Gothic II. What a great, rewarding and exciting game.

After a series of events, you break out of the colony with friends you made there. Freedom, right? No.
You weren't the only one to break out. Most bandits got out too and started to rob and murder innocent citizens of Khorinis. People see you as a nobody yet again, but slowly you gain respect and eventually become a respected man across the island, saving Khorinis from an evil force that's about to struck it.

Gameplay is improved in many ways over the first game. Controls don't feel stiff. Combat is fun and never gets old: you hold LMB and use WASD to swing your weapons in different directions, no button mashing involved.
You can join different factions: Paladins, Mercenaries and Mages. All of them are very different and have a lot of faction-related quests, so it's worth it to beat the game multiple times.
You visit a lot of places in the game: the main island of Khorinis, the colony from the first game (which is now abandoned, grey and full of orcs at every step that'll murder you in mere seconds), swampy Jarkendar from the expansion and some other minor ones. All locations are unique and different, NPCs have their own chores and the game feels alive. I'll be honest, I got immersed. I spent hundreds of hours wandering around and finding cool quests and secrets.

Gothic II is my favourite RPG and I beat it many times. It's the experience I will never forget.

Maybe i'm blinded by nostalgia, but I don't care. This game is exceptionally good for all those who seek a hard core RPG experience with a quirky plot and badass dragons.

The game runs great on my windows 8.1 gaming laptop, with no errors. I have read some negative reviews which claim to have problems getting the game to launch. If the steam version has some error that I am not aware of, then there is always the option to purchase Gothic II: Gold Edition from GOG.

Great game, runs perfectly on Win7. If you have troubles with starting it, close all background programs. And if this game chrashes during the loading screen, go to steam/steamapps/common/gothic2/system and rename Vdfs32e to something else and run Gothic 2 as admin.

My personal favourite installment of the Gothic series.

- 30h of a solid walkthrough (probably longer if it's your 1st time playing the game)
- Fairly big gameworld divided into 3 (+1) areas
- Tons of sidequests, "secrets" and dark mushrooms <3
- Solid soundtrack and dark atmosphere

The only thing that bothered me was the AI, which is easy to outplay once you notice the pattern.
Given the fact it's 12 year old game it's definitely worth a try if you're not familiar with it.

Off you go now, Xardas awaits.

I killed a dragon with dozens of summoned goblin skeletons. 10/10 would do it again.
PS: for Win 7+ users you have to patch it first (please refer to DaniLch guide), and it will work just fine.

One of the greatest RPG experience, highly RECOMENDED

Best bloody game i've ever played 10/10

Gothic II is a perfect action-adventure role-playing game with a huge world that lets you explore on your own. Like the first game, you will find the first few hours quite difficult, but when you get some new gear, you will start enjoying the game.

The developers improved the gameplay in every possible way and the game is more challenging than the first Gothic game. There are tons of weapons, armours, skills, secret areas, monsters, characters, exploration, side quests, and much more.

This game requires the player to properly assign skill points to different stats as well as which faction they want to join. The game is very atmospheric and the soundtrack is nice. It is a rarity to have such things in a game these days.

The Gold Edition includes the Night of the Raven (Die Nacht Des Raben) add-on/expansion pack, which adds a brand new world, Jharkendar, with new content and major gameplay changes.

About the story, well, it starts off right after the first game ended, so I suggest you to try that first. Many characters from the first game return and there are many interesting quests to finish.

I forgot to write this in my review of Gothic 1: the game has a very good lockpicking mini-game. Every chest has a combination that you must use your arrow keys for the right combination. If you fail, you break the lockpick. You might want to open every chest in the whole game if you want goodies!

Gothic II is a must play for any hardcore gamer.

dont talk to me unless you have beaten the orc

Don't look at my play time. I bought the game just so I can write a review.
What? Yep.. I did.

For the last 12 years I played Gothic franchise. Every winter, when the weather goes bad outside, I have to follow my tradition of playing one of the Gothic games. For 12 years...

