A huge bug-list, a horribly unhelpful and counter-intuitive interface/menu system and a worthless multiplayer mode make this albeit expansive and impressive RPG yet another example of what happens when you set your ambitions too high. Troika had a habit of over-promising, underperforming and releasing buggy titles and this is no exception. Worth playing if you have the patience, but you won't likely be coming back often.
but I felt this game was tighter, better balanced and more enjoyable before the expansion. NoTR threw in a (far less populated, less civilized) map to traverse which threw the leveling curve and meant that the game had to be rebalanced to take that in to account. This was done poorly and made exploring the game early on an object lesson in helplessness. This tends to break immersion and lead to frustrations, and for the life of me I can't say that the added content is that worth it. You don't get to do much other than bicker with pirates, kill more Orcs and go dungeon-crawling in a couple of really minor, claustrophobic places. It's still a worthwhile game, my advice is simply to get vanilla Gothic 2.
