Damn good stuff. I tend to write my long-winded, tut-tuty pseudo reviews after finishing with a game, but not going to for this here, no sirrah, this is some solid shit.
The whole thing took me 73 hours to play through. I initially wanted to give mage playthrough a try, but I only kept it up as far as chapter three. The stoppers were magical staves being a good idea in theory, but underperforming in execution (although I saw it being mentioned that their scaling is going to be looked at), me having this usual, hoardy dislike of utilizing scrolls, and the fact that I was unable to learn third circle magic, and find some solid runes. I waited until I learned to brew permanent potions and then chugged about what, fifteen pots of strength, which, together with my basic 2H skills let me make a switch to a big piece of steel. I was initially worried that the points I've sunk into mana and first two circles are going to bite me in the ass, but the game is quite lenient with its difficulty curve, and there are about gajillion ways of boosting stats (I think I had quite a bit more than a hundred bonus points in strength by the end of the game). I was unable to equip the Volfzacke sword, but the other 2Hs carried me through just fine. In general, it feels like the best way to play this is a standard melee dude with some ranged backup; an Archolos-style spicy twist on this would be to try and develop str and dex parallelly. It's funny how the most damaging weapons I've had in my inventory by the end were dex-based 1H weapons, although it makes sense due to how damage scaling works in the game.
So right, when I pick it up again (when not if), I'm going to go with 1H/Crossbow Str/Dex hybrid, learn smithing, bowyership, and alchemy, and go with Araxos, just to keep it fresh. After watching the ending slides, I'd hope to get the 'best' resolutions for the few quests I thought could've gone better (vineyard, pirates), but I think I'm going to need a few months of a break before that.
I am absolutely in awe regarding the amount of work on music, graphics, and scripting that went into the mod. The few bugs I've hit were mostly inconsequential (characters getting stuck, Marvin getting stuck, dialogues hanging up, Marvin falling under textures, occasional crases), and at least one was already fixed (minor mess-up regarding dialogue choices during Guard quest). The only major-ish items were
- Me trying to get money from Dima for the pawnshop lady during the night. The way the quest goes, she asks you to take care of her stall while heading out to pay what she's due, but if you do it when she's in the Guild's building the scripting breaks and you get locked in the conversation
- Probably the most serious one - while heading out to a certain fortress with a certain character, I handled all the items needed to get into the fortress, before chatting with the character. This caused a few conversation-starter triggers to fire at the same time, which made it so that the character stopped and did not actually walk into the fortress, and that broke the main quest's scripting. Good thing I was doing rolling saves across the available slots!
In general, the quests were way more stable than I expected, especially with some of the fancy stuff the team tried to pull.
The team had a perfect grasp on how Piranhas achieved the illusions of big worlds in the first two Gothics, despite the involved distances being relatively small. Setting up a number of "gates" via monster encounters, and making sure that every step you get a chance to run into something useful/interesting made the world feel super big for the longest time (well, until I bought a map). I very much appreciated the fact that spending LPs to improve your stats is only slightly more important here than development via exploration - the game greatly encourages you to look for new weapons, stat-boosting foods, and items you could trade to buy ingredients for more stat-potions, or books. There are a few locations here that you might skip entirely if you'd like to (beekeeper camp, that one farm in the west until certain point, gold mine), although I can only assume that some parts of it (especially the city-controlled salt mine) have a bigger role to play while doing the Araxos route.
Felt like Playing G2 for the first time again (including some Gothic-style lags, when I initially pumped DX11 graphical enhancements to the max). 10/10 would recommend.
