Gothic

Getting past the oddball control scheme and laughable voice acting is a major challenge. Once you do, however, you will find an absolutely amazing game, with unparalleled interaction for its time, an impressive story line, and an immersive world. If you're one of the people that missed it like I did the first time around, it's worth your attention.

Never played it before but the 22 hours it took me were just amazing comfy RPG goodness. Great prelude to an even better sequel.

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.

This was one of the first truly great Action RPGs I recall playing on the PC back when it came out. I had played Elder Scrolls games and while those were fun, to me the Gothic series was a superior game and series. The first and second in particular. The first game had such an interesting setting and, at the time, a pretty unique "hero" situation and a very fun world to run freely around with interesting spells to play with (turning into a maggot to sneak through things, hah) with fun monsters to fight and other great things to do. There was no real "right and wrong" just sides you could choose and the freedom to do virtually anything in the game. A lot of your choices effected how people felt about you and even going so far as to helping someone in a fight or not could go a long way. The combat system was also very interesting in that it wasn't a simple click to swing weapon like others where you'd just kinda run up and melee and try to move around to avoid being hit. No, you could actually control in which way your sword swung. While it was awkward to get used to, once you do, you'll find it enjoyable too I believe. While Gothic 2 is the best of the bunch, I'd recommend picking up Gothic 1 because it still holds up to being a really fun RPG with quite a bit of replayability to see what to do for different factions or try a different type of build for your character.

Just installed it today and it works fine !