Gothic

Thulis ist what Games are made for! You can feel the programmers' passion while playing.

I love this game since played it first time in December 2003. This is my first RPG in 3D. Comparing to Morrowind world is smaller but we don't have wastelands and almost every corner is packed with something interesting to discover! NPC are very interesting, so the plot witch is not pathetic. I have installed the game yesterday and will be playing with some mods :)

This game took me 30h to complete. The novelty of the first 10h made it stand out as the superior portion, though the combat became far better with the new skills gained in the latter half. Unlike most games, it starts out hard and gets easier as you progress, which is strange to most games but more natural. Some complain about the controls, but I love the controls. These are better than many WASD schemes, and allow for higher precision in object/enemy targeting. I am right-handed. What I've heard about them being made for left-handed players sounds like BS. Yes, it takes a moment to get used to, and you might even have to look at the manual (*gasp*) but you will adapt. The game is very buggy even with patches, especially toward the end. A few times I sadly wondered whether I would be able to finish the game. 1. Roaming around I discovered the Troll den with the black goblins in the north country and managed to defeat them using the shrink scroll laying there. As it turns out, this becomes a major quest point later on. Basically, since I'd killed the troll and used the scroll already, this part made no sense anymore and the game bugged out but I still managed to make it through (barely). 2. The final part of the sleeper temple was a sloppy mess and a disappointing conclusion to a fine game. Kor Calom got stuck behind a statue while I picked off the templars and stabbed the 5 hearts (it's far too easy to exploit the terrible NPC navigation). The orc priests in the sleeper temple were obnoxiously dumb and easy to beat. These endgame bosses couldn't even scratch me in my magic robe. No challenge at all and therefore just a slog to get through. In sum, it's buggy and the ending is lame and unsatisfying; but the controls are fantastic, the combat enjoyable, and the sense of progress bar-none. Try this if you're in for something different than the standard fare.

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.

"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.