Video Game / Gothic

"Piranha Bytes apparently takes any concepts that are salvageable out of the trainwreck that is Ultima IX (figuratively speaking), patch it all up with what they carried over from their pen&paper passion, and somehow make a great game out of that. The new German RPG prodigy is called Gothic."

— Hardcore Gaming 101

A 2001 German game translated into English, Gothic is the first in a trilogy of Action RPGs starring The Nameless Hero, who has been thrown into a prison colony. We never find out exactly what crime he committed, and none of the other characters really care. At first, he's just trying to survive, and maybe escape if he's lucky - but he ends up having to save the world.

The sequel, Gothic II, once again follows the now free Nameless Hero, who is promptly recruited to defeat the approaching army of dragons. Sounds easy enough. It also had an Expansion Pack, Night of the Raven. Uniquely for an expansion, Night of the Raven makes large changes throughout the whole game instead of making them self contained to the new area. Raven, a minor NPC from the last game, attempts to obtain the Claw of Beliar. The Hero sets out to stop him, rediscovering an ancient, lost civilization in the process.

In the third game, Gothic III, the Nameless Hero travels to the mainland of Myrtana, only to find out that the land has mostly been conquered by the Orcs, though several factions are still struggling. Finding himself in the middle of a political struggle which also represents a war of dominance between gods, the Nameless Hero has to choose a side. Gothic III was the first game in the series to feature Multiple Endings, and was rather rough at release. An Expansion Pack called Forsaken Gods was also released, which took the unfinished status up to eleven and wasn't made by Piranha Bytes. Most fans consider it So Bad, It's Good at best. This time, the Nameless Hero returns from exile because he is majorly pissed off at the people of Myrtana not enjoying the peace he has brought them with hard work, but rather warring each other in various factions once again. In the end, the Hero becomes the new King of Myrtana to unite them once and for all.

The fourth game in the series, Arcania: A Gothic Tale or simply Gothic 4, also not made by PB, stars a new hero who goes out on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge after the troops of the King (yeah, THAT King) butchered his village and killed his Satellite Love Interest. Of course, things are yet again not how they seem and the previous Hero didn't become an Evil Overlord just for fun... Arcania received low reviews and was poorly recived by fans for being decidedly un-Gothic in most ways, primarily being very linear. An add-on was completed, but Piranha Bytes's temporary sale of Gothic's rights only allowed JoWood to make two games, including expansion packs, and the obvious legal issues have prevented its release.

Meanwhile, Piranha Bytes made their own spiritual successor named Risen, which received good reviews and praise from journalists and fans. They later made another successor called ELEX.

One interview with Piranha Bytes has confirmed they have regained the rights to the series due to their sale to JoWood being temporary. In 2019, a playable teaser of first game's remake was released by THQ Nordic, with the intention of receiving feedback from players. They later confirmed the full remake was going ahead after the teaser proved popular enough.

Gothic's main draw was its wide open world and the ability to 'choose' in the plot, although this really came down to just picking one of three camps for the first half of the game, as you are railroaded back into the central plot eventually. The world, however, is exactly as promised: within the limits of the magical barrier surrounding the colony (or the sea serpents/mountains in the 2nd game), exploration is rewarded with beautifully detailed scenery, complete with weather, and many hidden items.

Another notable draw of Gothic is the method of character advancement. Only hit points increase on their own at level up, while the player gains skill points as well. To spend these skill points the player must seek out trainers. Basic abilities like raising an attribute typically have free, easy to locate, trainers (at least for low levels), while trainers for more esoteric abilities (such as lock picking) may be limited to a small handful that require a quest to learn from and higher skill levels generally require faction specific trainers. The hero's skill is also a much greater effect on combat than just speed or damage; at low levels he is visibly inept at weapon use, being slow, predictable and frequently stumbling, while as skill increases, new abilities in combat are gained, movement is more fluid, and fumbles are lessened. Armor also matters a great deal and, with the exception of a few early pieces that are simply bought, is linked with quest progress. Gothic is based much more on character skill than most RPGs with real time combat, with a weak PC being unable to make any damage on a strong enemy.

Combat, additionally, utilizes a simple but effective Non-Lethal K.O. system which applies to both NPCs and the player, meaning there is a large and tangible difference between a tavern brawl or robbery on one hand and cold-blooded murder or a fight to the death on the other. The setting, quests, character interactions and crime system are all heavily influenced by this fact.

Besides the above, the series (particularly the first two games) has been praised for its general dedication to immersion in various ways, especially in terms of sound design, flora and fauna, and Artificial Atmospheric Actions, its rough, dark, cynical, and rogueish, yet still quite witty, playful, and highly quotable take on fantasy writing, and, arguably, being an early, very prototypical example of what would later come to be known as the Souls-like RPG formula. The Game Mod community, particularly in German, Polish, and Russian, also remains highly active even 20 years after release.

Not to be confused with the genre of Gothic Literature, the Goth lifestyle, medieval architecture, or the tribe of people from Gotland. Also notable for containing a character named Gorn, but no actual gorn.

