SniperWolf427 said:
Excellent review mate, excellent review. I've always read yours but had a striking fear of commenting for some strange reason.
Your writing style flows stupidly well, meaning I've never had to read anything twice for clarification, and that's an amazing feat considering all the information you cover in detail.
The only thing I wished you'd have elaborated on is the character system. Is it class based? Are there stats? Do you create a character in the beginning?
As I've been yearning for a good RPG, I'll have to check this out. It does work on Windows 7, correct?
Thanks for the kind words chap.
The character system isn't class based. Gothic II breaks RPG convention in the regard that you don't get to change anything about your character before going into the game, neither in cosmetic nor mechanical terms. Instead of picking out a distinct class the game gives you the chance to pick freely which skills you want to learn and perfect throughout the game. Well that's not completely honest: One of the factions you get to choose from are a circle of mages, so this decision would pretty much narrow you down to a "magic user" career path (though it still offers a lot of choices). The other two factions however leave it more or less to you (safe for the fact that you obviously won't be using magic all that much). Melee or ranged combat, one handed or two handed swords, your choice. On top off that there's a whole number of useful secondary skills like pickpocketing, lockpicking and the like. All of these options are constantly there, however the slim amount of experience points you can spend forces you to specialize and pick only a few of those. Kind of like going to the supermarket. Obviously everything that's on display can be bought, but you really don't have enough money to do so.
To be honest I don't know. I don't have Windows 7 yet, and while I own a computer that runs on vista I never really tried to play this on anything past Xp-models due to the low system requirements. They do have the game on Good Old Games though, and don't they make sure they still work on current day systems there? At least I always thought so.