New Alternative Balancing, the supreme experience for Gothic 2 NOTR, Now more easy.

[Aholf Ditler]

I'm curious about the mindset... more contrast and saturation I can understand, also depends on quality of your display, but could you explain what is so attractive about chromatic aberration that makes it must have for you ?

Reshade looks terrible in 90% of all instances. Those screenshots included.

I say it again and I will not say it again.
Everyone has their own tastes and nobody has absolute truth in these subject matters.
Maybe it's my monitor's fault, an Asus 21:9 of 30 inches, but the game with the shaders that I have configured, for me looks a lot better than leaving it without a shader, and that's why I use it, otherwise I would not use it.

By the way, not only is it more contrast and color, the distant elements do not have so many jaggies, especially the trees or grass. I use a very similar one in every game that I play, and I even disable the antialising of the game

 

[passerby]

You don't understand what chromatic aberration does, but it fucks up image enough that it's hard to distinguish sharp, pixel level detail, including dreaded alliasing "jaggies" and that is all that matters. Sharp details are evil, so you have to make it look like a bad CRT display, k.

 

[Dodo1610]

Meh i still prefer the original version.

 

[Aholf Ditler]

You don't understand what chromatic aberration does, but it fucks up image enough that it's hard to distinguish sharp, pixel level detail, including dreaded alliasing "jaggies" and that is all that matters. Sharp details are evil, so you have to make it look like a bad CRT display, k.

Of course I know what that does. It smudges the image and gives it a more unfocused look, that combined with sharpen filters, create a more beautiful image for my taste.
My monitor looks great, even my friends tell me that they come to watch some games. Maybe the problem is with your monitor that you do not have it properly configured, or maybe you have one of those 144 hz cheap monitors that look horrible


anyway I would prefer to continue talking about these mods for Gothic 2, I suppose there will be other threads in the forum talking about this topic of reshade

 

[passerby]

It smudges red color component to the left and blue color to the right, like very low quality lenses that break different light wavelenghts at different angles, or vhs tape copied with misadjusted heads.

Comment about quality of display was in relation to contrast and saturation, I said it can be either a matter having to offset low contrast display, or simply a matter of taste and this I can understand. Chromatic aberration is just retarded.

The only way to stop, is to not respond to my post, because I am on anti chromatic aberration crusade.

 

[Aholf Ditler]

It smudges red color component to the left and blue color to the right, like very low quality lenses that break different light wavelenghts at different angles, or whs tape copied with misadjusted heads.

Comment about quality of display was in relation to contrast and saturation, I said it can be either a matter having to offset low contrast display, or simply a matter of taste and this I can understand. Chromatic aberration is just retarded.

The only way to stop, is to not respond to my post, because I am on anti chromatic aberration crusade.

No!, that's not the chromatic aberration that I use, that's what other filters called Fisheye horizontal.fx and Fisheye vertical.fx. I could put another color filter and you would think chromatic aberration.

 

[passerby]

Who cares what is typed in the filename, these postprocessing scripts do several things to the image. Simulating physical phenonomenon called chromatic aberration, by smudging color components at different directions, being one of them.
Dark object on bright background have blurry red outline on one side and blue one on the other - chromatic aberration.

In addition to making everything look out of focus, it fucks up color palette on any object with some high contrast noisy texture detail, dumb fad to replace excessive bloom from 2000s.

 

[Cryomancer]

Sorry for necroing this thread, but after over 400 hours of Gothic 2 returning without AB, i decided to test AB. Install was pretty hard and that video helped me a lot.

installation guide

One thing which I loved about AB is that necros now has an pet which scales with the master.

Here is my lv 12 demon pet

The interface to make runes and alchemy is far better too. Nor only a text message "missing reagents". You can easily see the ingredients that you need and produce 666 swords/potions is no longer a pain in the ****

alchemy

 

[Cryomancer]

Any AB installation guide? The video which I used as base got privated... I really miss Hubaxis.

 

[Murk]

Having just come off replaying Gothic 3 with some mods, time to try this again. Been long enough, let's see what happens.

Any AB installation guide? The video which I used as base got privated... I really miss Hubaxis.

The thread from OP links to this video, and this guy made the video that I used for the Gothic 3 mods as well: Gothic 2 Returning 2.0 ENGLISH - Installation Guide, tweaks & settings - YouTube

It's 3 years old so a bit wary that it's all "up to date" but eh. The thread itself also has translated steps in English:

EDIT: Though in my case, the torrent link to the main mod file takes me to a dead end. Well, RIP I guess. Might try that Gothic 1 mod instead.

 

[Cryomancer]

the torrent link to the main mod file takes me to a dead end.