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The series provides examples of:

• Affably Evil: The Pirates in Jharkendar. Like their local rivals, the Bandits, they are technically wanted men, always on the run from the authorities. However, while the Bandits kill on sight everything that doesn't look like them, the Pirates are shockingly friendly, this apparently stemming from confidence in their reputation as The Dreaded. When encountering the Nameless Hero, one character aside, they do not even bother hiding that they are, in fact, pirates, instead boasting about it, and they are incredibly quick to offer him rum, cheerfully describe the way to their camp to him and almost immediately take to the idea of recruiting him for their ranks without even bothering to ask who he is (in fact, the Hero may even be a member of the city guard/militia, although there is no option to turn the Pirates in).
• A Lighter Shade of Gray: The New Camp and its successor organizations (like the Mercenaries) generally come across this way. They're highly violent, criminal and unpredictable, but the alternatives tend to be ruthlessly authoritarian or mindlessly fanatical. Thus, the New Camp bunch gains a bit of a The Everyman feel, being the only faction that is down-to-earth, non-judgmental and straightforward and honest in what they want, not to mention free-spirited. Even characters from other camps, most notably The Mentor Diego, are implied to have New Camp sympathies, and they later without hesitation take in an Old Camp Nameless Hero, as well as his pal Milten, as refugees of sorts. Plus, the Hero unavoidably during story scenes mocks the Brotherhood's fanaticism (even if he joined them) and canonically stood up to the Old Camp's systems by refusing to pay Bloodwyn and giving Ian's list to the New Camp, but he doesn't really have anything bad to say about the New Camp. The Water Mages, who are aligned with the New Camp, also function as a Big Good to varying extents in every game, arguably moreso than the "officially good" Fire Mages. This goes doubly for the third game, which firmly establishes that Adanos, not Innos, is the Big Good among the gods.
• Ancient Tomb: Quite a number of them, since both Khorinis and the mainland (specially the desert of Varant) house ruins of ancient civilizations. Unsurprisingly, they tend to be full of undead.

• Anti-Grinding: More or less. There only a few Respawning Enemies except for the finite chapter transitions, so endless Level Grinding (without the use of some bugs or Game Mods) is tough. The exception are the Skeleton mages, who can summon endless waves of undead skeletons to their protection, unless you kill them. It's a good way to grind, especially if you have Death to the Undead magic rune.
• Anyone Can Die: Subverted in the first two games, where you can kill anyone but the plot-important NPCs (who are simply immune to all damage), played straight in the third one. (Though the plot-important NPCs in the first two games tend to become killable after they have played their role in the plot.)
• Arch-Enemy: The three classes in the second game each get one. Dragon Hunters fight predominantly lizardmen, Paladins orcs, and Fire Mages the Seekers.
• Arc Villain: Raven, who is the main villain in the expansion pack Night of the Raven of Gothic 2, but has no impact on the main storyline whatsoever.
• Armless Biped: Scavengers and the various Snapper species in the first two games. In Gothic III, their designs was changed and the Snappers were given arms.
• Artificial Atmospheric Actions:
  • NPCs go about their daily lives, and animals hunt each other and scavenge corpses. The player can also perform almost any action that an NPC does, no matter how pointless (sit on chairs, play instruments, ...).
  • NPCs also share generic after-battle-lines. It can be a bit odd when a wise, dignified and serene priest of Innos or Adanos is dragged into battle with a monster and afterwards goes "Man, I do love this shit..."
• Artificial Brilliance: Kiting is a useful strategy against most monster types... provided they're solitary instead of naturally pack-based. Attack one such pack-based predator, like a wolf, and they will simply alert their whole pack to attack you as a group anyway.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • NPCs when acting as temporary companions in Gothic 3 are walking examples of this. To be brief, they will only notice an enemy when said enemy gets close enough to hit them in the face (sometimes they'll actually need to receive damage in order to unsheathe their weapon and enter combat mode).
  • In Gothic 1, you can run straight into an owned house, lockpick a chest, take all of its contents, and then run away, with nobody being angry on you. Yes, as soon as you enter a house, surrounding NPCs will immediately shout "Hey, you!", run towards you, threaten you with their weapons and eventually attack you if you won't leave. However, they won't attack you despite the fact that you're lockpicking a chest right in front of them, and as long as you leave before their "timer" runs out, they won't attack you, and won't mind that you just completely robbed them of all their possessions.
  • You can also unsheathe your weapon and make everyone around you forget about what they were doing in favor of threatening you. For example, it works on guards who are supposed to not let you pass. They will be more worried about you running around with an unsheathed weapon than you going where you shouldn't go. It allows you to, for example, get to the Fire Mages without joining any camp and get the reward for delivering the letter. Though trying to get to Gomez this way makes him kill you.
  • Enemies with bows and crossbows never lead their target. Because they also have excellent aim, you can just walk sideways while shooting at them, easily defeating any number of enemy archers (if they don't have melee guards nearby) without taking damage.
• The Artifact: In Night of the Raven the Militia trainer still notes that one handed and two handed skills are linked and you need to learn one to master the other, despite the expansion doing away with that mechanic.
• Ascended Extra: Raven goes from being a quest giver/bodyguard for Gomez in the first game to the main enemy of the add-on.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: Go ahead, ask the Fire Mage Parlan where the church is. While standing right in front of it.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Come chapter 3 in Gothic II, the Jerkass "Paladin" Lothar is killed so one of the mercencaries can be framed for it to ignite tensions between them and the city.
  • The only way to advance to the end of the bandit camp section of the second game's expansion pack is to murder your way past all the douchebags in charge who refuse to grant your further entry. You can either do this directly or, for players who still hesitate for moral reasons, do quests for them, at the end of which they will inevitably screw you over, giving you a reason to kill them in self-defense.
• Automatic Crossbow: Not quite, but, while still slower than bows, crossbows in the first two games had a fairly impressive rate of fire. This kind of makes sense with the setting being Renaissance-ish and was likely also done for balance reasons, see Bow and Sword in Accord below.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Magic Crossbow and the Fire Bow from the Gothic II Expansion Pack are very powerful and deal high amounts of special-type damage, but they cannot use normal projectiles of their weapon type and once you used up the limited supply of special ammo you find next to them (there are two copies of the firebow+ammo to be found at least), they're useless, essentially downgrading them to a mere trophy. There is also the impractically long casting time of powerful spells like Fire Rain and Army of Darkness in the first game, but that was fixed in Gothic II.
• Badass Army: The Orcs, en masse, are tough enough to qualify, what with even a single orc being a challenging lategame enemy (at least in the first two games).
• Bad Powers, Good People: Even the good-aligned Fire and Water Mages are allowed to dabble in demonology and learn how to summon monsters and demons to do their bidding, though getting to deep into it is apparently frowned upon and made Xardas a pariah.
• Bag of Spilling:
  • Justified pretty well in Gothic II: The loss of status from I to II makes sense. The Colony had a society all its own, and no one in the greater world is going to care if you were a mercenary or a templar in the Colony. The Fire Mages in Khorinis wouldn't know about you if you went that route in Gothic 1 because the ones in the Colony all got killed. The only faction this doesn't make total sense for is Lee's mercenaries, but that can be justified because the new ones wouldn't just accept the Nameless Hero, and he's quite a bit weaker since he signed on with them in 1.
  • Gothic III had a Hand Wave that explained the equipment loss: pirates ganked your gear. As for the loss of status, that applied to Khorinis, which you find out via Thorus is also under Orc control, and King Rhobar II's kingdom no longer exists from a practical standpoint, so even if anyone remembered you, no one would care because you would be no better off than themselves (slaves, mercenaries, or rebels).

