Gothic Chronicles Of Myrtana: Archolos mod for Gothic 2

[Tihskael]

Quality wise is this mod better than what SureAI put out in Nehrim and Enderal?

 

[Abu Antar]

^I enjoyed those too, but yes.

It's on par with the best Gothic games.

 

[Alphons]

Question regarding the pirates

Spoiler

Beaten Cortez and got the rest to surrender. When dealing with Ben you can bribe one of girls to poison his wine or poison their entire beer supply. Journal said that it could be fatal to some of them, so I picked the wine option.

What happens if you poison the beer? Does it kill them/ prevent peaceful resolution?

 

[Tihskael]

Quality wise is this mod better than what SureAI put out in Nehrim and Enderal?

I hope its not only the Poles replying yes

 

[Tihskael]

And speaking of mods, dont the new Piranha Bytes games have any modding scene like ELEX?

 

[JarlFrank]

Quality wise is this mod better than what SureAI put out in Nehrim and Enderal?

Yes. I loved both Nehrim and Enderal, but Archolos is better purely due to the Gothic engine being less janky and the core mechanics being more fun.

The content is - just like with Nehrim and Enderal - even better than the content of most commercially released games.

 

[JarlFrank]

And speaking of mods, dont the new Piranhabytes games have any modding scene like ELEX?

They do not. I don't think there are level editors for any PB games post-Gothic.

 

[Zariusz]

And speaking of mods, dont the new Piranhabytes games have any modding scene like ELEX?

They do not. I don't think there are level editors for any PB games post-Gothic.

There was certain Risen 1 mod expanding whole map, and apparently it was quite far in development but due to certain reasons they cancelled it, it was called Risen - The North.

 

[agris]

Quality wise is this mod better than what SureAI put out in Nehrim and Enderal?

I hope its not only the Poles replying yes

It’s not just krauts and the kurwa gang, it is indeed on par with the originals. Superior to gothic 1 in my opinion.

 

[Danikas]

 

[True Ukrainian]

Super noob question. I just installed this but it doesn't launch. I don't get an error screen or anything. What's the workaround? I'm using win10.

 

[Alphons]

Have you downloaded from Steam, GOG or Moddb?
Steam and GOG versions should work out of the box, you should install SystemPack if you downloaded from Moddb.

 

[Rinslin Merwind]

Yes. I loved both Nehrim and Enderal, but Archolos is better purely due to the Gothic engine being less janky and the core mechanics being more fun.

*insert violent flashbacks about times when game crashed due "access violation"/unability to decompess audiofiles/other bullshit reason*
*another wave of painfull flashbacks about being stuck in textures/corrupted saves/ items falling under textures/ enemies who unable to see you*

 

[Jasede]

Yeah that was a poor choice of words. The Gothic engine is jank city. Falling under the world, clipping through doors, enemies stuck in trees, access violations, running out of memory, savegame corruption, etc. are all commonplace, and the biggest reason the CoM team doesn't want to do another project in the Gothic engine.

Things that happened in my playthrough:

~40 crash to desktops with no warning
~10 access violations from running out of memory (even with the 4GB memory patch)
~5 times falling under the world and swimming in the ocean that is below the ground
1 instance of a merchant losing his entire inventory for no discernable reason (Bevin, the honey merchant, lost his entire for sale inventory at one point)
A few instances of NPCs disappearing (but reappearing on reload or rest)
4 instances of getting stuck in an animation and the game freezing so hard only task manager can rescue it, 3 of which were in mandatory story cutscenes.
Countless enemies getting stuck in a tree/branch/pixel.
AI randomly deciding to ignore me.

 

[agris]

Interesting, did you play with the DX11 patch Jasede? I did, and only experienced 1 crash to desktop (said audio file wasn't found), and 2x quicksave corruption. That was it for engine-type bugs. ~140 hours on a mix of 8 - 12 year old hardware, 2560x1600 resolution.

 

[Jasede]

I played with and without. I played ~100 hours without, with the same issues, and then had to switch to DX11 because my save no longer loaded without it (!).
Point being the engine is very temperamental and you can not predict how stably it runs because it has strange interactions with all sorts of hardware and software configurations.

