Started playing Gothic 1 again. Good times. Awful playability and abysmal controls considered from today's viewpoint (Hold CTRL and press UP / W to pick up an item or use it...), but Piranha Bytes nevertheless made a perfect RPG masterpiece. Gritty, dark and very charismatic. You just have to love a game when an ever recurring applicable dialogue line just reads "In that case I will just have to beat the living **** out of you." And you can do that, without killing people. With practically anyone. You can (almost, like 3-4 exceptions in the whole game) kill anyone too. No immortal NPCS or Quest Givers. You can eradicate the complete game and void it of NPCs, if you want to. Roleplaying at it's finest. ^^
And then there's a branching storyline, which makes the game fun to be played 3 times. Not just simply a few different quests along the way. It's a completely different game, depending on what faction (out of 3) you choose in the first chapter. You're not joining the Old Camp, where the mages are? Then there's no way to ever learn magic in that playthrough. You're joining the Old Camp, but the Guards instead? You might have a few scrolls, but no magic for you either. You piss of the baron and he wants to kill you? You just broke the main quest, because acting like a dick gets you killed. And that's final. The game doesn't simply tell you you ****ed up, but a vital character doesn't talk to you any more. You then get a quest to try to join another camp. But if you pissed them off too, then you're going to have to reload or wander the world aimlessly until you accidentally stumble upon the final boss. You can still finish the game, but you're an outcast and nobody likes you and everyone's trying to kill you. ^^ Good old hardcore gameplay. And if you pick a fight with someone stronger than you, they usually don't kill you, they just knock you down and take some of your stuff and most of your money. You can get it back, if you can get them knocked down or killed before they start using up your inventory. No NPCS that just stand around, everyone has a day and night cycle. Regarding how old that game is, it has so many things implemented, that we are having started to miss out on again today. Because developers are getting too lazy and the games too big do give every single NPC a complex life cycle. It's far more convenient to just let them stand around or repeat 3 basic actions for eternity, say their 4 lines and be done with it. But not with the Gothic series. That series might be a bugfest catastrophe sometimes, but it is developed with heart. And by hand. (the 4th game, Arcania doesn't count, because it was developed by someone entirely different. That's the reason it has no '4' in it's title. And the third game got forcefully pushed out by the developer more than half a year too early and was horribly buggy, until community patches fixed it to a completely playable state.)
Second game is the best one. Can't wait.
If you have no clue what series I'm talking about, it's the same developer that made the Risen series. Either you love their games, or you hate them. Because they are different from mainstream games. Simply different. You revisit places. Things change, in the first two games you can't simply go locust-mode and farm everything and then go to the next area. The world is ever changing, with each new chapter. NPCs develop and comment on new things. You get feedback on the things you've done. And sometimes you just break into the wrong house and everybody will hunt you down until you're dead or you reload.
I'll stop waffling now.