• Battle Thralls: Beliar's main invasion force in the second game is composed of orcs, who make up the main physical body of the army, the Dragons and their lizardmen servants, who are elites and powerhouses, the Seekers, who work in the shadows, and corrupted humans, later revealed in the third game to be an entire civilization.
• Beat Still, My Heart: The final boss battle in I has five of these, and you have to stab all of them.
• Beef Gate: Gothic I and II heavily utilize these to keep you out of certain areas of the game world early on. However, there usually are several different ways to still bypass them and get to most areas, anyway, preserving the open world feel.
• Berserk Button: Kharim. You can talk smack about his strength, his face, or his mother and he won't react, but if you imply he's not totally loyal to the New Camp...

• Blamed for Being Railroaded: At one point, you are tasked with finding a necromancer named Xardas. He's supposed to help the Water Mages in carrying out their plan to destroy the Barrier by blowing up the big pile of magic ore they collected over the years. However, Xardas tells you that blowing up the pile won't destroy the Barrier, and the answer must lie elsewhere. When you return to the Archmage of Water, your character inexplicably just can't bear to tell him the news, and instead decides to keep this to himself, with no other option available. Later on, you finally figure out the real way to destroy the Barrier - finding and defeating a powerful demon that lives deep inside an underground temple underneath an orc village. As you attempt to go further into the temple, you find an old, very powerful sword. Xardas tells you that this sword might be the only way to reach and defeat the demon, but only after it is powered up. As luck would have it, the pile of ore appears to be the only way the sword can be powered up. But inexplicably, your character once again refuses to tell the Mages the full story, and instead attempts to hijack the energy of the pile while keeping this a secret. But he gets caught, which results in the Mages being so furious that they attack him on sight, forcing him to run away from the village. After that, their disposition towards him doesn't change until the sequel.
• Boss Battle: Most notably the Sleeper, although there are others.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • In Gothic III, while several wild animals could qualify due to the severely unbalanced combat system, the Sabretooth tigers definetely take the cake. They can sustain moderate amounts of damage, hit quite hard and fast... and come in packs. A group of three can be found pretty early in the game in a cave which an orc patrol will task the player to investigate (and "cleanse" if neccesary); amusingly enough, the only way to complete the quest at a low level is to attract the tigers to the orcs' position and assist the orcs to take the beasts down. Packs of four or five (found in Nordland) will keep being quite a menace even to very well geared and high-leveled players.
  • Packs of goblins and blood flies in Arcania. While the game is not specially challenging when compared to the previous installments (even in the "Gothic" difficulty setting), these two are the most likely ones to give players a run for their money, mostly due to their numbers. Goblins have a rather annoying special power attack that hits quite hard and is not easy to avoid when fighting against a whole group. Blood flies move relatively quickly, and some attack at melee while others stay behind shooting their venom at you from distance. Both goblins and blood flies are encountered relatively early in the game, as well.
• Bow and Sword in Accord: Many characters, such as bandits, mercenaries, shadows of the Old Camp, and various hunters throughout the world favor this combination, and the hero can do it as well. Some factions, like guards of the Old Camp and knights/paladins, however, prefer using crossbows instead. The whole thing is also played with from a gameplay mechanics perspective in Night of the Raven: Bows correspond to Dexterity, while crossbows correspond to Strength. Strength is the main attribute required to use and wield melee weapons, making crossbows an ideal Ranged Emergency Weapon for melee characters. However, there are a handful of dexterity-based melee weapons in the game that can be of great use for archers, but they will still always be inferior to the weaponry a proper melee character can equip. Trying to skill both dexterity and strength, meanwhile, while likely result in your character becoming a Master of None.
• Canon Discontinuity: Forsaken Gods and Arcania have been officially dismissed as non-canon by Piranha Bytes when the rights went back to them, much to the joy of pretty much the whole fandom.
• Cave Behind the Falls: Gothic I and Gothic II have such cave up the river that separates camps from the Mine Valley entrance and the Old Mine. The treasure inside depends on patches.
• The Chew Toy:
  • Mud. To be chewed on is his raison d'etre. He develops a crush on the player character, follows him around, gets in the way and tells increasingly depressing stories about his abuse at the hands of every other character. The vast majority of players eventually kill him just to get him out of the way; he is the only NPC in the game whose death earns you zero XP, and won't trigger the guards because everybody hated him anyway. The alternative is to beat him up, wait until he stands up, and tell him you enjoyed it. That's right, you can show him that you're just as much of an asshole as everyone else who's been kicking him down all his life.
  • There's also Valentino in Gothic II: Night of the Raven. There seems to be some sort of secret organization based around beating him up.
  • In Gothic 1, the entire "digger" social class of the Colony exists mainly to be bullied and stepped on by everyone else. Interestingly, this has changed by the time of Gothic II: Night of the Raven, where diggers in the bandit camp enjoy a degree of respect, with a more fair treatment in terms of working hours, compensation and food. This is because the dirty work they previously had to do is now done by inexperienced slaves, and the diggers have come to be valued for their expert knowledge of mining, as well as at least being fellow ex-convincts, rather than the 'degenerate' city-folk the slaves are taken from. Thus, for once, the diggers have someone they can bully without retaliation.
• The Chosen One: Defied. The Nameless Hero is treated as the Chosen of Innos, God of Fire, Light and Justice, even by Innos himself, but considers himself no one's champion but his own and is perfectly capable in the third game to join Innos's mortal enemy instead, or just screw them both over and end divine rule over the world for good. Likewise, Xardas becomes the Chosen of Beliar by the end of Gothic II... but he uses his newfound powers to find a way to stop the war of gods instead of supporting God of Darkness
• Chromosome Casting: The first game has a large cast of almost exclusively male characters, with the only exceptions being a tiny handful of slaves in the Old Camp and the Swamp Camp (with no relevance to the story and a single line of dialogue shared between them). This is justified however due to the game's setting; the characters are all trapped in a men-only prison colony, and under normal circumstances there would be zero women present - but after the prisoners took over, their leaders' demands to the outside world included the occasional Sex Slave. This doesn't apply to later games which take place outside the colony, where female NPCs are unremarkable.
• Combos: In Gothic I and II, you can chain multiple weapon swings together with properly timed presses of the "attack" key, instead of slower normal attacks. The combos also evolve as you improve your weapon proficiency skills, becoming longer and more efficient.
• Commonplace Rare:
  • Armor, arguably. The Gothic series always made a great deal out of their importance, since they generally represented faction affiliation and status. Therefore wearing a Paladin armor gave you quite the sense of accomplishment for having worked yourself up all the way from a lowly militiaman with a cheap uniform. However, to achieve this, they obviously have to prevent you from simply looting armor off the corpses of NPCs that already wear that armor. It sometimes makes you wonder. "Why do I have to work for the pirates to earn that Bandit Armor to infiltrate their camp if I could just take out a bandit and wear his?". Made worse by the fact that the game states the "guard" ranked guards in the colony got the armor they have by killing the pre-barrier guards.
  • In-universe, this happened to magical ore, which was so common in the first game that is was used as currency, the hero could easily carry around thousands of chunks, while in the second game, it has become so rare that a single piece is worth a lot and there are only about two to three dozen or so chunks in total that one can find and use to make magical weaponry.
• Crapsack World: A world where not even staying on paths can keep you safe from being mauled by beasts, and the traditional greeting to newcomers is a punch in the face fits the bill.
• Critical Hit:
  • Notable because of the way the game calculates damage. For example in Gothic II, in close combat, a regular hit will do roughly 1/10 of (strength + weapon damage), minus the target's armor protection value, down to a minimum of 5 (so in practice, you'll often do just that guaranteed 5 damage). However, the Hero can train in weapon skill, which is a percentage value, and aside from giving you new combos at 30% and 60%, regulates Critical Hit chance for close combat attacks. If such a critical is scored, the full strength + weapon damage value applies. This makes fighting NPCs (thank god you can block...) extremely dangerous, since they tend to have Weapon Skill of somewhere around 30%-70%, strength values of often 100 or above, and decent weapons, meaning there's about a 50% chance to be instantly downed every time an NPC hits you in early parts of the game.
  • Archers have a weapon skill stat, but instead of regulating critical hits per se, it regulates the chance of actually inflicting a wound when the arrow hits. However, since every arrow wound is a critical hit, you quickly learn not to mess with archers.

• Crutch Character: Diego in II joins you briefly in chapter 2. He is strong enough to plow through the, otherwise nigh-unkillable at this point, enemies encountered when he is with you and will generally earn you a few levels.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Downplayed. The second game does canonize some things the Hero did in the first game, but they're all fairly minor things which do not decisively lock in his choice of camp or build, or major story decisions. He completed the Grim ambush quest, meaning he refused to pay Bloodwyn protection money. Cavalorn also says he would constantly come by to buy arrows from him, which suggests an archer or ranger build for the Hero, but arrows were also handy for trading in the first game, so it's ambiguous. He probably learned at least the first level of one-handed fighting, since the flavor text points out a beginner's mistake in his stance which he does not repeat in the second game. And of course, the Hero is shown wearing the Ore Armor and Uriziel in the opening, but not really fighting with the sword, so having been a mage build remains possible too. The one borderline case is that, if a particular dialogue option is chosen, Lares will state the Hero brought him Ian's list, which is technically a betrayal of the Old Camp in favor of the New Camp, but it was still possible in the game to join the Old Camp after doing this, so it would only mean the Hero was not canonically a fanatic Old Camp loyalist, unsurprising considering you later have to work against them anyway.

• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Default combat controls are almost entirely changed between 1 and 2.
• Dark Is Not Evil:
  • Xardas, the elderly black-robed necromancer with pale white eyes who lives in a creepy tower and consorts with demons and orcs. On paper he looks like he might be the Big Bad, but he's actually The Mentor. In the first game, he can actually teach a PC who has already taken both the Vow of Fire and the Vow of Water to become a Demon Summoner/Black Mage as well. So yes, you can totally be a hero that frequently uses a spell called "Army of Darkness" which summons six undead warriors. Though they will attack/be attacked when you summon them in a public zone.
  • At the beginning of Gothic 3 it appears like Xardas might be a subversion, as he seems to have pulled an Evil All Along and betrayed you... except he hasn't, he's playing a long con to banish the gods from the world and put an end to the constant wars and suffering perpetrated in their names.

• Death Mountain: Gothic II, the volcano of the Fire Dragon.
• Dinosaurs Are Dragons: Played with in GII with the introduction of Dragonsnappers. Mutated by the Dragons' corrupting magic, they replaced the Biters and Razors from the previous game. In addition to them, there's the Fire Varans, who resemble Dimetrodons and breath fire.

• Do Not Drop Your Weapon: Averted, as being knocked unconscious will make anyone drop it.
• Double Unlock: Spells in the second game are triple-locked. First, you need to invest learning points into achieving the required circle of magic. Then you must invest further learning points into unlocking the spell you want. Finally, you need to craft the rune of the spell in question, with rune-stones being a finite, highly sought-after resource usually received as a major quest reward.
• Dragon Their Feet: Thorus manages to pull this out twice. In the expancion pack for the second game he assumes the control of the bandit camp and their gold mine after the Nameless Hero kills Raven. Between Gothic III and Forsaken Gods he rises from being The Quisling for orcs to leading what is left of their short-lived empire. Unfortunately for him, later he decided to mess around with the same guy who created power vacuums that allowed him to jump ranks.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: The Nameless Hero's fairly understandable reaction at the beginning of Forsaken Gods. After clawing his way up to a position of respect and prosperity at the end of one game, he'd be right back where he started by the next one. Seeing as he's understandably frustrated that he gets no respect each time and it gets worse the more he tried to be a good guy, by Forsaken Gods he's becoming disillusioned with helping others because he just gets spit on for his trouble.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Pyrokar shows up in the first game's opening.
• Early Game Hell: A deliberate use due to how character progression is handled from a story prospective, working to mirror how The Nameless Hero is completely inept at fighting.
• Easter Egg:
  • In the Expansion Pack to Gothic II, Diego can temporarily become a companion. If you go to the place where you originally met him in the first game rather than to the other side of the Pass, he'll get all nostalgic and you'll get a few hundred bonus EXP labeled a "Nostalgia Bonus".
  • Getting into Khorinis at the start of Gothic II is normally just a simple task of obtaining a set of farmer's clothes and bluffing your way past the guards, but if you enter via Sequence Breaking, you not only get a nice sum of experience, but a few unique lines.
  • Various other Easter Eggs include the stunt bonus, a used car hull, and a sign written by a mighty alien dwarf.
• Everybody Hates Hades: Beliar, the god of death, is also the god of evil. He is actually worshipped by some civilizations, but they are exclusively Always Chaotic Evil types. The only benevolent Beliar worshipper in all games is plotting to destroy him with his own power and all but states outright that his religious affiliation serves purely the purpose of acquiring useful information to that end.
• Elemental Dragon: Dragons in Mine Valley are based on elements along with changing enviroment to their preferred ones.
  • Pandrodor the swamp dragon creates a big swamp as his lair.
  • Pedrakhan the rock dragon hides in the Mountain fort.
  • Feomathar the fire dragon changes the Old citadel into a volcano.
  • Finkregh the ice dragon freezes the New Camp in which he hides.
• Evil Sorcerer: Xardas the Necromancer is a subversion - he certainly looks and acts like one, but he's ultimately a heroic character, even if he verges on being a Well-Intentioned Extremist.
• Evolving Weapon: The Claw of Beliar in the second game's expansion pack. An evil blade, you can permanently sacrifice a portion of your health to it after every level-up in order to increase its strength.
• Excuse Plot:
  • The devs have admitted that the dragon-slaying main plot of the second game was essentially a last-minute addition. Originally, there was supposed to be a sequel set again within the Colony, but due to office politics, it got cancelled late in development.
  • The story of Forsaken Gods is essentially an excuse to explore Myrtana for another twenty hours. It's also a bridge (albeit a weak one) to Gothic 4.
• Face–Heel Turn: Joining the Assassins in Gothic 3 is this for the Nameless Hero by default, since the previous two games had No Campaign for the Wicked.
• Fake Ultimate Mook:
  • Shadow Beasts in caves in 2. While hyped in the setting and one of the more likely things to maul a new player, once you have a weapon+weapon skills+strength that can hurt them even the slightest bit, just repeatedly attacking can kill them due to their huge delay before attacking. The Black Troll is a very noticeable example, so threatening and prominent it's marked on your map, but it can't turn at a decent rate and is easily circle strafed.
  • All trolls in Gothic 3. Huge, physically imposing monsters with a loth of health... but so slow you can repeatedly slash or maul them to death without sustaining any damage, since they just can't block your attacks and aren't fast enough to land a punch if you keep attacking again and again.
  • To some extent, Dragons in Gothic 3. They only attack by throwing fireballs out of their mouths, and since their wings seem to exist only for decorative purposes, a player with good hunting skills can use any big enough environmental object as a shield and shoot arrows at them until they drop dead. With good timing, positioning and movements, even an average player character with average equipment can take down one of the (supposedly) toughest enemies in the entire game.
  • Too many examples in Arcania. The most physically imposing enemies the player will encounter tend to have rather predictable attacking patterns, so taking them down simply requires spotting said patterns and exploit its weaknesses. Shadow Beasts and Golems are probably the most clear examples. Packs of apparently 'sparring enemies' like goblins and blood flies, on the other hand...
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Myrtana is your average Medieval European Fantasy setting, with strong German, Spanish and Italian touches and some Renaissance elements. Nordmar is basically christianized Horny Vikings. Both Varant and the Southern Isles are an "Arabian Nights" Days setting, with a particular focus on The Hashshashin. The Brotherhood of the Sleeper in the first game is a non-national example, presenting essentially a mix of Hinduism and Buddhism, with just a touch of Canaanite paganism for flavor. The Jharkendar region is a downplayed example, with its pirates, jungles and Mayincatec architecture, it is clearly inspired by Mesoamerica and the Carribean, but the characters there are all of the same stock as the rest of the island and there is no indication the ancient culture resembled the Mayans any more than in their building style and being a doomed, deeply cultured civilization.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: Or rather Fighter, Mage, Archer. Though any combination of their individual skills is possible and by the end of Gothic I, you're most likely going to be a Magic Knight due to the mages being the highest rank in all the factions, so you have to go through the fighter-based ranks first. Though how many skills of theirs you learn is up to you.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: Mostly played straight. Magic comes from the three gods, and Innos is associated with fire magic, Adanos with the magic of water and ice, and the most iconic spells and interactions involving Beliar often feature lightning^note Claw of Beliar special effect, offending Beliar while praying at his shrine, Beliar's Wrath. That said, Beliar magic appears to be specifically "dark" lightning, while "natural" lightning falls under the domain of Adanos, presumably under the logic of storms as a sub-aspect of water. For the purposes of harming cold-fearing creatures, Adanos-type lightning magic actually does frost damage.