If you read this far and you never played this game but you call yourself a RPG fan, then do yourself a favor and buy it!
Buy it and play it for at least 1 hour. This is how long it will take you to get used to the controls and to the open-world-no-hand-holding ideology.

If I could wrap up the review in some simple words, they would be: Gothic = immersion.

This is a common scene that you will find in Gothic 2:
Heavy grey sky, raining. It's night and you see the soldiers gathering around a camp fire and chat. One of them even starts roasting the carcass of a hunted animal over the fire, preparing the dinner. The merchants sit down in front of big water pipes and relax, smoking different types of weeds. An owl can be heard in the forest close to the camp while through the trees, you can see some Scavangers going to sleep for the night. You decide to also sit on a log and enjoy some socialization time after all the fighting and hunting done over the day.

Pros:
- solid story with deep lore, a mix between religion, mysticism and politics.
- unprecedented AI behavior! Seriously, this franchise is 16 years old but even today the Ai scripting, behavior and combat is unmatched in any other RPG. Sure some other games excel in certain segments of AI implementation, but overall, you wont see a more vivid and realistic AI.
- a true open world. If you see something in the distance, you will most likely be able to reach and explore it. There are many level designers that can provide good content with a large world, but only geniuses can make every inch of a small world filled with content.
- your actions matter. Stealing from someones house or chest? Bad idea. Beating up some important NPC that has many friends and connections? Really bad idea. Betraying a whole faction and be responsible for their deaths? Awesome!
- a very natural and diverse quest system. Make friends, make enemies, steal, hijack, frame some or prove the innocence of others in order to unlock more quests.
- choose your path. This is not Skyrim or Mass Effect. Once you chosen a faction, there is no turning back! Playing each faction it's basically a separate playthrough. This is how much the game changes depending on the path taken!
- absolutely beautiful soundtrack, realistic nature sounds and good voice over.

Cons:
- somewhat awkward control scheme, but it's consistent! Once you learn to handle it, the controls feel smooth.
- outdated graphics. D'oh! 16 years old engine.
- almost no hand holding. No flashing quest marks over NPC heads, no minimap, no pointers all over the screen (probably this is also a reason why the game is so immersive... nothing to distract you from the actual game)
- high difficulty in combat, but not unfair!
- access violation error for some systems, that can be easily solved by running the game in Windows XP SP2 compatibility mode + Administrator rights.

By today standards the game is 7 / 10. But, by taking a look at the game industry today... this game is a 10/10 from head to toes. This is a rough gem that deserves a chance to be discovered.

Piranha Bytes, thank you for creating Gothic series. With all my heart, thank you!

Hands down one of the best RPGs of all time.

I love this game so much, but I don't recommend purchasing it, at least not here, because it will not work on my machine running Windows 7. This is apparently a common problem with the game, with numerous solutions, none of which have worked in my case. I recommend reading about this game on the internet before purchase, especially in regards to running it on new operating systems.

Gothic 2 is basically a completely polished and smoothed out Gothic 1 with added features.
But that means that it's just brilliant, this game is flawless in my opinion.
The story carries on and it just get more and more insteresting.

Same as Gothic 1 you put in effort to become a part of a faction and NPCs react to who you are and what you do, you feel like you accomplish much, everyone who played Gothic 1 should without a doubt get this immediatly.

Great game, but steam version is ♥♥♥♥. You just can't make it to start.

The game from my childhood 10/10

Co tu dużo mówić, gra (od 1 do 3 części) życia.

If you played this game and didn't like it suck your uncle's ♥♥♥♥

It's a good game althrough steam refuses to do any fixes so don't buy it.... it could not be launched on win 8 and there still lot of problems with win 7.... hope i helped.

The gamimng CLASSIC with really capital letter 'C'. Many hours of much enjoyment, great storyline, and plenty of choices to made, to increase the feeling, that you can litterly do anything you want. A-MUST-HAVE to all fans of fantasy, RPG, and good games

Dont work. Use GoG version.