Gothic

God knows how many hours I killed playing this game and I am still playing. I strongly recommend it!

I loved the freedom this RPG gave me, as well as the story: you start as no one, and nobody bets a dime on you, but you prove them wrong in the end. I decided to roam around and not follow the missions for a while, just messing around... and getting killed lots of times, ha ha ha. I also did some cool stuff, like making some orcs follow me into the Old Camp to kill some guards and get their loot (weapons and gold, babe, LOL). A downside might be the bugs: they increase as the game progresses, which can be frustrating. I have two backups to revert to a point in time where things worked fine. I suggest playing it with Union and G1CP, which is a community patch that fixes bugs (although I still encountered some annoying bugs). Another downside is the keyboard layout. You can delete keybindings by selecting them and pressing "SUPR" and then you can set up a more user-friendly configuration: Forward: W Backwards: S Turn left: A Turn right: D Strafe left: DELETE Strafe right: PAGE DOWN Weapons: Q Action: LEFT CTRL Jump/Side step: SPACE Run: LEFT SHIFT Speak: E Look around: R Look around first person: F Inventory: TAB Player’s status: C Missions and notes: M

Really graet atmosphere. I had issues with the game hanging on launch, but the hints from the gog support (e.g., installing the system pack) fixed that. That also enables using Gothic 2 controlls, which I find vastly supperior.

A lot has been said about Gothic, so I'll try to keep this relatively short. It's an RPG with lots of issues. The entire control scheme is wonky, and if you can't get past that, you can't enjoy the game. Combat is wildly unbalanced: the most overpowered move is dodging backward, as it grants you invulnerability for several frames; if you start using summons you can overwhelm anything; at the start you are weak as a newborn and so on and so forth. The game gets severely linear after chapter 1-2. Often, you can find glitches and assorted issues, ranging from annoying to hilarious. Despite all these problems, the game shines with an interesting story and setting, a rewarding progression (from very weak to force of nature) and an open world full of things to explore. There is an atmosphere to the prison micro-cosm you are thrown in which makes it all seem more alive than it actually is. The plot twists are nice and the game accomodates several playstyles for you to enjoy. The music could use more variety, but it's also good. It's clunky, and you can kind of tell they ran out of money and had to really rush to wrap things up, but it's the kind of game that truly resonates with a certain crowd, and I really enjoyed its clever ideas and designs, despite the all-present flaws. The jank is real, but so is the charm.

The strongest aspect of this game is by far it's overall atmosphere. The world design and layout are also pretty good... as for the rest... they are somewhere between "okay" to "pretty good". When put together they would have been enough to consider giving it "good" grade (aka 4⭐) with the atmosphere and vibes arguably pushing it towards 5... Unfortunately the flaws of Gothic are apparent. It could have been phenomenal, but it is merely good... and if the atmosphere and "vibes" of the game don't click for you, probably not even that. However as I do enjoy the overall atmosphere quite a lot, I'm giving Gothic a 4. It's too good for anything less... but even my personal bias can't make me stretch the grade beyond that... albeit I did strongly consider adding in a plus there... (I have a longer post on my blog, if you'd like to read through more of my thoughts on the game)