Note: all items here apply to Gothic & Gothic II, except the Gothic 3 Community Patch. Also, some instructions and links are outdated. See here for some updated info. I'm not on GOG much anymore, so feel free to PM me for any specific updates you want to see to this guide, or if you want to write a new guide, do that and PM me with it and I may replace mine with it. Alternately, write a new guide and message mods/staff and see if they'll sticky it.

DirectX 11 Renderer

Significantly improves the graphics and performance in Gothic 1 & II by utilizing the much more modern DirectX 11 renderer. To get this working with Gothic, follow these steps:

1. Go to the system folder in the installation folder and make a copy of Gothic.exe called Gothic2.exe.
2. Install Report-Version: Gothic2.exe 2.6.0.0.
3. Install the latest version of the mod.
4. Run the game with Gothic2.exe (you can update your shortcuts for convenience).

(Thanks, Arkose)

See the link for a variety of other mods recommended for use in conjunction with this one.

Custom resolution
For Gothic or Gothic II, open your gothic.ini file in the install folder and change the "zVidResFullscreen" items to your default resolution, and the zVidResFullscreenBPP item to 32. Now copy the file and rename it gothic.in, then open notepad and paste this text:

copy gothic.in gothic.ini /Y
gothic.exe
exit

Save this as gothic.bat (all file types) in the same folder. Launch as normal.

For Gothic II, use the unofficial patch below to improve FOV (this comes with potential concerns, though).

Gothic mouse controls
Change the control settings to "alternative" in your in-game settings for somewhat reasonable controls by modern standards. Gothic controls were designed around a keyboard with mouse support added late in development, however, so the experience will never be great. Note to newbies: to interact, attack, etc., hold the left mouse button and use the WASD keys as appropriate to "direct" your action (eg. W to open a chest/attack forward, A or D to attack sideways, etc).

kohan69 recommends setting the mouse sensitivity line in gothic.ini to 3 instead of 1. Experiment with numbers 1 through 10 to find what you like best.

Gothic Unofficial Patch
Popular patch by Ironkeep Studios which fixes many bugs still present in the latest official version. Some say it causes more problems than it fixes, so be cautious. My personal experience with Gothic was almost bug-free, so you may want to go without.

Gothic Textures Patch
Significantly enhances the graphics of Gothic. Player Kit (below) required.

Gothic Player Kit
Install this to play/use the fan made modifications (mostly adventures) found here.

Unlock framerate (Gothic)
After installing the Player Kit, download and install the patch above to unlock the framerate from 25fps to whatever your machine can handle. Should provide a much more smooth gameplay experience.

More blood
To increase the amount of blood in Gothic / Gothic 2 (it was censored by the powers that be, if I recall), open Gothic.ini (found in your install folder) and change "bloodDetail 1" to "bloodDetail 3". This is useful for tracking enemies, also.

Stop NPC chatter
If you're annoyed by the frequency of repetitive NPC chatter in Gothic, do the following:

-create 'speech' folder in _work/data/sound
-download the NicoVDFS tool
-set root path in NicoVSFS to _work/data/sound/speech
-open speech.vdf with it
-extract all files from it to the new folder
-delete speech.vdf
-search folder for 'smalltalk' and delete all files containing the phrase

The same can be done with Gothic 2 using this version of the tool, though it seems to cause stuttering.

Thanks to alexei_net for this tip.

Gothic II IronKeep Community Patch
Another series of bug fixes from IronKeep Studios. Also improves FOV on widescreen monitors and improves textures. One user warns against installing the full patch and going a more minimalist approach (details here). As with G1, the game is pretty well bug-free, so you may want to skip this.

Gothic II Texture Pack
Significantly improves the textures and meshes in Gothic II.

Command console
In either game, enter the character/status screen and type "marvin" (no quotes). Exit the screen. You should see "Marvin mode" in the top left of the screen. Now, after hitting F2 to open the console, you can activate a variety of commands for various effects (see: Gothic commands, Gothic II commands).

One function which should prove useful to most is teleportation -- handy if you have to get halfway across the world and don't want to walk. To do this in Gothic, type goto waypoint [waypoint] -- in the brackets goes the location you want to travel to. See for the list of accepted location codenames. For Gothic II, simply type the name of the desired location listed [url=http://www.worldofgothic.com/gothic2/?go=g2waypoints]here.

