Although it is obvious that there is a wealth of content available in the game, many minor flaws and a number of critical ones mar the game to the point of near-unplayability. These flaws appear early on in the game and thus will deter most players from continuing to the point of their resolution, if any. Some, like the problems with quest design, seem to be endemic--it is tough to believe that there is some point after which the quests will stop being breakable and badly designed.
The combat system has been mentioned by numerous other reviews. The fundamental problem with the combat system is that critical hits are entirely too important. Your character may defeat a monster in one swing, or he might do 1/20 of its life again and again. Enemies are the same way: trying to fight a number of enemies at once is impossible, as they will by sheer weight of numbers critical more often than you--and remember that a critical can kill you in one shot, even if you have dozens of HP above the base for your level. Furthermore, you may not move while performing most attacks including the vaunted combos, yet enemies dance in and out of range easily. One-on-one fights with human enemies can, at times, boil down to attacking, pounding block, and then attacking again. It feels very arbitrary whether or not you will have one of these attack-block-attack fights or one where the enemy swings fast enough to kill you between your blocks. Ranged combat is no better: one click is one arrow shot (no drawing back or meaningful manual aiming), and then your skill with a bow entirely determines if you will hit or not. Combat performance would not be so important if there weren't many quests early on in the game that require the player to fight multiple strong opponents.
The camera is another major failing point. Judging melee ranges is extremely difficult. The player is larger than many early enemies, and therefore he will block the camera's view of them. Enemies can easily see you before you are aware they are there, whether because of the third-person view or, at times, because the camera is stuck in a tree. You can use a first-person camera to rectify the latter problem--unless you would like to use your weapons, when the camera pulls back automatically to third-person. The camera will "lock" onto enemies and NPCs even if you have not used the lock function on them. The camera will not break away unless you move the mouse. This means that if you navigate by running and strafing, you will find yourself attaching to NPCs and even enemies again and again.
Speaking of strafing: you cannot move on a diagonal. You can either run straight forward, or to the side. If you stop strafing and start to run forward, your character must come to a complete stop and start running forward from there. This sounds like a minor quibble, but it is a pointless annoyance in a game whose controls are already unimpressive. Navigating menus may be annoying to those unused to using arrow keys for a graphical menu, but unless you have to use an item quickly it should not get in your way often.
The game does feature an impressive jumping system, including mantling and even mantling above the head. Very many modern games, even with their empty emphasis on "environmental interaction" don't do so well with simple but fun exploration assistants. However, there is no mid-jump "ledge grab" mantling--which you will regret not having--and the clunky-feeling running controls make the jumping controls almost moot. You will, after all, run and walk far more than jump.
We now enter the meat of any RPG: quests. Quest design is probably what will always make or break an RPG. The quests in Gothic 2 are standard fare for an RPG, but suffer from very flawed design. There are many points in the game--even just in the first few quests--where you are able to fail or otherwise lock yourself out of content without any notification that this was even possible, or even that it has happened. This was a hallmark of older (and shorter) adventure games, but in an epic-length RPG that can span dozens and dozens of hours, having this happen in the first few hours does not bode well for the rest of the game. Not all of these appear to be intentional: one questgiver offers to escort you to a site where the expansion pack content apparently starts, but that option disappears if you accept his escort to another site first. Another representative example: one character offers to sell you items--but will only do so one time, without any indication that you are using up your one chance to purchase from him. It feels as if the player runs into these situations constantly--the player is punished for exploring and trying to work through all his options. In a relatively short adventure or platformer, this is forgivable; in a massive RPG, the constant loss of content is infuriating. The player becomes scared of everything--will this trigger close off some other quest? If I give this thing to this guy, will I lose an entire quest-line? Can I sell this pearl I found? If I kill these wolves now, will I be able to find enough wolf-skins later? If I talk to this person, will he run off and die two quests down the road? If I walk into this town, will the guy in the previous one wander away and refuse acknowledge that I completed his quest? These kind of questions will always be in the gamer's mind, and even keeping 20 saves, nobody really wants to restart hours back to try to figure out why they can't do a certain thing any longer. It's stressful and, frankly, not much fun.
