Incline Gothic turns 15 years

[eric__s]

Very evocative work. It must have taken a lot of courage to post this. Thank you so much for sharing something so deeply personal and intimate, agentorange.

 

[hilfazer]

Since we're speaking of Gothic 2, can anyone tell me if the Blood Chalice bug is fixed in the GOG version?

Namely, you can get a quest in the Thieves' Guild to find and steal several Chalices. It's a pretty complex task, and once you manage it and go back to the quest giver, she tells you that the deadline for the job was blown and she attacks and kills you. Which is silly, because nowhere during the quest were you told that there's a deadline.

She's a woman. You need to handle her like an IRL woman. After she gets angry at you, you have to do what a real man would in such situation: run away.
Let her cool down a bit. Come back later and talk to her again. That should help.

 

[System]

I recently replayed trough both Gothics, I don't think I will bother with the third one. However I see people talking about mods for G2, any worthwhile to check out?

 

[T. Reich]

I wouldn't bother really.

Most of those mods greatly overcomplicate the game by adding a shitton of extra mechanics and various shit. Also, they usually make it much more difficult and grindy.
There is a number of "story" mods that are basically separate short scenarios made in Gothic engine. Most of them are pretty short and small-scale, and are usually quite buggy/unpolished.

 

[Sigourn]

As much as it pains me to say it, Gothic II (maybe Gothic as well, I can't remember anymore) is probably one of the hardest games to run properly I've come across. I've seen my fair share of games that are simply too much for my computer to handle, but Gothic II is really problematic.

First there's the weird delay when starting the game, before the words load into the screen. There's also the videos that for some reason some times may be all the way to the left, or to the right, or center but not fullscreen, or center AND fullscreen, or the opening videos that may not even appear. The menu music that carries over into the intro videos and whenever you load a save, the overall lag issues I mentioned a few posts ago (and that I won't be able to troubleshoot until I go to the place where I remember having lots of issues). The FOV being too high for my tastes using the patches, the camera placement that prevents me from seeing what the hell I'm doing when fighting (no mouse controls); try using ALT-TAB to switch programs and the game doesn't know exactly what the hell to do, and usually pops back into fullscreen. Among many others.

It's truly a pain in the ass. The controls themselves are just fine, they work as they are supposed to be working, but everything else I mentioned... I don't think so.

For reference, I installed these:

- Gothic 2 Gold (GOG)
- gothic2_fix-2.6.0.0-rev2.exe
- Gothic2_PlayerKit-2.8.exe
- G2NoTR-SystemPack-1.7.exe



EDIT:

Also, this may just be my case, but whenever I load a save I get the usual Orc fighting Ponytail Dude screen. Except suddenly the image starts warping in the edges, as if the game was blurrying it on purpose. What's up with that???

 

[Multidirectional]

I would like to hear opinions on Yet Another Unofficial Patch for Gothic II if someone here has tried it. Worth bothering or not?

 

[Abu Antar]

Started this, today. I'm trying to get used to the controls. Haven't played this since I beat this many years ago. I've already died five times. It's going to be fun to go through the series again.

 

[Junmarko]

I would like to hear opinions on Yet Another Unofficial Patch for Gothic II if someone here has tried it. Worth bothering or not?

Nice find - GoG recently packaged VtmB with 9.9 of the unofficial patch, feel like it's time they did the same with the Gothic games. SystemPack has been consistently amended nearly as long as Vamp's patch.

 

[eric__s]

I recently replayed trough both Gothics, I don't think I will bother with the third one. However I see people talking about mods for G2, any worthwhile to check out?

I'm going to try out the Gothic 2 Returning mod posted on the previous page. I'm apprehensive because I've played very few good mods ever, but this looks professionally done and leagues above anything else I've tried, so I'm willing to give it a chance. I'll let everyone here know what I think. I've been very critical of mods before, so people shouldn't expect me to go easy on it, and if it's good enough, maybe I'll contact the team and collaborate with them on a better English version.

 

[Sigourn]

I would like to hear opinions on Yet Another Unofficial Patch for Gothic II if someone here has tried it. Worth bothering or not?

I installed it and from the looks of it it seems like something I would like to play with from the get go. Mostly because it makes the translation much more logical, with potions no longer saying stuff like "HP Bonus", which for your average person means nothing else but "these will add extra HP on top of your existing max HP". So yeah, I'm cautiously optimistic about it.

 

[Multidirectional]

I already started a playthrough with it too. One change I found right away, apart from item descriptions, is the first statue you get to pray at. I offered maximum choice of 10 hp and recieved 500 moneyz for it. Were statues in vanilla even doing anything?

Though god damn I'm still annoyed as fuck by performance. I'm halfway thinking to just limit FPS to 30 and make peace with it. It's weird, in Gothic 1 I had no trouble not only setting in game distance sliders to 300% but also increasing its multiplier by 10 in SystemPack.ini. Perfect framerate all throughout. In Gothic II I cannot even max in game setting.

 

[Sigourn]

I already started a playthrough with it too. Though god damn I'm still annoyed as fuck by performance. I'm halfway thinking to just limit FPS to 30 and make peace with it. It's weird, in Gothic 1 I had no trouble not only setting in game distance sliders to 300% but also increasing its multiplier by 10 in SystemPack.ini. Perfect framerate all throughout. In Gothic II I cannot even max in game distance setting.

