Finished G2 Gold for the first time ever, looks like it took me 8 days of more or less full-time involvement, probably my main takeaway is a reminder of how time intensive cRPGs are.
Did a few unconventional (for myself) things on this playthrough:
- Went the paladin route - Because that artwork got to me, I almost consider that path cannon
- Opted for 1 handed weapons because the speed of those attack animations made a huge difference in the early levels
- Really made a point of not consuming stat boosters until later in the game, to maximize efficiency. Thus ended up with 110 Dex despite not using ranged weapons almost at all
The NOTR bits, which were new to me, were pretty welcome meatiness-wise, but I felt the story didn't make much sense and the pacing was somewhat thrown off.Also as much as I liked how the 2 medium sized PreJharkendar quests (on the weapons and the missing people) bring Khorinis's Chapter 1 slightly closer to Athkatla, the shortcuts into joining guilds and doing the important stuff of Ch1 were plainly a bad idea, if I was a newcomer and didn't prioritize minmaxing I'd probably take them and miss out on a lot of good content. The locales were quite pretty although I couldn't shake off seeing how R1 was basically a remix of the bandit camp and the booty hunt, it was worse than what the myriad spinoffs Valve made off HL2.
The Notr rebalancing was pretty brutal initially, but it evened out hugely towards the end. I must have spent as much time in Ch1+Jharkendar+2 as in the rest of the game. The Claw of Beliar was probably too strong and limited my weapon experimentation, not to mention canceled my weapon forging plans. Granted, I played with the advantage of fairly thorough if dusty knowledge of G2 Vanilla, so it's likely my difficulty curve was radically different to a newcomer's.
On that point, assuming no meta-knowledge, I feel that G2Notr is legitimately a more difficult game than the Dark Soul's series, or at the very least requires more patience and is, unfortunately, more exploitable. The dex will cringe at this but from where I'm sitting its claim to being a hardcore affair is pretty strong among at least half of the games in the top 50 list.
All in all, especially in the beginning, I couldn't help but feel how much this game wipes the floor with most modern open world attempts, and I came to it after finishing and quite liking the Witcher 3 expansions. The non-obviousness*of the, admittedly humble, C&C and the rudimental nature of the UI which made basic gameworld interaction feel very direct has probably stuck with me and became a strong design preference till this day. Used to be my favourite RPG until I played Torment, hindsight in this case confirms that.
*I feel it's worth noting how undeveloped the English-language knowledge indexing for this game remains. The poles have what looks like a glorious wikia page and the international crowd has to trawl through decade-old WoG threads. This is actually benefitial to the experience.
Belated strong thanks for all these answers. Most of them were very much on point.
Especially 4 on dex based mages (which frankly look extremely viable, to the point of potentially canceling my difficulty comment above?). Ended up not using the remapped side attack keys, because combo attacks were singificantly better
On the subject of mods, for posteriority:
Used the G2Fix 2.6, the SystemPack, biosmanager's fork of the D3D11 renderer, vurt's improved textures and
Yet Another Unofficial Patch v1.6.
The latter was definitely worth it and I consider it the G2 equivalent of Wesp's VtmB patches. The renderer took some tweaking to get crash-free and working smoothly (no tesselation, unfortunately).It complimented the game's aesthetics more than I expected it to, although those nights were way too dark.
, and strategic 'acquisition' of items from NPCs.
