Gothic II

Gothic 2 Gold

Developer: Piranha bytes

Publisher: Jo Wood

Release: October 28, 2003 in North America

Genre: RPG, SandboxRating: M

Platform: PC

DRM Free

Enter a rough and dark world full of dangerous monsters and uncaring people forced to fend for themselves. Where almost everything will kill you and survival is slim. Prepare for a long journey to save the land from a great evil that will destroy all in it's wake. Can you survive this epic journey?

Gothic 2 is a part of the Gothic series with 5 sequels and two unofficial sequels. It has been a hit over in Europe due to it's complexity, atmosphere, and challenge. It has had some small success in the west with a dedicated fan base still creating patches and making mods for it. This game is not easy and it is unforgiving but fair to players. At no point will you ever get stuck. If you can come into this game with an open mind, then you are in for a wonderful classic RPG. The game is still compatible with modern systems from what I have read. In my case, I had to instal a patch to fix it up. The game comes with an optional add-on called Night of the raven which makes the original Gothic 2 a lot harder but adds a lot more story content so is worth it.

Story:

The story takes places directly after Gothic 1 but altered the end where your character defeated the sleep in the penal colony. The magical barrier that was holding all the convicts for the purpose of mining magical ore for the Orc war fell and and a huge earthquake happened. The hero became trapped in the ruins of the temple of the sleeper for three weeks. The necromancer, Zardos, transports the hero out of the temple to stop the latest threat that came after wards. DRAGONS!! The dragons are a part of a force of evil summoned by the Sleeper to wreck havoc upon the land. It's up to you as the hero to stop this threat.

The story may seem simple but this is just the outline about how an island wrapped up in a desperate war, while dealing poverty and danger all around them. Learning about the people's lives and what is going on is the best part of the game. It wraps up nicely into fitting with story and not divorced from it. The story does a excellent job linking Gothic 1 and 3 together with everything making more sense.

Game play:

Game play is an open world third person RPG with real time combat. The game is very detailed in the simplest actions you can perform like sitting on a chair or cooking a meal. It is mostly pointless to watch but adds so much detail to the universe. There are people that refer to this as what defines a European RPG. Even the NPC will have schedules in what they do or when they sleep. Monsters will have behavior patterns where they wander around, will investigate and eat corpses, and take a fighting stances to ward you off rather then be a constant predator. Quests are long and detailed with many different ways to complete them. An example of this in the first chapter when you try to get into the city. There are literally 5 different ways to get into the city and one of them allows you to stack exp by allowing you to get into the city twice. All these quest are about leading you to complete the main storyline. Not all quests are easy to find though as you have to talk to everyone repeatedly.

You will have huge environments to explore and scavenge in order to survive the 6 chapters you play and will be traveling back and forth between locations and this can sometimes be boring after awhile. Later on,You will get access to teleporters that will take you to certain locations. It may seem annoying not to teleport to wherever you want but it keeps it so exploration is risky and dangerous. The environments will change in each chapter and people will have new quests. It does always bring me satisfaction though when I complete a quest, discovering new and hidden areas, and survive a tough challenge. It it much harder then most RPG's released today which takes time to get use to.. You can expect to die a lot as you learn from your mistakes but they are not unfair as you will learn to foresee them. If your use to modern western RPG's then this will take time to get use to but don't get discouraged. There will always be a way to solve a problem. It's an extremely long game as I have spent over 20 hours on the first chapter alone. By the time I finished the game I spent 86 hours playing it so you best pace your self to not get worn out.

The game play is awkward at first but it works well as you get use to it. Combat focuses on Kitting, which means isolating your enemy and/or keeping your distance while hitting them away from their reach with magic and arrows. Fighting monsters in the game means you have to learn their attack patterns and back off to avoid their attacks as you can't block their attacks. Magic and arrows will always kill humans while swords will incapacitate them temporarily if they are NPC's. You can block human's attacks but they are much stronger then monsters and more likely to kill you if you get hit due to their high weapon abilities. It is possible to fight enemies even at level 1 but it takes a lot of work. If you can kill an enemy at the distance the better you will be especially if it with groups or monsters that attack in groups. At first you will not be able to handle groups of monsters and barely handle a goblin but after while you will especially when you will be facing groups of enemies in chapter 2. Humans and any opponent that uses weapons should always best fought one on one to avoid dying. The game will continuously get harder as you go along so the game will always be a challenge.

To level up in this game you must fight monsters, knock out or kill humans, complete quests, perform stunt bonuses, pickpocket people. The amount of experience you need will increase to large amounts making it important to think about where you will place your learning points. When you level up you get 10 learning points to spend on trainers to level up your skills and stats. These trainers can be any NPC that has a name so you should talk to everyone. When it comes to stats, the point distribution system starts at 1 learning point for 1 stat point or 1:1. After increasing a stat to a certain point, the amount increase to 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, and finally 5:1. Your stats can also be upgraded by special plants, potions, praying, and reading stone tablets. When it comes to learning new abilities they can start from 5 learning points to 20 learning points. When it comes to magic, it's more complicated as you have to spend learning points to learn the circle of magic then spend points to learn how to create the rune. This makes being a Mage more difficult, due to how much skill points you need to spend in magic.