Gothic also worked flawlessly for me, it's Gothic II that is such an annoying bitch to get working properly. I'm not even sure my computer is to blame. I don't have problems with the framerate itself as I can reach 60 with ease, it's the damn stuttering from time to time that bothers me. With the AMD Radeon settings I've been able to stress the game enough to bring down the FPS to 15-20, this way I can see more easily what strange tweaks may cause the game to get a higher FPS.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

the damn stuttering from time to time that bothers me

Parse scripts, did that work?

 

[Sigourn]

the damn stuttering from time to time that bothers me

Parse scripts, did that work?

How do I get that done? I went to the System folder, launched GothicStarter_mod.exe, clicked on the parse scripts option, and when I launch the game I get an error (UAR: Source-File CONTENT\GOTHIC.SRC not found. ( line 0 )).

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Zogged if I know then, worked in my modded version, which was just the same game with a different protag head.

 

[Murk]

I already started a playthrough with it too. One change I found right away, apart from item descriptions, is the first statue you get to pray at. I offered maximum choice of 10 hp and recieved 500 moneyz for it. Were statues in vanilla even doing anything?

Beliar Statues always offered money for HP in NOTR, haven't tried vanilla g2 since release so no clue there.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Beliar statues turn up only in NoTR, they weren't there in vanilla G2.

 

[eric__s]

I'm a couple hours into the Gothic II: The Returning mod and I am absolutely astonished by it. In the same way that Night of the Raven embedded itself into every facet of the original game, adding seamlessly to the world with breadcrumbs that lead to much bigger chunks of new content, The Returning does as well - just so much more of it. There is an absolutely ludicrous amount of new content; new characters, new quests, new dialogue - and it's everywhere. Everyone has something new to say or some new task to give you. It's amazing. But the most amazing thing about it so far is that they've changed fundamental engine mechanics of the game, things I wasn't even aware you could do with mods. They've added entirely new statistic systems, new crafting systems, a speech skill, new weapon types and I don't think I've even scratched the surface yet. Everywhere I turn, there is something new. I am not far into this yet, but I think The Returning might be the largest, most ambitious and most technologically advanced mod ever made for any game.

The big problem with it is that it's machine translated. The dialogue is legible, but it's not good. Sometimes it's gibberish, but most of the time it's understandable. In fact, a lot of the time, the base English dialogue is changed to be less understandable, which is just bizarre. What it really needs is some serious editing, and I think this is completely possible. I'm going to keep playing and see where this goes, and if I truly like it, I will look into what's necessary to edit the dialogue files. But yeah, so far I can't believe what I'm seeing, this mod is tremendous in depth.

 

[Murk]

Whoaw, seriously?

I may have to dip into that. I tried L'Hiver and was mostly put off by how unnecessary the majority of changes were, but did enjoy some of them... (wasn't most up to date tho, was pre-shields version).

 

[Anomander Rake]

Eric, I hope the mod turns good enough to motivate you to correct the translation.

 

[eric__s]

I'll add some more thoughts later, I rushed the post because I have to go, but there is a lot to say about this mod. I think it could be worth checking out for the technology alone.

 

[Anomander Rake]

Multidirectional
What I can recommend is installing a number of semi- and unofficial technical and bugfixing patches/utilities:
1) gothic2_fix-2.6.0.0-rev2.exe - supposed to be a semi-official patch, fixing game compatibility with 64-bit OS and some engine bugs.
2) Player Kit - basically, a mod manager and an alternative game starter menu. (Usually) makes managing the whole mess a bit easier.
3) System Pack - fixes a bunch of technical and compatibility issues on top of (1). Requires (1) + (2) to work, IIRC. Check it here.

do you suggest using these even with a gog version?

 

[Abu Antar]

I've now spent approximately 10 hours with the first Gothic. I'm using a few mods, but no added content mods. While the world building is better than for example ELEX, this game has many ways to cheese enemies. Companions can do the job for you here, just like they do in ELEX. Unfortunately, the enemy AI can also be a bit brain dead. They get stuck behind rocks and stuff. Quest design is better most of the time. Combat has aged. It isn't bad, but I am mostly standing still, trying to time parries and blocks. The decision to hide numbers in ELEX baffles me. Here, you have everything you need to know in numbers. I remember a lot of things, but there are also many things that I don't remember at all, which is fun. I'm currently trying to get effective with one type of weapon. I still don't know which faction that I will ultimately join. I like to drag it out as long as possible in PB games.

I had one really annoying thing happen to me while playing. All dialog of mine would get interrupted. I thought the game was broken, but it turns out that a character had tried to initiate a conversation with me. When that was over with, everything went back to normal. (I didn't even know this was a thing.)

I'm not sure if I should play Gothic II with added content mods or not. I do remember more of it than the first game. That's why I wanted to play it as vanilla as possible.

 

[Anomander Rake]

Abu Antar, did you add something on top of gothic? Bugfixing patch, graphic patches or ...?

 

[Abu Antar]

Player Kit - v1.08k
A 60FPS Patch
ThielHater's Texture Pack