After reading the Gothic II thread, I decided to go ahead and pick up Gothic I at its old game price, and play that one first… especially since several people here said Gothic I was better anyways.
Now… I have no wish to spoil anyone’s enjoyment of a fine, well thought out game, but these are some unbelievably bad controls. Yes, I’ve found the Settings option where you can customize what keys do what… it’s still unintuitive. I couldn’t even figure out how to swim, so I drowned when I took a step backwards into the lake that you start out next to.
What’s more, there’s no instruction manual at all. Nor is there any tutorial. I feel like I’m playing some sort of HAXORED game that I got off some WAREZ site… not that I’ve ever done that, mind you… but… umm… I read about it. In a magazine.
Does this game get better? Am I just stupid? Is it cold and are there wolves after me?
The controls eventually do make some sense, just don’t go looking in the games manual for the explanations, it’s less than useful. The one nice thing is you can play the game very well from the keyboard only. So if you have a nice htpc you can hook it up to the tv and use a wireless keyboard for lots of gaming goodness.
Stick with it, once you figure out the interface to buy/sell it all sort of falls into place, and you might even find yourself enjoying the combat.
The game gets better. Stick with trying to get used to the controls – after a bunch of hours in, you’ll think they work well. The interface is definitely Gothic 1’s biggest problem Gothic 2 is much better than the origninal, btw.
I’ve never been able to get comfortable with Gothic 1’s interface either. Maybe I’ll give it another try sometime, but I’m definitely less patient about stuff like that than I was when I was younger.