• Fetch Quest:
  • While Arcania, due to its linear nature, has less sidequests than the previous games, you'll spend most of the time doing this if you want to progress in the story. The hero even lampshades it: by the time he arrives at the monastery he's so annoyed of being the errand boy and/or hired thug of virtually everyone, that he outright asks what does he need to kill in order to get the information he wants.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Ask and look around a bit early on in the first game and you'll learn that the Old Camp originally had two major mines, but one (now known as the Abandoned Mine) eventually collapsed during an accident. Guess what happens to their other mine later in the game at the worst possible moment...
  • Wondering who this ominous dark master commanding everything is that all the wise characters keep warning you about in the second game? It's actually a case of Hidden in Plain Sight, just take a close look at the banners of his orc underlings. They depict a Dracolich...
  • Invoked with Abuyin the seer, whom you can pay once in each chapter to give you a brief preview of the next one for a nice amount of experience points.
• Freudian Trio: The High Council of Fire, consisting of sceptical, jerk-ish Serpentes (Id), calm, understanding Ulthar (Superego), and stern, but reasonable Pyrokar (Ego).
• Gameplay and Story Integration: In the first two games, tutorials and explanations on mechanics are always delivered from an in-universe perspective. The most famous example is learning new combos in the first game, where the skill trainer will explain in detail to the Hero how to hold his weapon, how to strike, and what the advantages of this are, and it's translated 1:1 into how he actually fights afterwards.

