That was when I closed then game, removed disk, uninstalled.
Yes! This is exactly what I ran into! I faked it for a while by finding a dinosaur morph scroll and by ripping up on everything in sight while it lasted, but it wasn’t enough to bring me up to speed with the rest of the world’s deadly population.
It’s a pity, because as far as convincing worlds and NPCs go, Gothic 2’s was excellent. Citizens had schedules, would react to a variety of actions you did, all were actually doing something - not milling around and talking about crabs - and the notable NPCs were downright kooky.
Maybe I could just cheat to see the rest of the game…
Oh god, that was horrific.
Hmm. I’ve been looking for a badass RPG to tide me over until Fallout 3.
Is Gothic 2 too old, now? I guess that’s subjective. Gothic 3: worse than G2? And do either of them work on Vista?
3 works on vista last time I checked. I also had 2 running on vista
You know, at the beginning of each act ALL the mobs respawn, down to the level 0 trash? So, I had a blast going as far as I could in the world before I went to the next act (and it’s pretty clear when you transition.) That way, you can level up as much as you can, and explore a ton. When you “ACT UP”, you’ll get plenty of new mobs to play with, and now you’ll have some new toys as well (spells/weapons/etc.)
I loved the HELL out of gothic 2. I remember the discovering all the nooks and crannies in the tower where you start, and finding all that loot, and books to read, and little items. Then you walk down the path, and to the left there’s a little hidden walkway that opens out onto a lake with a waterfall, and you can dive under the water and find an underground cave, and get reagents and such.
It’s like the devs put little treasures everywhere, and reward exploring with neat little bits of stuff. The world feels very hand made, and very dense with neat things to see and do.
I have Gothic 2 AND 3 both installed and running on my Vista 64. I seem to vaguely recall a patch workaround when I installed G3, but my walkthrough AAR is currently buried on the severs being used to resurrect OO so I can’t be sure at the moment. Anyway, they both run beautifully in case that was holding someone back from giving the games a try.
Gothic 2 is also on my top 10 RPGs list. Concur that it’s not as easy as typical North American RPGs, and that there’s some aspects of the interface/controls that can seem cumbersome at first until you spent some time with the game, but it’s ultimately extremely rewarding, and the depth of its world is only topped by Oblivion and Ultima VII.
Not a mod per se, but there is a pretty beefy community patch for G3:
I’ll second, or third or whatever, that Gothic 2 is great. The expansion is great as well. Of all the crpg’s I’ve played I think G2 is the one that has given me the most joy of exploring. The world feels so alive, and the possibility of running into and fleeing from critters beyond your competence to handle makes the exploration all the more interesting. It is a lot more interesting trying to climb atop hills and precipes when you know there is a possibility that you will be rewarded with a perma stat boost herb, and run the risk of bumping into a shadowbeast who will make mincemeat out of you for a good part of the game. Unfortunately I thought the last map was a bit of a letdown.
I thought the second was much more enjoyable than the third though.
Any particular reasons for this, or just a general sense of sameness?
The second is tighter and more focused. It has much better combat, too. The third suffers from over-ambition for one thing, but more importantly the combat is simply broken. I don’t mean that it’s bad. I mean it is broken.
You know, at the beginning of each act ALL the mobs respawn, down to the level 0 trash?
That was distinctly not my experience. I triggered an Act before I was sufficiently leveled up, and the world repopulated with the level 15s mentioned above, including the starting area and town.
I was actually having a blast since I thought I could make progress even not being leveled, and got to the Orc-held lands and castle by mostly running away (hate the combat anyway), and then I tried going back only to be greeted by things that easily 1-shotted me. Including the spoiler dudes wandering all over the place.
Grrr, there’s no way to buy Gothic 2 online…
What?
Take your pick.
Ah, phooey, I meant Digital Download. If it were on Steam, I’d buy it right now.
Also, the Gothic 2 expansion pack was unique in that it essentially offered a “directors’ cut” of the original game (aside from adding new areas and quests, etc.) Some quests had different resolutions, there were additional characters and quests in familiar areas - it made the original game really entertaining to play again with a different character class, which is one of the fundamental problems most RPG expansions have (unless they continue the story, rather than addin intervening material)- it’s often a lot less interesting to go back months later just to get a few more items and see a much smaller new area than the original game offered. Gothic 2: Night of the Raven revitalized the entire experience in a way few “add in” RPG expansions have.
Part of the fun of Gothic 2 is that the world is dangerous. You aren’t supposed to be able to fight a lot of the things you run into, not for a long time. You need to seek out the things you can fight, and run like hell from the other stuff. This is part of what made the game so different and interesting.
They got that part down; it’s just that they didn’t provide it throughout and at some point you hit a brick wall if you don’t go forth and kill every single thing in every act just to keep up with levels.
There’s also the little detail of the combat being atrocious, which didn’t make me want to fight anything. :P
I was toying with the idea of starting a new thread titled ‘Gothic 3 redux’ two weeks ago, Gordon- let’s hook pinkies and make a wish!
Unlike you, I found the beginning ridiculously easy and was soon power-leveling my way through Nordmar. It was only after I started single-handedly freeing a couple of towns from orcs that I found that this was a bad thing to do early on because it breaks the desert quests- there are some towns it is now impossible to enter without combat once you become an enemy of the orcs. Watch out for that.
One of the cool things in the game is the way that there is almost an ecology happening in the game- you can walk into a fight between animals and wait for them to beat each other up before slaughtering them all. It’d be nice to see a game with that developed even further. It was somewhat dismaying to play Oblivion with a high view distance and see everything standing mutely, waiting for you to approach before they come to life.