Gothic 3 Community Patch
Very popular overhaul which was since incorporated by JoWood into an official package. It makes the game look and play better improved performance, mechanics, graphics, plus bug fixes, and a whole lot more. For all the details, consult the . GOG has [url=http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/new_release_gothic_3/?staff=yes]confirmed the final version (1.74) is compatible with the GOG release.

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Further tweaking can be done by opening gothic.ini and reading descriptions. Be careful, of course, and keep a backup default copy in case you mess something up.

If I've missed anything imperative or useful, please let me know and I'll add it.

Thanks for putting this all in one place.

Glad you like it. :) It should be stickied by the end of the week.

Hey chautemoc, there is a significant omission in your post: you linked the wrong version of the Ironkeep patch for Gothic 2. The final version is version 2.10, linked below; you linked the early 1.0 version. (For some reason, it's hard to find the final version on google.)

http://forum.worldofplayers.de/forum/showthread.php?t=848246

Thanks for creating this thread! :) :) :)

Thanks man. I saw that but it was a little confusing with all the different releases. Link has been updated.

I'm pretty much an idiot when it comes to computers and I have a problem I can't figure out. I got gothic 2 and installed 2.1 community patch, game still didn't work, then I uninstalled game and patch. Now I've reinstalled game but every time I try to download patch it say it's already installed buy it isn't. I'm not sure if maybe the patch is somewhere I haven't seen and I'm not deleting all of it or what?

If i've read it correctly, in the forum discussion mentioned above, there are hints about some registry keys that are written by the patch installer but are not correctly removed when you uninstall, and must be deleted manually...

Thanks for the info. I've read through it but I couldn't get anything to work. I guess the patch is unimportant though since I can't even play the game. I don't think it fixes whatever it is that's stopping me from playing it. I could be wrong though.

You may find help here: http://forum.worldofplayers.de/forum/showthread.php?p=7073174&#post7073174
Please start a new thread here if you're still experiencing issues.

hey chautemoc. I want to share my experience with the G2 community patch and you can decide whether there's anything worth integrating into your first post.

So,
1. The installer causes trouble for some people. A manual installer is available, which is just a .rar file. This is what I used, because I only wanted the bug fixes and the camera patch (contents of the "work" folder in the .rar).
2. EDIT: see some later posts in this thread for discussion of the usefulness of the 2.6 (german) vs 2.7 exes.
3. The patch is pretty conservative in its fixes. If people are having serious problems with the game, the community patch probably won't fix them.

Thanks for the info. I've added a word of caution.

I bought the G1, G2, and G3 bundle from Steam's sale this week and just wanted to report not only do the G1 mods work with the Steam version but they also launch the game separately from the Steam client so -- essentially -- it's a way around the DRM. Sort of like Fallout 3 mods, even if Steam went poof you could probably still play just launching the game through the mod launcher. I'm only using the FPS uncap mod for a smoother experience as I think the graphics look great without the texture pack -- of course I play on a somewhat dated system at 1400x900 for all of my games anyway.

This here is still the best source for mods and other Gothic-series related stuff:

http://worldofgothic.com/ or http://worldofgothic.de/ for the german version (more mods)

Most of the files are straight replacements, but what did you do with the ou.* files in
_work\Data\Scripts\Content\Cutscene\
?

The original folder has Ou.dat and Ou.lsc, but the RAR file has ou.bin . . .

This thread suggests removing/renaming the .dat file and renaming the new ou.bin to Ou.dat
http://forum.worldofplayers.de/forum/archive/index.php/t-817290.html
I haven't gotten to the location where people noted that there was a bug though (Vatras saying "let us summarize" and getting a sub in German), so I'll have wait to see what does what.
[looking at NCONiall's posts - he said he was using 2.7 but also said he used the installer, so I'm not sure what his actual situation is]


Also @chautemo, you might note that currently, the link to the .rar in the first post of the patch thread is dead, but there are two links offered on the last page to a new mirror:
http://www.silverphoenix.eu/ik/products/g2cp/g2icp_v2.10_archive.rar
http://tratos.110mb.com/ik/products/g2cp/g2icp_v2.10_archive.rar

EDIT: this entire post is invalid. See the next guy's post for proper science.