Gothic/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The series provides examples of:

  • Awesome Music: The main refrain of Gothic I/Gothic II is awesome, and the whole soundtrack of Gothic 3 is this in a nutshell.
  • Demonic Spiders: In the unpatched Gothic 3, several animals (most notably boars) had the tendency to stunlock and kill within seconds even experienced characters. It reached Memetic Mutation levels before later patches reduced their attack frequency.
  • Fan Dumb: Maybe not the English ones, but as somebody regularly visiting the forums, this troper can tell you that the German fan community is an extremely vicious Broken Base. Generally, most of them can agree that the first two games and the Expansion Pack were awesome, but when Gothic 3 came out, everything went to hell, especially when the developers, Piranha Bytes, and the publisher, Jowood, separated. Jowood kept the license and went on to make Forsaken Gods and now Arcania. Piranha Bytes instead went on to make Risen. Most members of the community side with Piranha Bytes and consider Risen a worthy Spiritual Successor, but prepare for a flame war when you're not implying that Gothic 3 didn't suck (yet Piranha Bytes, of course, had no fault in that, according to them) or that any of the games made without Piranha Bytes might actually be worthy of the name Gothic. Even if you do agree with the general opinion, expect someone to call you a fanboy. Flame War ensues either way.
    • The vitriol over Gothic 3 isn't nearly as bad with some fans due to the fact the Community Patches cleaned up a lot of the bugs and fans have been working on reintroducing the dark atmosphere back into Gothic 3 via modding, but Forsaken Gods and Arcania still drawn not entirely unreasonable utter hatred.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: The release of Gothic 3 and the following games made under the license owned by Jowood all created some backlash and led many of the hardcore fans to declare this. Some felt the franchise was Ruined FOREVER, others simply pretended the Gothic series never got a sequel after Gothic II's Expansion Pack.
  • Game Breaker:
    • Hunting skills in Gothic I, exploitation of monster patrol patterns and the Insurmountable Waist High Fence aversions in Gothic 3.
    • Summoning Magic in Gothic II could get pretty close at times too.
    • Ranged Weapons becomes one in Gothic 4, thanks to bugs with monsters spawning, at least in the demo.
  • Good Bad Bugs: All the Gothic games have these, and many are used by players to make the games far more enjoyable.
    • Gothic I has the unlimited Roast Meat bug, and the strafe off cliffs with no damage bug.
    • Gothic II allows for the economy to be exploited via an A.I. programming glitch in which you beat the crap out of a merchant, take his crap, wake till he gets up, sell him what you took off him, and repeat.
    • Gothic 3 allows you to beat up people for their stuff (which respawns), and when done in towns where everyone is your friend, you can make a small fortune in less than ten minutes.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Xardas, especially in Gothic II/Gothic 3.
  • Quicksand Box:
    • Gothic 3, specially if you haven't played any of the previous two games. The storyline is "tenuous" to say the best, and very few characters will actually get detailed at explaining anything. While this can be considered a token of realism (people aren't usually prone to give full elaborate explanations to a stranger that just knocked at their door), it also means you can easily get lost and walk around aimlessly without knowing what the hell is going on. At the very start of the game, you're given the task of finding Xardas (the main quest) but no info at all about where he is. You'll need to do a lot of sidequests to just get some clues about his location, and at the beginning, they'll be pretty vague. The game also makes little to no effort to explain who is Xardas and what he has done, so if you're a newcomer to the series, you'll probably spend a good portion of the game without really understanding why you have to seek him at all.
    • Another main quest, finding the fire chalices, will take almost all of the game for you to complete it. However, the quest itself is given by a very minor character in the first rebel outpost you'll probably visit, and he's not extremely hard to miss by the way. To add further insult, the quest was broken in the initial release, and took quite some patches to get it fixed.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks:
    • Gothic 3 did away with the context-sensitive jumping system from the earlier installments, making the Insurmountable Waist High Fence aversion much more difficult and less awesome.
    • Especially in the German community, Gothic I and Gothic II were often considered the ideal of how a German RPG should look: a dark, dirty world with an incredibly thick atmosphere (the main reason why you can perform entirely pointless animations) where one has to work his way up to become a Badass. Fans generally refer to this as the Gothic Feeling. The huge changes made by Gothic 3 and the following games have often been criticized by the fanbase for lacking that particular feeling around them. Risen, on the other hand, was quickly considered to be possessing the Gothic Feeling and therefore, a worthy Spiritual Successor by most.
    • Arcania in particular suffers from this. The general consensus is that that it would have at least gotten a few more So Okay It's Average reviews more had it not claimed to be a successor to the Gothic series, yet done away with most traditions and features the games were notable for, like the ability to attack anyone or pass time by sleeping in beds.
  • Uncanny Valley: The Seekers in Gothic II are made incredibly creepy by taking advantage of this.
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