The returning ISO file, Sinitar put in the description https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VjWOUBzOZddeNKZEgMR3ZYZb160hEDKP/view

The thread from OP links to this video, and this guy made the video that I used for the Gothic 3 mods as well: Gothic 2 Returning 2.0 ENGLISH - Installation Guide, tweaks & settings - YouTube

But the normal returning I installed. The problem is that AB is far harder to install and I honestly, an playing base returning as a water magician but I wanted to play AB. Reason? Ice blast circle 3 spell. On original returning, is the unique circle 3 spell for water mages and is complete trash. Alternative balancing not only adds a shitton of spells to water mages but also fixes some which are broken and often ignore the enemies.

Look to this video. About 42 seconds to kill a troll with lightning strike and 8 seconds with spear of darkness, a circle 3 dark magic spell.
Lightning ball vs Troll: 0:02 to 0:44 -> 42 sec
Spear of darkness vs Troll : 1:33 to 1:41 -> 8 seconds.

Chargeable spells are amazing on G1 but trash on ret.

 

[Murk]

Ah I see, I didn't get as far since the link was deadending for me. Though now that I started up Dark Mysteries for G1 (the translation of which is actually quite good), I think I'll play through that for now before moving on to returning/G2.

 

[Cryomancer]

When you reach high level, things become crazy for water magicians. This is a non AB video

 

[Murk]

Finally got around to trying this again and for what it's worth, the Alternative Balancing makes the game *feel* a lot better IMO (things like stamina, strafing, the way assets load in, etc.)

Played 'returning 2' for a few days and wasn't loving it, tried AB and feels a lot better. Think I'll stick with this now.

 

[Malamert]

So what's the deal with this Returning mod? What's good/bad about it?

 

[Cryomancer]

So what's the deal with this Returning mod? What's good/bad about it?

The best aspect of returning. You can learn magic from a baddass necromancer or from water mages, instead of by distributing sausage in a all male mosntery. The game is HUUUUGE, an returning run can take over 200 hours easily(mainly for completitionists) and far harder than normal Gothic 2. Dragons which are cakewalk on G2, has circle 6 magic, summons, regen among other nasty things. The negative is some level of fanfic.

 

[Malamert]

Is it possible to install just certain parts of the mod?

 

[Cryomancer]

Is it possible to install just certain parts of the mod?

No, however, You can say "no" to the keeper in the Xardas tower and ignore over 90% of the returning fanfic. Just don't do that on harder difficulties...

 

[Murk]

I guess you could just install L'Hiver if you only wanted the map changes and not so much the content changes.

If you've played G2 a bajillion times over then it's worth playing. Get AB with it though, much more satisfying than just returning on its own IMO.

 

[Baron Dupek]

i heard that AB makes easy to miss content (like access to new maps and locations) less prone to block for the player? That would be a big deal for me...

 

[Murk]

So how are the teleporter runes activated? I got the one in front of Sagitta's Cave and in front of the new Brother/Sect camp, but I just pressed 'use' and it happened. None of the others activate when doing the same, some even say "too far to use" but when I get within any range or any side, it doesn't activate. Is there an item that needs to be gotten first? Or perhaps an order?

It's the ancient rune tiles.

 

[Murk]

So I didn't realize the demon needs to be leveled by actually getting XP form kills while it's out. I had thought it just scaled off my level... imagine my shock when I finally get it at level 40 or so and realize it's barely able to kill a wolf on its own. Guess I'm gonna run around with it on passive from now on.

 

[Dodo1610]

The autistic Russians modders who made Returning never understood what makes Gothic 2 great, almost every single thing that they added makes it worse like the retarded stamina system, the UI, the shit high fantasy story and so much more.

 

[Ravielsk]

The autistic Russians modders who made Returning never understood what makes Gothic 2 great, almost every single thing that they added makes it worse like the retarded stamina system, the UI, the shit high fantasy story and so much more.

I have to agree. Returning feels bloated as a mod, not just in terms of features in terms of its visual overhauls. The amount of foliage it adds makes it incredibly difficult to see what is on the ground so the only way to see and pick up items is via their text. Which on top of being rather jarring(being able to pick up items I myself do not even see) also means you miss out on a lot. Turning the foliage of also does nothing since textures were remade to work with increased foliage density so without it the game just looks bad.

Not even Xeres return added this much on top of the game and it honestly makes it feel more like a chore rather than a game.

 

[Murk]

^I had the same problem with foliage, the AB helped a lot there, but there's also a mod that reduces foliage if you don't want to use AB.

I actually switched from returning to AB because of a clip I saw.

otherwise, yeah, the tone is completely out of tune from a true PB game -- but then what does one expect? It's a giant mod for people who have played the game a ton and want something more, even a pale imitation.

I genuinely can't stress how much the AB mod/patch reduces some of the stupidity of the returning mod. the stamina use/recharge rate alone is worth it.