When it comes to weapons you have four types you can excel in; one handed weapons, two handed weapons, bows, and crossbows. One handed weapons are faster, get them right at the beginning of the game. Stronger two handed weapons are easier to find, upgrade easier, and have more range which can help with faster monsters or ones that have a long reach. By increasing either one or two handed abilities, you can have a longer combo of swings, block faster and longer, swing faster, and a higher chance of having your strength points added to the damage. When increasing one or two handed ability, at a certain point, you have to pay more but some extra points go to your other sword ability. This does apply for crossbows and bows too. They are separate and based off of strength and dexterity respectively. Increasing your bow or crossbow ability allows you to have a higher probability of hitting a target at certain ranges and adding damage based on either your strength or dexterity stats. Arrows are easier to find but not easy to find stronger bows or upgrade to unless you specialize in dexterity swords. Likewise, bolts are harder to find but easier to upgrade to. In general, and regardless of what you choose to focus on, you at least learn some bow or crossbow skills for ranged combat, especially if you don't know/have any magic runes.

In the first chapter, you will have to choose a faction, which is basically choosing a job class. There are path to choose from, Paladin, Dragon Hunter, and Mage which could easily be considered easy normal and hard paths. Paladins can learn some magic and get good armor early. Dragon hunters learn both sword and bow/crossbow skills but learn no magic and are treated like crap by other people. They get a lot better weapons for the one handed class. Mages learn all kids of magic and learn to create runes that don't require buying scrolls. They also have the longest side quest, get the highest respect from characters and get some of the best spells by the end of the game. Likewise, they don't get their best armor near the end of the game, costs a lot to of skill points to learn magic, and they will be weakest quite often. Most people will recommend doing Mage in a second play-through as it can be overwhelming if you upgrade your stats incorrectly. It's not impossible to play as a Mage in the first play-through as I chose to do it for the challenge for the purpose of this review. I beat the game as a level 46 mage and screwed up a bit in LP distribution so it's possible to beat on your first play-through. At no point, regardless of which class, will you get stuck.

The game has it's fair amount of bugs an glitches that I have encountered. Most of them are small stuff like AI or yourself getting stuck by objects that you need to move around to get out with the rare occasion of getting stuck in the environment. One of those happened to my self when I tried to slide down a cliff. Instead of going all the way down, I ended up going up and down repeatedly never getting out of it. Sometimes I did final reach the bottom though. Rarely, the game would crash at random moments. Regardless of how you are doing, you should always save to avoid having to backtrack too much.

If you want an extra challenge or to make things easier, you can edit the ini file to activate hot key's for potion use or randomize lock combination. Being able to hot key potion's allows you to use them instantly. However you can't be doing an action and it only uses the lowest potions first but never the full recovery potions. At first it doesn't make a difference do to how weak you are but once you start getting strong enough to survive fights for awhile, it make things easier to get large amounts of enemies. The game is still difficult even with potion hot-key’s so it's your choice to use them or not.

Sound:

The sound in this game is quiet good. From the sound of foots steps to the natural ambiance of the world. It all pulls you into the atmosphere of the game. Even the music is good. There are not a lot of songs in the game so it can be tiring to listen to after while but they fit the mood of the game well. They are memorable. The acting in the game is pretty good with everyone sounding like a real person and not overacting. Unfortunately, for the size of the game, you will hear many of the same actors over and over again with some minor variations in tone. Never the less, the same voices being heard repeatedly won't hurt the enjoyment of the game. Sadly they changed Diego's voice actor used in Gothic 1 and 3 for a a squeaky hillbilly voice. His original voice was more deep that sounded like he was someone who was cunning rather then meek and scared like in this game.

Graphics:

The graphics in the game are quiet good. All textures are very detailed with real color tones unlike most modern game. Even the fog and the sun shine adds to the atmosphere of making the game to look almost like a painting. The textures by themselves kind of look old and dated but when looked at as a whole, it looks like a beautiful painting. The graphics despite coming out in 2002 still stand the test of time in being pleasant on the eyes and looking good at high resolutions. The game can be played in 4:3 and 16: 10 resolutions. You can go into the ini file to edit in 16:9 resolution but it glitches were every time you die, it turns into stretch mode which can be cured by talking to someone or maybe by interacting with an object.

Conclusion:

Gothic 2 is a really hard RPG. It will kick you in the face and and constantly test you. This is an hardcore RPG especially compared to modern mainstream RPG's. This mean that all the conveniences like regenerating health, easy combat against mass amounts of enemies, simple decisions, will not exist in this game. You will have to plan, save often, and go through trial and error to understand the game and get better at it. If you can get use to it, you can find a deep and complex game with beautiful atmosphere and challenge. Overall I would recommend this game to anyone that likes RPG's and wants to experience something different. You can buy this game DRM free at GOG for $10 or get the entire Gothic trilogy for $25 on GamerGate