Gothic

after 20 years I am still enjoing it a lot :) And I am playing with German dubbing this time.

Bored being the Chosen One, great hero everyone's begging for help? Try Gothic. Here you're nobody, just another convict thrown into a magical prison camp. No one important won't even want to speak with you until you prove useful in some way, let alone giving you important missions. Saving world? Forget it. You'll just try to find a way out for all cost. The game has very good difficulty curve. At the beginning you'll scrap for every magical ore nugget and ordinary wolf will seem unbeatable enemy. But the game rewards you for perseverance with a great feeling of power increase as you gradually get stronger with every new level and will be able to get revenge on fellow inmates who could beat and rob you without breaking a sweat previously, as well as with great atmosphere and immersion. On the cons side, controls scheme is a bit strange and requires some time to get used to. And vanilla game can crash sometimes. But try to install Union (SystemPack 2.0), Gothic 1 Community Patch and for slightly better visuals and additional stability D3D11 Renderer. I've done this and haven't had even one crash.

Yes

It took me a few hours to get back into it but once I got there it felt just like playing it back in the days. If your game starts freezing during startup try out different compatibility modes for the gothic.exe, I think in my case it worked reliably with Windows Vista Service Pack 2 compatibility mode. After that I got through it with just some random crashes here and there. Sadly this version does not include the in game concert of In Extremo in a later chapter.

After playing this game for some time now, I find that I had over-looked a lot of really cool stuff. I think I will start over, slow down and enjoy what I'd been missing....