• Grey-and-Gray Morality:
  • The guilds that the player can join in Gothic 1/2 are this, you can choose between a militaristic, Knight Templar faction, a freedom-loving and rough bandit/mercenary faction, or a group of Warrior Monks that require every novice to brave 3 (often) deadly trials to even have a shot at becoming more than a novice.
  • It's more traditional Black-and-White Morality in Gothic III, but it immediately goes pretty far back into Grey and Gray by the time of the Expansion Pack, which prompts the frustrated Nameless Hero to Take a Third Option.
• Hanging Judge: The justice system after the discovery of magic ore was HARSH. It didn't matter if you killed someone or ignored a "keep off the grass" sign, the punishment was the same: you get thrown in a big prison colony where you either mine ore or get shanked by your fellow prisoners.
  • A sidequest on the mercenary path in Gothic II involves taking down the resident judge of Khorinis, who is also this, and in fact was heavily complicit in the above, taking advantage of that policy to get rid of anyone he disliked.
• Helping Would Be Killstealing: Inverted. Random NPCs will help you, and you will hate them for kill stealing your preciously rare XP, as there is only a finite amount in the game.
• Hitchhiker Heroes: The ones in the first game are actually a group of conspirators. However it's played straight in the second one.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: In the second game, you can run into a rogue alchemist who developed a spell of forgetfulness. He asks you to test it by committing a crime against someone and then casting the spell on the person so they don't remember. A popular solution, both out of convenience and karma, is simply to do this to him.
• Hyperspace Arsenal:
  • Unless you're the kind of player who regularly empties out their inventory just for the sake of having it easier to look over and move around in quicker, an endgame Nameless Hero's inventory likely contains the following things: About a half a dozen different swords and ranged weapons, several thousand projectiles, a dozen different sets of clothing and armor, the majority of plants and mushrooms to have ever grown on the island, enough food to hold out in a siege for years, enough potions and magical scrolls to make even the most accomplished alchemist or mage jealous, as well as a large variety of miscellanous stuff reaching from books and letters over animal trophies, silverware, torches and various random household objects.
  • Curiously subverted in the first game - apparently, there actually IS a limit of how much you can carry before your character shakes his head and outright refuses to pick up any more. To be specific, a single section of your inventory (the sections being weapons, armor, magical items, food, etc.) cannot exceed 1000 of filled slots. For the majority of the sections, it's impossible to encounter this limit, since multiple amounts of the same item turn into stacks and only occupy a single slot, and there are simply not enough items to fill 1000 of such slots. However, possibly due to an oversight, weapons of any kind do not stack - which means that if you somehow acquire 1000 of them, you'll hit the limit and won't be able to pick up any more.
• Impossible Item Drop: Averted, the drops make almost total sense. If a humanoid NPC has a weapon in his hand at the moment of his death, he'll drop it - the player can pick it up and then go through the body's inventory, picking and choosing the best loot. Non-human monsters don't initially have a visible inventory; the player has to learn specific hunting skills in order to, for example, skin wolves for their pelts (which can then be sold to traders).
• Insufferable Genius: Serpentes of the High Council of Fire is extremely dismissive of the hero, looking down on him and calling him insolent. He is also the only Fire Mage besides the Hero who ever managed to pass the Trial of Fire, a sort of potentially lethal test which allows a novice to ascend to mage-hood immediately if successful, skipping the years of humility and hard labor which would otherwise be required.
• Insurmountable Waist-High Fence:
  • That they avert this trope rather spectacularly is part of what makes Gothic games what they are. The Barrier in G1 is not a case of an Insurmountable Waist-High Fence, not even metaphorically, because it makes perfect sense for it to stop you. Anything else - fences, roofs, city walls, the huge battering ram in G2, mountains - if it looks climbable, it almost always is. Hell, there are at least three little known ways to get into Khorinis in G2 that depend on this (though just using the gates and tricking the guards to let you through is easier, but perhaps not as rewarding). The game actively encourages you to look for creative ways to get to seemingly inaccessible places.
  • There is one instance in G2 that plays this straight, although it is likely to be a glitch. The Orcs cannot follow The Hero up the log leading into the besieged fortress but they will try. In the end it is possible to have the entire Orc camp clustered at swordslength and much Level Grinding ensues.
  • And then they dropped the context sensitive jump system when they changed engines for G3... The trope is still averted, but is much more difficult to avert.
  • Also extremely blatant for the enemies in G3, many of whom cannot jump at all. Is there a high rock nearby? Do you have a lot of arrows / the mana regeneration ability? Okay, everything nearby without a ranged attack is dead.
    • Doubly excellent when you could find dragons that followed the same pathing rules as normal people, so they couldn't just step up waist-high breaks—or, y'know, fly.
• Invisible Wall:
  • The Barrier. Which becomes more and more visible the closer you get to it, and starts manifesting as electric death when you get much too close.
  • Ironically brought back in III with the same guy who put your character in one erecting the same thing around himself willingly!
• I Take Offense to That Last One: In the first game, there is a guy named Kharim from the New Camp, who fights in the arena of the Old Camp. You may say that his mother was fucked by a goat, you may call him ugly and a weakling, but ridiculing his loyalty to the New Camp? He'll kick your ass for that one!
• It Only Works Once:
