I just finished up gothic 2.
I was told by quite a few people that it was like morrowind, but better.
WRONG, the only things that are better is the: program stability, music and world design.
The combat is fucking disgusting. Morrowind's may have been boring but it wasn't so clunky and counterintuitive that every single battle could end in death.
Another big problem is that certain things require very specific actions that are easy to miss, which leads to frustration (ie You get a book from some guy that proves some other dude innocent, and you're supposed to show it to the boss, but the option isn't there when you talk to him. The thing I missed was that you have to READ the book before you talk to him. Why the fuck do I have to read the book? I already know what it says. The other one I can remember is lockpicking. I didn't learn lockpicking until about 45 minutes before I beat the game because I didn't know how to make the carpenter trust me.).
The difficulty is absurd early in the game. For the first maybe.. 10 hours of the game, if you see more than one enemy, even if it's the weakest bastards in the game, you HAVE to inch towards one and lure it to you, kill it, then repeat until you've killed the group. You can't use arrows or magic on them because that will alert the whole fucking group. The valley of the mines is the worst offender in this regard. Most of the time it's impossible to pick off an orc since there are so many of them grouped together and they have VERY GOOD EYES.
Adding to the frustration of the enemy difficulty is the bad collision detection and animation system. I won't go into detail because I'm started to get bored typing this, but the main problem is the very liberal range on enemy melee attacks and the fact that you can't start running while you're changing weapons, and you can't draw a weapon while backing up.
Balance is another big issue in this game. The beginning is incredibly hard, but the end is ridiculously easy. Once you get the paladin runes you can take down orcs in 2-3 hits (I killed ALL of the ones around the valley of the mines castle), from very far away and it just becomes a matter of not running out of mana.
The last problem I have is that there's not enough item variation and nothing you get feels like an actual reward.
The game's not all bad, though. The quests are quite varied and generally good, the music is excellent, sound effects are pretty good, the story is quite compelling, the fact that there's no load screen when you teleport is awesome, and the amount of choices you get is very good, so good that I could replay the game and probably have a totally different experience, but I won't because of all the problems.
I know I spent more time complaining about the bad than praising the good, I guess that's a side effect of spending so much time on the internet, but don't get me wrong, it's a very good game. I'd give it an 8 or 8.5..
P.S. I know no one cares since this game is so old, but I wanted to vent
P.P.S. I just remembered another problem.. YOU CAN'T PLAY AFTER THE CREDITS. WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THAT? The world didn't blow up, the majority of NPCs didn't talk about the thing I defeated, why couldn't I go back and wrap up the side quests?
