I lost my childhood here

Still one of the best RPGs ever made with great quests and immersion.

If you want it to run in all resolutions, Windows 7/8/10 and 60 fps use the Gothic System Pack. You dont need other workarounds.

http://forum.worldofplayers.de/forum/threads/1340357-Release-Gothic-%C2%BD-%C2%97-SystemPack-%28ENG-DEU%29

Gothic was released in 2001, but it already had advantage gameplay features and graphic you can't find in other games back then: a lively open world with rich dialogues and voice acting, you can climb, swim, eat,... and pretty much everything that makes a RPG great and immersive. (and they say Morrowind was a revolution for RPG, PFFFFT!)
The story is not the best, but it's good and interest enough to keep player in the loop. Combat and control will confused people who just started the game, but you will get used to it.
Because this game was made by a German company and wasn't well marketed in worldwide, it wasn't well known (even up to now) and was result in being a very very very underrated gem. Therefore, if you are a RPG player, this game is a must.

Here are some recommend mods for you:
Unofficial patch: http://www.worldofgothic.com/dl/?go=dlfile&fileid=164
The game itself is not really buggy, some claim this patch causes more trouble than it worth but I had no problem with it.

Texure patch: http://www.worldofgothic.de/dl/download_247.htm
Gothic 1's textures are very outdated, with this texture patch, it will bring most textures from Gothic 2 to G1. It's not your kind of fancy HD texture pack, but it will improved the graphic A LOT and keep the visual style in a lore-friendly way.

Best RPG.

Best RPG I've ever played. 12/10

-always join the sect camp because of their delicious weed
-dawgie can bite ya
-steal from poor homeless people
-sleeper is a lie
-little troll is cute as hell
-get everyday your swampweed portion and enjoy it!

Trouble launching a new game? Use this!

http://steamcommunity.com//sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=242675318

This is truly, together with its sequel, one of the best RPGs in gaming history, and probably a game that set standards for lots of games that came after. It has a well thought combat system that once get used to, it makes the game even more fun. Most importantly it has a unique storyline with player choices that DO matter. And despite the lack of graphics, even now a decade after it was released, it is worth a buy for a true RPG fan.

A classic! And part of my childhood. This game is one of the best RPG ever made. The soundtrack is really beautiful and the gameplay is good if you can get familiar with the clunky combat. The game world atmosphere is great. It will surly absorb you with his hostile world, if the 2001 grahpic isn't a problem for you.

Btw I would recommend it to get it from GOG or if you have it on Steam, download Gothic ½ SystemPack for widescreen support etc.

One of the best RPG games ever and the most favourite game from my childhood.

Hard to believe an old game released in 2001 already has so many merits that today's modern RPGs are proud of! Gothic has fully voiced dialogue (including the hero himself!), day/night cycle system, weather system, smithing (which is somewhat in detail and realistic), animal skinning, NPCs all have their own simple daily schedule, player even have several different factions to join ... and yes these all in a 3D hand-crafted open world!
In the dark evening, the hero can cast a light spell (which will summon a light ball hanging over his head for a while) or simply lighting up a torch. Though this does sounds quite usual to today's players, I still have no idea if Gothic was the first 3D RPG that introduced such feature just to add immersive feeling, what I can say is it's quite an useful function in this game. The sound design is also outstanding in its age(except for npc's chatting lol) and its background music is very well done that not only adding points to atmosphere but also can be seamlessly switched between different areas. The storyline is good enough to me that not only makes me keep goin on but also provides a comparatively convincible explanation of the border of an open world lol (instead of some kind of "unseen wall"...)

Note: I've finished this game several times, but not the Steam-Version. I also play with the "PlayerKit", and with this modification, the playing time doesn't count, so don't get confused about my ~1 hour of play time. :D

This is one of my most favourite games. I started playing this masterpiece around 2004/2005 and I still LOVE it! The Gothic-Series (except Part 3) has been the best RPG series ever existed. I also played Skyrim for around 300 hours (~100 with the account of my brother), I loved it, but the atmosphere and the fighting system isn't even near as good as in G1 and G2.

+ Story!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
+ FIghting system
+ Athmosphere
+ Character identification
+ Cool armor, cool weapons (altough there could be more)
+ Cool Fractions!

- Not Designed for windows 7/8, I had some work to do to get it running (Nr.1: Delete the "Read-Only" parameter in the folderoptions of "SteamLibrary").
- The graphics are really bad, but this doesn't matter for me (and there'd be some texturepacks out there!)
- The fighting isn't as smooth as in gothic 2

one of the first games i ever played and still one of my favorites

Gothic is one of the best RPGs ever, and it laid the foundations for other great titles to come. It's open-world and mostly non-linear, though completing certain parts of the main storyline progesses your game to the next "chapter" which can change things pretty significantly.