  • Spell scrolls. They are, however, supremely useful, since they exist of any spell, yet have no spell level requirements like runic magic has, and only very basic mana requirements. Using them tactically is a key part of the metagame, especially in the Expansion Pack for Gothic II. Using summons, AoE-spells or scrolls of shapeshifting, the player can easily take down boss monsters or fierce packs of enemies way beyond his level, often enabling him to instantly gain 2 or 3 levels afterwards from all the foes destroyed.
  • Also, Black Ore. Both have a bit of a Too Awesome to Use nature to them.
• It's Up to You: A common criticism of the storyline. You frequently meet powerful army generals or high-ranked and well-respected mage-priests, but do not expect them to do anything of substance other than delegating their tasks to the Hero and maybe providing a bit of support. Sticks out especially while the Hero is still low-ranked and/or just a random stranger, but gets settled anyway with a crucial task by a faction who should by all means have their own highly trained and much more certifiably loyal professionals for this kind of thing, like providing the means for the greatest and most important summoning ritual to date in the Swamp Camp. The Very Definitely Final Dungeon in the second game is also a notable example, with the Hero having to assemble a full team of companions before he's allowed to attack it, only for them to stay behind to guard the base camp instead.
• Karl Marx Hates Your Guts: Some special merchants in the 2nd game that will buy 1 item type for full price are an exception, but everyone else pays the same for every item.
• Kiting: One of the first NPCs encountered in the first game explicitly advises you do this whenever possible if asked for advice. Most enemies can be dealt with in this manner, wolfs (who automatically agro any other nearby wolfs when agroed) being the most prominent exception.
• Knight Templar: Innos, mostly in the third game. He is as stubborn to wipe out all darkness and defeat Beliar and his hordes as Beliar is to corrupt and hurt the world. This fierce struggle of power causes a lot of suffering for the world's common population.
• La Résistance: The Human Rebels, united against Orcish oppression in Gothic 3. Arguably the "mercenary" factions in G1 and G2 too.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: During the quest about Bosper's stolen bow in the second game, an observer tells you he saw Bosper chase the thief, angrily shouting something after him. That something just so happens to be one of the generic lines NPCs may shout if you provoke and then run away from them.
• Limited-Use Magical Device: Gothic has single-use scrolls that can be used with minimal cost in mana and with no training, in contrast to the runes which can be used indefinitely, but use up mana and require having learned the appropriate level in magic. Most scrolls are just a single-use version of runes, but there is a handful of spells (like shapeshifting) that are only available on scrolls.
• Lizard Folk: Elite Mooks in the second game. They are implied to be a servant race of the Dragons, responsible for spreading their eggs across the land, but are never mentioned again after that. They probably all got wiped out when the Nameless Hero attacked Irdorath.
• Load-Bearing Boss: The Sleeper's temple collapses the moment it's defeated. On top of you.
• Lost World: Jharkendar. An isolated valley full of ruins of an ancient civilization. Small dinosaurs included.
• Lovecraft Lite: Technically, the first game is about a slumbering Eldritch Abomination from another dimension with unknowable, sinister goals which manipulates people through reaching out with its half-aware consciousness into their dreams, turning them into fanatic cultists, and has been known to drive them insane this way, and ultimately said entity is not killed in battle but merely sealed away for the time being. However, it's all framed in a fairly low-key, fantasy kind of way rather than horror, so you're unlikely to notice on a casual playthrough.
• Low Fantasy: The general point of the first game is a personal goal, escaping a Penal Colony. Even though you may save the world in the process, it's never your main motivation. Most of the major factions and characters you encounter tend to be either rogueish and self-serving types who ultimately believe in survival of the fittest, or overzealous Knight Templars. Magic exists, but isn't widespread with the only practitioners being either arrogant high mages or morally questionable Necromancers and Voodoo Priests. Gothic 3 even implies that, since magic comes from the gods, it actually might be a corrupting, evil force after all. And even though there is another humanoid race - the Orcs - their only true difference to humans seems to be the worship of a different god, a simple difference in philosophy.
• Mage Tower: Xardas appears to be fond of these, residing in a different tower in each game.
• Magic Knight: In the first game, an Old-Camp player could join the guards, learn 2 handed weapons using a bunch of hoarded skill points, then join the Fire Mages (overwriting their "guard" rank) via glitch ^note Ask to join the Fire Mages when given the ability, join, but before the initiation ceremony join the guards, then go to the initiation ceremony when done. In the 2nd, Paladins are a straight example, able to learn some basic (only healing and attack, plus one flashlight), but potent, spells, and unlike Fire Mages, don't suffer double cost physical skills.
• Mass Monster-Slaughter Sidequest: Often given justifications as in "Kill these Fieldraiders before they eat our crop!"
• Master of None: Not an issue in Gothic I or II, but Night of the Raven's extremely brutal way of handling skill points and greatly powering up enemies means that any PC who isn't absurdly specialized and seeking out every last oppurtunity to improve their skills by just a little bit is likely to get absolutely murdered in the harder parts of the game.
• Mentor Archetype: Vatras plays this role for the hero in Gothic 2, especially in the Expansion Pack. Xardas is this for the hero in the overall series, though a much darker version than the usual trope.
• Money Spider: Goblins play this trope straight, but they're implied to be little kleptomaniacs. Every other monster can be looted for claws, teeth etc., but not money.

