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Reality.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: April 02, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Why do I say "reality"? Well, you tell me....what would you do if you were thrown into the middle of a prison camp with three powerful, rival factions by a ruthless and unsrupulous king? Armorless, weaponless, without hardly any skills at all, trapped with vicious beasts, ghouls, etc...what would you do? Would you cry out in your best brogue: "What wood ye do fer freedom?" storming about, waving a broadsword? Try it in this game and you will be dead....immediately.

That's why it's so real. You have to gain skills, learn the ropes, cut deals, do favors, run errands,make strong allies--much like real prison. Gradually, you will get stronger; and the effort that it takes to get there gives a true satisfaction because you have to work for it.

The thing that I find tedious is having to run so far between camps (and having to dodge and sneak through feral beasts, esp. in the beginning when you're weak). Having to sift through questions to get info can be tiring, but hey! that's reality.

The graphics are good, the variety and expanse of the landscape...
This is a good game for patient people who don't mind working for every step. If you want it to be easy, don't get it.

By Far This is Best RPG Ever.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: January 30, 2002
Author: Amazon User

_____By far this is the Best RPG ever. Never before have I played a game with such depth and variability. I am a big fan of first person shooters and adventure games like Diablo. And this game does an awesome job combining the first person interface and the adventure that I'm looking for, but this game take the art of creating a story line to a whole new level. There are multiple endings depending on whom you decide to ally with.
_____To give you an example of the variability, your character can find spells to do multiple things. One such spell allows you to turn into one of the monsters that you fight. In that form you may roam around their lair without any opposition, find the objective of you mission, turn back into yourself (completing the mission), and turn back into a monster and leave without a problem.
_____Also, this detail of this game with almost life like. Almost every character you meet in the game (and there are many) look unique with individual traits. The characters eat sleep and do daily activities as the hours of the day pass. In fact if you get close enough you can even watch them chew their food.
_____For those of you who complain about the controls not being the way you want them, it is not really that hard to change them. And if you can not get over it, them you may want to stick to games to can handle like "pong."
_____For those of you who complain about the manual being short and not descriptive enough. Give me a break. The story and details unfold as you progress through the game; besides with out there being any one ending what else could the creator's do other than lay out the very basics. Also I like the fact that the manual does not give the stats of monsters, or tell you how to do this and that for everything. After all that is what makes this game an adventure.
_____If you like you games as much as I do then you will LOVE this one!!!
_____I do have one more thing to add. The recommended system requirements are not high enough. You will need a 32MB video card to run the game well and a 64MB to really enjoy the wonderful detail and work put into this masterpiece.

Better than Morrowind

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: May 09, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Yes, I know Morrowind is a great game... but Gothic is better. The world seems more "real", the NPCs seem life like, the graphics are amazing, and the story is great. You can even cook your meals! For example, you kill an animal for its meat, find a fire... and you can fry the meat!! You can even watch it sizzle. And in the evening, when you come back to the camp, you can chat with friends by the fire... and listen to one of them playing the guitar!!

The controls are a bit awkward when you first play the game, but after a while you get used to them.

Buy Gothic today!

Good game, but with strange and crippling flaws

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: June 01, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game is a good, open-ended roleplaying game. It has great graphics, and the world has a very "real" feeling, but it is marred by a few flaws. First, since the game was translated from German, at times the manual appears to be written by a junior-high age gamer. For example, the actual manual description of the sleep spell is:"zzzZZZzzz". Instead of telling how the game works, the manual spends half its space giving little hints on how to survive. While this is useful, it would be better if told to you during the game. However, my biggest gripe about the game is the controls. The game basically uses the direction buttons, the mouse, and the control key. There are a few other keys that are used, but by and large to do something you hold control and press "up". If you hold control and press "left" in front of a chest, you'll try to pick the lock. The game doesn't tell you how to do that, you just have to figure it out. The manual leaves a lot of things out. For example, I was trying to buy one thing from a merchant, but I could only buy ten of them, unless there were eleven of them, in which case I could select ten items, then the last one, then send ten items back, leaving one for me to purchase. It SHOULD NOT be that difficult to buy one item from a merchant in an otherwise realistic/intuitive game. I don't like learning this game via trial-and-error, because decisions you make will permanently alter what is going on in the game. For example, I challenged a person to a duel (not to the death) in one arena, he beat me unconscious, took my money, and refused to ever fight me again. None of this was explained to me before I challenged him. This is an allegory for this game - you make one mistake because the game and manual didn't warn you, and the game holds it against you for the rest of the game.