Save frequently and don't skip the dialogue quests, because you're going to want that experience to actually survive outside of the camps (and sometimes inside too). You're pretty much dogmeat early on, and fighting multiple enemies at the start is almost guaranteed suicide. Yes, the game is difficult in the early stages and that's why I like it - you're a nobody that gets beaten up from outset, continually threatened and attacked, but you rise up from that to become a hero.

You can choose whatever playstyle you wish by advancing certain stats and using the proper gear/items. The main builds are melee fighter or mage (archery exists but doesn't seem entirely viable for several reasons), but you can hybrid as you want and there are some thief/rogue skills available as well.

Nearly all dialogue is voice-acted, which was a pretty big deal back when the game came out. A number of NPCs roam around in the camps, making background conversation with each other, wandering off to pee in the alley, and heading to their homes at night, adding a realistic atmosphere to the world.

While Gothic is an amazing game, it's not without its flaws. Enemy AI can sometimes be abused to allow you to casually pick off enemies. The game tends to crash a lot later on (it often has to do with it not loading sound files for the orc weapons properly on startup, which could be a huge problem if you or an NPC/mob has one near your save location). The game lacks a crafting system which was disappointing when a conversation early on with a blacksmith suggests you can actually craft more than a standard sword (you can't). The tools are in place for it, because you can cook meat in a pan and smith some basic items... but that's about it. Additionally, some content was stripped out of the North American version - a side questline involving a bandit camp as well as an in-game music concert (though mods have restored these). There are a number of mods available for the game that range from additional content to crafting to entirely different gameplay styles.

Some experience problems getting the game to run on modern systems, but there are a number of resources/fixes posted on the forums that have worked for most people. That said, it took me about 7 steps to finally get the game to run (and in doing so it wouldn't completely log my full hours played on Steam, which is nearly double what's officially posted). Because of this, I'd recommend buying Gothic when it's on a big sale just in case you can't seem to get it working... but if you do, you'll find a satisfying RPG worth many hours of play.

Best game I played in 2014.

One of the best RPG ever. But be ready for many bugs and community patches if u want to play on modern systems.

This is my favorite early childhood game! I have played it hundreds of hours. If you are classical RPG fan this is definitely for you! Recommend for everyone! Long time ago theese was very nice graphic's , new generation people will possibly never undestand that... It still beats some of the new generation RPG's. Thanks for great memories GOTHIC! :)

You may have problems to run game, because game is provided to old generation computers.


1.Go to Steam>Library>Gothic>Properties>General and uncheck the box next to "Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game"

2.Go to your Steam install folder and rename the GameOverlayRenderer.dll to something else (Like to GameOverlayRenderer32.dll) and then should work fine! :)

An important note about this game is that it isn't meant to run on Windows 7, 8, or even Vista. It was made back in 2001, and you'd better be prepared to jump through some hoops to get this thing working. I ran this game under 8-bit color mode with Windows XP Service Pack 3 as the Administrator, and even then I couldn't get the opening cutscene to play (the other cutscenes worked fine, though). I can't guarantee that you'll need to do as much as I did, nor can I guarantee that you'll need to do only what I did. Keep that in mind when looking at this game.

Story:

People don't play this genre for the story too often, but it's still there, and still worth mentioning. You play as the Nameless Hero (yes, that's his title), sent to The Colony, a magical island prison, to deliver a letter to the Magicians of Fire. You'll end up joining one of the prison's three camps, the Old Camp, the New Camp, or the Sect Camp, in the process. To say much else would be to delve into spoiler territory, so I'll just say that the story is a lot better than would be expected, but it's still no Dragon Age.

Graphics:

Graphics have come a long way since 2001, and Gothic is nothing if not proof of that. The game looks, to put it frankly, terrible. Models are blocky, the textures are blurry, characters look like they were barfed out of a Dreamcast, forests in the distance are replaced with a really crappy-looking forest picture...thing, and so on. I didn't have much of a problem with it, to be honest, but others most certainly might.

Voices: Terrible, but laughably so. That's really all that can be said about this one.

Combat: Normally, when you start off in an RPG you can swing a sword with ease, but the problem is that said sword is made of dirt and you do no damage. So, you buy an iron sword, put some points into strength, and start movin' on up in the world. In Gothic, however, The Nameless Hero starts off swinging his weapon so clumsily he might as well be on resident drug Swampweed. You overcome this by paying trainers to teach you how to more proficiently use items, but doing so means you're not putting points into Strength. This creates an interesting tossup; is it worth doing more damage if your character can't swing the sword at all? Is it good to flashily swing and spin your weapon if you do so little damage?

