Hi all,
Have the Gothic edition needed to run this mod, but the more i read it sounds like this mod is more like an overhaul of the game judging from various comments ??. Is the original really that bad or this mod that good?.I though mod's only makes improvements to certain parts of games but this one doesnt impact of affect the gameplay in the original in anyway? (bit confused tbh). People seem to recommend to play the vanilla version of any game before using mod;s but in this case?.

Archolos is not an expansion to the original game. It is a separate story taking place in the same setting. No. While this mod is indeed one of the most interesting Gothic projects in recent years, it is clearly over-hyped at the same time. No. Properly-built Gothic modifications don't affect the original game ( and each other as well ). It is true for addon-like projects, which modify the original campaign.

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Of course, if you have never played Gothic games, you should start with the originals anyway to familiarize yourself with setting and lore. :)

You should definitely play Gothic 1 and 2 before playing this. They're superb games.

No, it's a completely new, almost unrelated game just happening in the same universe.
It could easily be (well, no, it is) a title on it's own.

The amount of content/complexity, depth of the story matches original games (maybe it's even a little more in terms of , length of a play-through movie, maybe a little less [not tried] in terms alternative solutions), And it's also not just random content, but feels very real.

As a free AddOn, the bug-denistiy is (*) slightly higher (this could be a single reason to recommend playing the original games first, with some degree of feel about what kind of bugs/shortcomings might arise, it gets pretty easy to ignore). If one doesn't have too much problem to switch back to some savegame just for the reason of some minor bug (maybe half an hour lost per 30h of play or so) however, it's difficult to decide which of the games to play.

But why should anyone decide about that?

(*) was, in 12/21

EDIT: same world -> same universe