This is not a bad game, it just doesn't play as smoothly or intuitively as Morrowind, and so I'm playing Morrowind and not Gothic. If your computer can handly it, I strongly reccommend Morrowind.

Boring game with horrendous controls

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 10 / 16
Date: January 22, 2002
Author: Amazon User

If you love LONG segments of nothing but talking this game is for you. Half this game is you trying to extract the right info from people and only one tenth of what they have to say is useful. The rest is the standard "shooting the breeze" that game makers think creates "atmosphere". Gothic held some comic value for me as I started to see it not as an adventure game, but as a bizzare excersize in making boring people get to the point. This is a useful skill to develop in this world so I give Gothic an extra star.

Why do game makers feel the irrational need to make you learn a completely different control system for every new game? Gothic is the worst in this example of this trend. Sure there's SOME key binding customization available--just not for the actions you actually want. Not only are you banned from binding actions to mouse buttons, but Xicat breaks new ground in game control idiocy by forcing you to hold down TWO(2) keys to do practically everything.

Made me realize how fun an RPG coule be. . .

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: October 18, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing games all my life. My RPGs include all of the Zelda games, some of the earlier Final Fantasies (i.e. before Playstation), all the Breath of Fires, and so forth. However, it wasn't until Gothic came along that I realized just how enveloping an RPG could be.

First, I'll mention Gothic's flaws: As one reviewer already mentioned, the manual is useless. This error is compounded by the fact that the controls are not very intuitive; to pick something up, you have to look at the object to highlight it, hold down the use key, then press the forward key. Nothing like any other games out there, is it? Once I figured that out, however, the controls actually became instinct, and I learned the combat system fairly well, since it is based directly on the same system that lets you pick things up.

Another flaw that I encountered with the game was how easily you could circumvent yourself by accidentally (or purposefully, for that matter) killing an important NPC or going into an area that you aren't supposed to be able to get into until later in the game. You can, as one reviewer stated, lock yourself out from beating the game. This, in my opinion, seemed like an oversight on the part of the developers, but who knows.

Now on to the good parts: This was the first fully free-roaming, open-ended RPG that I have ever played, and that experience was awesome. The world, including the graphics and sound, seems so realistic that it draws you in from the beginning of the game. There is no class system per se; you just choose your alliances and your character is open to develop in any direction that you choose. Want a ranger? Give all your skill points to your bow marksmanship abilities. Want a brawler? Give all your skill points to your fighting abilities.

The NPCs all seem like believable characters; they remember your alliances and how you have treated them since you last spoke to them. The ones who like you will help you along; the ones who despise won't, and may even try to kill you. The great thing about it is that it's all up to you.

Therein lies the great things about this game. I played Morrowind for a while, but it just doesn't draw you in the way that Gothic does. Morrowind, in my opinion, while it does have lots of subquests, there's almost too much to do. The map is so big that if you want to go somewhere where a siltstrider doesn't go, or you can't get there by way of the mages guild, and you don't have the boots of blinding speed, you get to walk. For a long time. For me, Morrowind was just TOO open-ended. Gothic is just as open-ended, but everything leads up to beating the game. Whereas, in Morrowind, you're never obligated to actually beat the game, Gothic does prod you along in that direction, though not forcefully.

The ending to Gothic was a let down, but the experience is well worth it. It's one of those cult-following games that, if you can look past the flaws, you'll remember the experience for a long time.

