, the default controls are quite horrible. Spend a good while in reconfig and running about the opening area learning how to use them. Once past that, the game gets a lot better and a slow progression becomes quicker. But be warned, if you stray too far into the wild or away from the main story arc, prepare for punishment in combat. Low level creatures are quite a challenge for those brought up on RPGs where you beat rats with a stick. There is much to the game world that can go unnoticed, such as the crafting system that is more involved than clicking a button that can surprise one once they get to it. So be sure to talk to everyone and find out what interactions you can do. Gothic is one of those games that people love or ignore due to many clunky features. But to really get into it, you need to spend an hour or four before it just clicks. The series improves as it goes along, but as game #1 it's a decent start.

Pros:many different quests, the story is pretty good to keep you interested. Cons: Horrible Game gameplay/mechanics, during a fight sometimes the buttons you press are not immediate, the camera angles will change on you disrupting your view, you cannot program the mouse buttons to fight you have to hold a button then press another one, and if you try to run away you'll just end up circling the enemy. The ending left out what happened to the Old Camp storyline.

I can't thank enough GOG.com for this game. !! Gothic 1 is perhaps my favourite game ever!! (*certainly in top5 games), but all the versions i've bought and tried , either from STEAM, or physical copies as well, have been unplayable for me, with crashes and messages such as "access violation error" !! I was desperate that i would never again play my favourite game, but thanks to GOG.com i bought a patched version of this game , and plays smoothly, like back at the good-old-days !! I'm so happy with this purchase that from now on GOG.com will be the first on my list whenever i'll buy another game!! Thanks!!!!!!!!!

"Gothic" is, along with "Two Worlds" and "Oblivion", one of my all-time favourite action role-playing games. What enthralls me most in the genre is a beautiful, detailed, large, and believable world. "Gothic" has one of the most interesting ones and has been designed with a lot of care. It tends a lot to relatively worn-out clichés, but it is all so well done that one can't really care. That you can watch your co-inhabitants get up yawning in the morning, going around their daily business, and enjoying a meal and some music around the campfire in the evening adds a lot to how realistic the world around you feels. To shallow players, things like that might seem unnecessary coating, but it is what, for instance, earned Origin the title of "world creators". Piranha Bytes achieved this as well with their Gothic series - a fantasy world that you always like to revisit, not just to complete the storyline and the game, but because it is nice to look at, there's always something to discover, and you got to know it so well over the course of the game to the point that it feels a little like a virtual home away from home. The beautiful soundtrack, the interesting characters and the fitting voice acting do their part to support the atmosphere and immersiveness. What keeps you playing is the raw standard action-RPG gameplay: a constantly evolving character that rises from zero to hero, a lot of loot to pick up and a lot of money to spend. It's nothing new or special, but it has everything that can make this kind of game so addictive. The downsides of the game don't really weigh much against all its strengths. The controls have been widely criticised, and rightly so. The weird key combinations and mouse movements you have to perform to interact with the world might feel a bit strange for the first couple of minutes. You get used to it of course, but it's an unnecessary barrier. I don't think there's many people like that on GOG, but if you lose your motivation with a game if you can't completely master it in the first 3 minutes, this might be a problem. Also, the storyline really loses all of its personality towards the end, and drowns in a sea of mediocrity. But by then you will most likely have fallen so much in love with this game that you'll instantly go on to play its sequel, which will make you quickly forget about the subpar finale of the first title. If you have any interest at all in action-oriented, real-time CRPGs, if you enjoyed the likes of Two Worlds or The Elder Scrolls series, this is a game that you will heartily enjoy and remember for a long time.