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.
Pouring so many hours into Neverwinter Nights back in the day, it pains me to say this: the game has not aged gracefully. Unlike the Baldur's Gate series or Icewind Dale 2, NWN was limited by its technical capabilities and offered a dialed-down D&D experience compared to the aforementioned Infinity Engine classics. Basically, imagine you're that one kid with only two friends who were into D&D back in the 80's/90's and so the kid taking the role of DM needs to adapt the campaigns to merely two adventuring misfits. NWN in a nutshell. For starters, the default campaign is just underwhelming. The story is intriguing and well-written, sadly the gameplay doesn't match the writing. By far the worst aspect of the campaign, aside from the aforementioned "two-man D&D unit", is your complete lack of control over your one henchman's equipment and limited control over their actions. The only NPC even remotely suited for the role of tank is Grimgnaw the monk, so the campaign basically pushes you into playing a tanky melee class (that is, if you don't want a AI-controlled tank that dies as often as Kenny McCormick). Compared to the Infinity Engine D&D adaptations or to NWN2, NWN feels like playing a hybrid between World of Warcraft and Diablo 2 (you'll learn to love your "Hearthstone" in a hurry). Now that the negatives are out of the way, it's only fair to mention the positives. Hordes of the Underdark is a fantastic expansion, blowing the previous two official campaigns to kingdom come; you finally get something at least resembling a D&D party (3 people) and you get to customize your party's gear. It only took BioWare three tries to actually get it right. There's also several official modules well worth your time (Kingmaker, Wyvern Crown of Cormyr, Darkness over Daggerford. But you still have to trudge through a lot of muck before you find the diamonds in the rough. I think the main reason this game still gets such fond recollection is the very user-friendly module creator.
The following serves as both review and beginner's guide. Gothic is a rather unique game. It is not an open world game where you can just run around willy-nilly and stick your nose in ominous ruins unprepared. You will die in a hurry. Repeatedly. You have no choice but to git gud, especially as the mouse-free controls are unorthodox (yet surprisingly easy to get comfortable with). Take it slow. You are a convict in a prison colony and you must learn the ropes if you wish to survive. Without spoiling too much, you have a choice between three factions: Old Camp (AnCapistan), New Camp (reformed, less corrupt AnCapistan) and Swamp Camp/Cult (Hermetic Brotherhood of Weed). Choose what best fits your aesthetic. From there, the game offers you a fair amount of freedom as to whether you opt for a melee guy, a ranged guy or a hybrid, and whether you wish to become a dedicated caster with memorized spells or simply cast spells from single-use scrolls. You also have the option of learning thief skills, which can make you wealthy in a hurry if used wisely. The gradual evolution of the PC combined with the gradual power level of enemies you'll encounter make the game feel like a balancing act for survival, but ultimately feels quite rewarding. You quickly learn which enemies are above your paygrade and should only be challenged when stronger and better-equipped (quick tip: the Orcs hit like a Mack truck, NOT for rookie convicts). One of the game's more grueling features is blocking and parrying in melee combat (against weapon-wielding humanoid enemies like fellow convicts and Orcs, you cannot block attacks from hostile animals), it feels quite twitchy and unresponsive at first and may turn off a number of players from melee-only builds (as it pays to soften them up with arrows or spells from range first). Aside from that, I haven't encountered significant bugs that impaired gameplay. Overall, highly engrossing and challenging and things only get better in the sequel.