Combat is simple, but effective. Block when the enemy attacks, attack when possible. However, the majority of enemies will kick your ♥♥♥ so hard it'll fly off to the Orc Lands until you level up a ton. It can be annoying, sure, but when you finally take that beast down you'll feel fantastic.

Technicality: Oh god. This game has some horrific bugs. It occasionally crashed on me. Oh well, I saved a ton for reasons mentioned above. I can't climb certain ladders due to the geometry of the map. Oh well, there are ways around those ladders. The game repeatedly crashes in a certain late-game area unless you hack the game, turn off the sound, keep playing for about thirty seconds, hack the game again, and turn the sound back on.

...

Conclusion:

Did I sound like I hated this game? I don't. I actually quite like it. The thrill of powering up and taking on tougher foes can't be easily matched. The story is surprisingly pretty decent and I cared to see the end of it. The bugs were awful, the graphics were painful, and the compatibility was hard to get around, but despite all that, I can't help but wholeheartedly give this game a great thumbs up. You won't get it 'till you try it, but once you take it for a spin, you can't put it down until you see the end.

Valve really screwed up on pricing this, given its age and the fact that Gothic II, with the add-on, as well as Gothic 3 and the first Risen, are all half the price of this one. It makes no sense, but it's due to the fact that Gothic has not been available for sale on Steam until very recently.

Anyway, into the actual review: This is the game that really defined and revolutionized the Western RPG. It gives you a delicately hand-crafted world filled with dangerous enemies and characters with extremely varied motives, who follow a daily schedule. And it plops you right into the middle of it, with little more than the shirt on your back. Go ahead, try and take down the first enemy you come across; you'll probably get pummeled a few times until you learn how to fight.

So there you run into the first justified complaint: The controls. While it was an ambitious, complex control scheme, it simply failed to be utilized correctly, due to its general clunkiness and unresponsiveness. However, if you get used to it, you can endure the awkward use of mouse-and-keyboard interface to really enjoy the depth of this game.

The setting is truly unique as far as games go. Instead of a world full of peasants, paladins, mages and monarchs, you are dropped into a prison colony which has been entirely usurped by the convicts themselves. Nearly every character you meet is a criminal, to a greater or lesser extent. It becomes a point of stress as you delicately choose your words and who to interact with to ensure you don't run into a twitchy cutthroat or crafty thief. Thankfully, the determined adventurer will find enough NPC's who guide you through this troubled world safely.

The three factions in the game give a lot of depth to the opening chapter. You can explore three unique settlements: the Old Camp, occupied by a rigid hierarchy of convicts who adorn themselves as agents and soldiers, and answer to the tyrannical Gomez; the New Camp, a ragtag group of rouges and mercenaries, who live in careful harmony, and who answer only to their chosen leaders; and the Swamp Camp, or the Brotherhood, a group of fanatical monks and novices who believe they have found the path to salvation in a mysterious diety known as the Sleeper.

Once you're past the first chapter and have chosen your faction, the game gets increasingly linear, perhaps to its detriment, but the story escalates and becomes exciting enough that you may be able to ignore the fact that you're given only one path. As you continue to develop your character, you may open paths to magic, giving you a powerful arsenal of spells to rain hell and become the colony's ultimate powerhouse.

So I've really talked up this game, but now the question is: is it worth the price? Well, if you're going to play Gothic II or 3, I definitely recommend taking the time to play the first one, to help you really understand the world and conflict, as well as learn where the characters you encounter repeatedly in the sequels have come from. Of course, I've already stated that this game should not be priced twice as high as the next two games in the series, so I wouldn't hold it against you to wishlist the game and wait for it to go on sale. But at $20, it's still worthwhile for a classic RPG that set the standards that developers such as Bethesda and CD Projekt made sure to abide by.

i remember hearing all sorts of stuff about the gothic series but never managed to get on with playing it , guess i as too young , i remember playing oblivion and thinking it was ♥♥♥♥ , hell even skyrim is crappy because u dont get a sense of achievement in any way , u slay a dragon get his soul and get some ♥♥♥♥♥♥ shout that makes u invisible or something while some invisible war between nords and imperials happen and u dont see any of it i mean wtf . But now im finally starting to play this gem and its awesome even though the graphics suck once u get on with playing it its non stop . 5 stars game , top quality material here.

Spent the first hour selling weed to an entire villiage, went to sleep, and did it again the next day!
10/10