 

[agris]

I played with and without. I played ~100 hours without, with the same issues, and then had to switch to DX11 because my save no longer loaded without it (!).
Point being the engine is very temperamental and you can not predict how stably it runs because it has strange interactions with all sorts of hardware and software configurations.

I played exclusively with it, I was curious if it was alleviating some of the issues you experienced since my record is so different from yours.

 

[Jasede]

At least in my case I certainly had less crashes with DX11, but usually it's the opposite.

 

[Rinslin Merwind]

However, right now I finished the mod and overall liked it. I even would dare to say it's even better than original games.

Spoiler

I wish they haven't tried to tie in ending for main character so close to first Gothic, because reasoning for main character being sent in that place is bullshit. Also character of Marvin and that character from Gothic 1 is completely different people, a meh descision

To summarize the unholy trinity of things that held up my experience a bit:
1) crashes and bugs
2) npc pathfinding (especially fucking kessel near waterfall) and wonky hitboxes
3) ending for main character (not secret one)

But overall I liked it more that originals and my desire to replay this mod some time late is much higher that for original games.

Sometimes I wish Gothic engine wasn't so shit, so team of Chronicles or some other team were capable to improve mechanics of first two games and made a good finale for Gothic story, instead of bullshit that was Gothic 3 in terms of story, lore and characters (the shenanigans with rune magic, motivation of Xardas and human/orc interactions had no sense)

But I guess some wishes will stay only wishes. I hope we see some good and original games from members of Chronicles team and their creativity will be not thwarted by "AAA" publisher or state of gaming industry in general.


Yes, I know, I don't sound as "true" fan of Gothic, but I don't think anybody unironically loves cliffhanger endings in games, so it would be nice to see last orc invasion failing without facing all bullshit from Gothic 3.

 

[Rinslin Merwind]

only experienced 1 crash to desktop (said audio file wasn't found), and 2x quicksave corruption.

Let me guess, Volker's screamers quest from Kessel?

I played exclusively with it, I was curious if it was alleviating some of the issues you experienced since my record is so different from yours.

I played with DX11 patch and had several cases of crashes and corrupted saves. So he isn't alone.

 

[agris]

only experienced 1 crash to desktop (said audio file wasn't found), and 2x quicksave corruption.

Let me guess, Volker's screamers quest from Kessel?

No that didn't crash me, it was the start of the initiation ceremony when you join Araxos. I picked a dialogue option that I think the VO file for was corrupted.

 

[Anthedon]

Can the DX11 renderer even cause savegame issues? I played all the Gothics + Archolos with it and never had any problems.

 

[notpl]

Can the DX11 renderer even cause savegame issues? I played all the Gothics + Archolos with it and never had any problems.

Not really, no. If it's unstable for you then it could make a crash while saving more likely, which (if you don't use quicksaves) is the only way for a save to get corrupted, but that's true no matter what the source of the crash is. For 99% of people the dx11 renderer makes the game significantly more stable on modern systems, so it's a net positive unless you really hate the way it looks.

 

[Justicar]

For retards that say learning pickpocket is waste of lps and gold you are truly braindead. Just stole a key to merchant guilds warehouse you cant open this doors without the key. Inside there is a dish that gives +3 bonus to strenght and recipe for it that costs 1500 gold, dish that gives + 3 bonus to agility and this is just one person. Master pickpocket lets you steal perrma stuff from other npcs some alchemists have perma potions or king sorrels, some inkeepers have perma dishes. + the various letters you can steal from Roderich, Lorenzo, Kings emissary, Volker etc. that give exp and flesh out the lore.

 

[notpl]

For retards that say learning pickpocket is waste of lps and gold you are truly braindead. Just stole a key to merchant guilds warehouse you cant open this doors without the key. Inside there is a dish that gives +3 bonus to strenght and recipe for it that costs 1500 gold, dish that gives + 3 bonus to agility and this is just one person. Master pickpocket lets you steal perrma stuff from other npcs some alchemists have perma potions or king sorrels, some inkeepers have perma dishes. + the various letters you can steal from Roderich, Lorenzo, Kings emissary, Volker etc. that give exp and flesh out the lore.

that key is the only thing in the entire game that gives permas and 15 LP is not worth it for +3 str/dex. 100% there were no alchemists who had perma potions or king's sorrels on release, possible they added more stuff since they got overwhelmingly negative feedback about the skill