A particularly frustrating quest involves telling a character to go from one point to another. He will take the shorter route there despite it being clogged with bandits. At the level at which you would reasonably take the quest, the player and NPC together will have absolutely zero chance of defeating the bandits: three bandits with sticks are extremely hard for a low-level player, and these are six bandits with swords and bows. You cannot tell the NPC about the bandits, and there is no way to stop him once he starts off on his trip. There is an alternate route to his destination that is no longer than the one he takes, but you cannot ask him to go around the bandits. He is doomed to die if you proceed to a certain point in the quest, and you naturally fail the quest then. A person can cluck their tongue and say the player should've been more careful, but it is simply lazy quest design that the player cannot warn a person he is walking into a trap when the player and even the NPC can see the trap practically from where they start the journey. It is also implied (but not stated) that the player has a time limit for the quest, which means leveling up and coming back later to beat up the bandits is out of the question. Normally these sort of time limits are not really time limits at all, but Gothic has shown itself not to be shy about punishing a player for slacking off--you can lose one of the earliest quests in the game if you take too long doing it, and are not warned that the man will wander off and end the quest at some point.
And the player has to ask himself: this is the first quarter of the first chapter of 5. How many more times is this going to happen to me?
What makes this problem so galling is that it is obvious there is a lot to do in the game. There are all sorts of things hidden in the environment. There are caves to explore. There are quests aplenty even in the first town. The roads are lined with shrines and rock circles. Even after just a my first couple of hours of play, my inventory was full of stuff I'd gathered just from poking my nose around. Now, it's brimming over. The player, however, is so severely punished for exploration by weakness and arbitrary quest design that it discourages him from trying anything at all.
Here is an egregious example: in the main town, I was exploring a tent city by the docks. Suddenly, from nowhere a giant lizard woke up and killed me instantly with a charging attack. I didn't even have time to draw my sword. It's perfectly and even admirably fine to have dangerous enemies, and I DO respect the developers for taking a path that doesn't hand things to the player. It is, though a testament to the poor design of the game that there are hostile enemies INSIDE the first town that can trap and one-hit-kill an exploring player without his knowing they are even there, and nobody in town says a word of warning about it. The player is just expected to realize by being slaughtered that he shouldn't walk in that one particular part of town. The part of town that the player IS ACTIVELY warned to stay away from? You MUST go there early on to get anything done.
In a game plagued by annoyances, the scenarios I have mentioned are stand-out examples of either exceptionally poor design or exceptionally poor quality control. They are huge red flags; Gothic shoots itself in the foot by having such glaring problems crop up in the first couple of hours. These are not problems that it is clear will be resolved if the player sticks with the game; these appear to be fundamental problems that will crop up again and again.
These issues aside, the quality of the game content itself is actually fairly high. There is a very good game somewhere in this title. The NPC characters are, honestly, bland in a way that you would expect from a bunch of run-of-the-mill fantasy peasantry. They are voice acted reasonably well, although there are translation errors and some German haunts the subtitles. The graphics are functional with nice touches: blacksmiths grinding down metal in a spray of sparks; guardsmen practicing in formation; character faces don't seem to repeat too often, or if they do you don't immediately notice it. The ambiance is surprisingly very high: the much-vaunted Radiant AI of Oblivion didn't create a single town that feels as lived-in as Khorinis. Even single farms don't have the "randomly-generated" feel that places in Oblivion did. In some aspects, the game is a satisfying success, which makes the problems in actually getting to that content all the much more regrettable.
I have read in places that some of the difficulty of the game is attributable to the expansion pack being installed. Lists of changes to the game mention making stat increases more difficult among other things. These changes should have been made optional. A working gamer may have time enough to enjoy the additional content offered by an expansion, but will probably not want to deal with pointless hindrances added for the sake of making the game harder. Simply asking if the player wants to play with "hard mode" numbers or not would satisfy Gothic fans looking for a challenge, while also catering to gamers who simply want to experience everything the game has to offer without having to attain extra levels before they can do so.
At the end of the day, I would not compare Gothic to a modern RPG except in places where Gothic shines. In atmosphere and exploration, the game should be a proud contender. However, there are frustrating design problems that are not merely artifacts of the game's age, which could be overlooked for that reason. An extremely patient person with a wealth of free time might be able to hack through the game to the point where it "becomes fun." The average gamer, however, will probably not want to put as much effort into the game as it deserves--especially if told seven hours in that they have to start over from the beginning, when they were too weak to kill a fly.
Gothic 2 does itself absolutely no favors, offers no apologies for being difficult for silly reasons, and demands the player conform to its meanness in order to experience its wealth of content. Therefore, I can't feel too sorry for giving it a low rating, but I can be sorry that I can't take what it holds in outstretched hands.