Great for RPG beginners, and overall good game.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: September 08, 2003
Author: Amazon User

First off, if you find the default control scheme cumbersome, switch to the alternate control scheme. The alternate control scheme has mouse support, and makes combat a lot easier. Once you get used to the control scheme as I have, it is quite intuitive. This game is a great game for first-time RPG players. The whole game is direct and down-to-earth. This is not a complicated D&D game (not that D&D games are bad). This game has a very easy learning curve. You get used to the process of leveling up and using your skill points to learn skills or increase attributes. You can use your skill points to learn just about anything, though there are limitations. For example, you have to master one-handed weapons before learning how to effectively hand two-handed weapons. Every time you level up, you get 10 skill points. You can use these skill points to learn something simple, such as one-handed weapons level one, or you can use it to increase your strength and or dexterity. Each of the fighting skills has two levels, and you have to learn the first level before learning the second level. This stands true for learning to pick locks or pick pockets. This is not true for learning to sneak or hunting skills. If you become a mage, you learn the circles of magic. You must learn the first circle of magic before proceeding to the second one and so on. Each circle of magic requires more skill points to learn, but will give you access to better and more powerfull magic.

Dialogue options with NPCs are straightfoward. You get a dialogue box with all your current dialogue options displayed. I recommed you turn on the subtitles as NPCs' speech can be at times incomprehensible if they mumble a lot.
The quests in this game range from the mundane (finding ingredients for a stew) to the gripping (fighting a group of velociraptor-like creatures with one of your NPC friends to find an ancient artifact). Most of the quests are extremely fun and can keep you in your seat for hours.
The level of interactivity in the game is decent, though not up to Morrowind standards. You can trade with merchants, piss off guards, talk to just about everyone, and beat up people for their money (at risk of pissing off the guards, of course). There are plenty of opportunities to scam people of different factions for profit as well.
The beginning of the game is very open-ended, with you deciding which faction to join (there are three of them). You do quests for members of each faction to impress the bigwigs, and you make friends (and enemies). Once you join a faction, however, the story becomes somewhat linear. Still, the story is a good one, and will have you playing for hours on end. The story kicks into high gear when one of the factions makes a treacherous move (I won't tell you which, so as not to spoil the plot), and has you fighting off members of that faction wherever they are.
Overall, this is a great game for RPG beginners, not to say that an experienced RPG player won't have a great time playing it, because this is the RPG for everyone.
My only complaints about this game are a small map and some wack AI. Enemies will jump off cliffs to get to you, and sometimes will go into a coma-like state where you cannot interact with them and they will do nothing to attacks.
Complaints aside, this is a good RPG.

joshua

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: December 18, 2001
Author: Amazon User

initially i found the controls for this game difficult--it relies on an keyboard heavy scheme. after an hour of game play the controls become more intuitive and eventually the game interface became second nature, but this takes time. the game itself is great. it is a third person role-player that reminds me of rune with a stronger story line. the graphics are great, the story line had some holes but this didn't detract from game play. the world enviroment is open, and this is wonderful for players who like to explore.

Gothic is awesome

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: October 08, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Have you ever taken a chance on a bargin bin game and come up with a treasure? Well, that's what happened to me. This game is amazing. The reviews just don't do it justice. The story is interesting and they do an excellent job of staying away from cut scenes (which I think mostly destroy the immersion factor) to tell it. It is like a real world you are exploring. There are no boundries except for the Barrier that keeps you all in. The only thing stopping you from going everywhere right off is critters you can't kill yet before they kill you. People complain about the combat, but I think it is rather realistic. It takes a bit of time to switch from your sword to bow and back. Melee is about timing and watching what your opponent is doing. It takes skill, not just the character's but also yours.

There's just too much to say about this amazing game. Just get it. You won't be sorry.

Enjoyable Single Player Adventure

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: February 16, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I won't rehash what all the others mentioned. I agree with their assessment on this games ability to "draw you in". I'd also look into Gothic 2. IMO, it's even better. I just wanted to inform those who might like to purchase this game, that you can buy it at Ebay for thirty-fifty% cheaper than what's being offered here(..I paid sixteen bucks). If you can't find a manual, look for a good walkthrough to explain the controls etc.
Don't pass on this game. Do due dilligence and you can find a reasonably priced copy and free walkthrough.

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