Gothic 3

[Quillan]

That may be why I had some early problems, as I haven't played the first two games. I've figured most of the things out, and gotten a handle (mostly) on what's best to spend learning points on and what I can skip. I just hit level 22 and am in the process of clearing out the cave full of minecrawlers and gargoyles behind the grain thieves' camp. I, too, find it silly that you can't lose reputation with any of the factions. I'd liberated Cape Dun before I found out doing too many rebel quests can put you in a position where you can't complete the rebel ending, so I'm not going to liberate any more cities now, but my reputation with the orcs is just as high as it was prior to that.

[Skanky Burns]

I found a fairly well-written walkthru for Gothic 2, so restarted the game to take advantage of the information contained in it. There doesn't seem to be a great deal of information about the Gothic series available though (in English), presumably due to the fact that most fans speak German. I only found one other guide which listed only one way to complete the game. Considering the different factions you can join and the different side-quests you almost need to do to level up, a guide that lists only one way to complete the game is close to useless.

The control scheme is not what I would call intuitive, but given enough time with it (and remapping the keys) has made it easy enough to use. I still find out a fair bit of things just by trying them out. For instance, I used to eat my meat raw because that's how it came, but by using a stove I discovered I could cook it and get more health (or money) from each bit of meat.

I have found one thing Gothic definitely does better than the Elder Scrolls games: rain doesn't fall straight through solid objects! This was a minor thing that irritated the hell out of me in both Morrowind and Oblivion!

I hear you on that!

Reputation is quirky in Gothic 2 as well. I have joined the Militia (city police) and have had the thieves guild send someone out to kill me. Upon entering the thieves guild, they offered for me to join them. :shrug:

[Standup]

I got to like the controls in Gothic 2 - adds a nice element of control/skill although at the early levels it doesn't make much difference.

The manual isn't very helpful. I had to look up how to use lockpicks but managed to work out potions and blacksmithing (is that a word). Sometimes it's nice to find things out by experimentation (there;s lots of small bonuses in the game) but other times.....

World Of Gothic this is a pretty complete site if you haven't already used it.

Edit: I'll add only for Gothic 1+2 in light of Quillan's post below. Haven't bought 3 yet. Waiting for a few more patches...

[Quillan]

I've been to that site; the design looks good, but the content (at least for Gothic 3) is incredibly poor. Literally the only information I was able to glean from that site that wasn't in the manual was the names of all the various skills and what prerequisite abilities you had to get before you could learn them.

I thought I'd borked my game just now, and was gonna be highly upset if I had. I was up in Nordland, joined a Wolf Clan hunting party, and they sent me off to go wipe out an orc hunting party that had set up nearby. Unfortunately, what I thought was the orc hunting party turned out to be much larger. After fighting my way all the way through a cave and out into a valley, I killed an orc named Boss (which completed a quest I'd never seen), but orcs kept coming out of another tunnel entrance. That led into this mine that was really strange inside, chocked full of orcs, so I wound up turning God mode on and killed my way through because I wanted to see just how many orcs were there. I think it was at least 200. The problem came up at the far end. I fought my way past this monstrous forge, almost dwarven in design, and up another tunnel where I encountered more Nords heading down. Well, in the course of the end of the orc battle I accidentally hit one of them. He of course started attacking me and all the others joined in.

I tried running, I tried an Amnesia spell, I tried beating him down (they normally forget after you beat them), but nothing worked. I ran off, saved the game, loaded it back up and they still attacked me. So then I figured I'd kill them and leave it at that. Well, after doing so, a guy with a name (NPCs with actual name are generally important to a quest) arrested me for murder! I quit at that point, and then discovered that he's important to the main quest line of the game! So now I'm thinking "Great! An NPC for the main quest is going to attack me on sight, I've broken the game and won't be able to complete it!" Well, I decided to try one last ditch effort. I used a teleporter stone to go all the way down south to Cape Dun, then used a console command to move me back to that NPC. Apparently getting beyond a certain distance of them reset the NPCs, because they didn't want to kill me anymore. Whew.