Gothic

The Good
I am a natural strategy games lover and to me RPG games come in a second term as well as other genres.

Anyway, you cannot play strategy for ages, sometimes comes the need for a change so I discovered this title and decided to try it… Man I get lucky, what a great game, the best RPG I played since “Legends of Valor” (a today unknown oldie RPG). Let’s see…

1) The storyline: Designed with great dedication by the creators and as a player, I appreciate that. As you discover the way the story develops, you want to keep playing more and more and start being afraid that the time when you finish the game will come.

2) The world: You play it, as you wish, no limits, while you play the different quests you can stop whenever you want to explore or even start more non-related quests.

3) The creatures: Well, I can’t describe them since it will take to much space but I can say that the variety and characteristics of each of them are well developed and since you can use spells to turn into a creature and use their faculties you will need to learn about them, not just kill them.

4) The Guilds: The player can join one of three camps (The Old Camp, The New Camp or The Swamp Camp) and in order to succeed he must pass a series of quests that eventually will help to reach better ranks on each Guild. Be aware that once you get the admission to a camp, you can’t join the other ones.

5) The Interface: Perfect, intuitive, marvelous. Once you get used to it you will miss it when playing other RPG games.

6) The Fight and Movement System: Outstanding, another big point, very intuitive and very realistic, it take some time to get used as well.

7) The NPCs: Each one with his own personality and behavior, you will learn about them and feel identification with them. Even the tutors and merchants are well developed.

8) The Inventory: Maybe unreal but there is not limit on weight, in my opinion that’s good. The inventory is divided into 7 categories (Weapons, Armor, Potions, Spells, Writings, Food, Miscellaneous) helping a lot on the items management and usage.

9) At last, The Quests: There are not stupid quests on this game and as consequence each one have a smart solution, sometimes you feel that it is impossible to get a quest solved but by smart think you always can take the correct steps. Sometimes you will need to talk to an specific NPC character or use a specific spell to beat a creature but the point is that isn’t just as other games where you guess and get lucky or unlucky, in this game if you think, you always find the solution.

The Bad
1) There is not autosave or quicksave, therefore you have to remember to save every 10 mins if you don’t want to replay the game or if u get killed or made a mistake.

2) Minor bugs, most related to 3D Graphics System that eventually will lead to some crashing, but not a great deal.

3) Bad programming on the NPCs fighting movement, sometimes a player can exploit this to kill stronger enemies. Anyway, this fact doesn’t affect the overall game experience.

4) It took to me 50 hours to reach the end, I am not used to many rpgs as I said before but I think that it was short.

The Bottom Line
Is hard to me to express how much I like this game, I will not recommend it, I will just ask for… Please, play it and have fun. In the while, I am starting to look ahead for Gothic 2.