• Musical Spoiler: the 'chase theme', which plays while a hostile NPC is still chasing the player character, and stops when they give up.

• Nice Mean And In Between: Several examples.
  • The leaders of the three camps in Gothic I: Lee is an overall honorable man, admired by his mercenaries and friendly towards the hero. Gomez is a tyrannical ruler who only cares about himself. Y'Berion is never outright mean nor friendly towards anyone.
  • The three highest ranking members of the Swamp Camp: Cor Angar is an honorable and dutiful man, also a friend of the hero. Cor Kalom is an obsessed fanatic who eventually joins the main villain. Y'Berion is in-between for the same reasons as in the previous example.
  • The Old Camp guards tasked with protecting the outer ring: Jackal is calm and diplomatic towards the hero, even when the two meet as enemies at the entrance to the Free Mine, Bloodwyn is an outright evil bastard capable of using weaker people against each other to do his bidding, while Fletcher just wants to be left alone.
  • The ship captains from Gothic II: Jack is a nice old man, who probably wouldn't hurt a fly. Torlof is greedy and selfish, not above letting innocent people die as long as it benefits him. Jorgen is an overall good guy, but he can also be a troublemaker.
  • The Freudian Trio which makes up the High Council of Fire, as laid out in that entry.
• Nintendo Hard: When the fans complained that Gothic II was too easy, the developers raised the difficulty A LOT for the Expansion Pack. Now just about every enemy is a lot stronger, raising your stats on higher levels costs ludicrously large amounts of XP and you'd better get your fingers on each and every Stat Boosting Item you can find, you'll need them. That said, thanks to the available AI companions and various It Only Works Once items, the entire game can still be easily beaten by an underlevelled, combat-inept character, if you're willing to skip out on having "fair", climactic boss battles.
• Non-Indicative Name: One of the Water Mages is named Nefarius. Like the rest of his guild, he is unambigiously a force for good and never pulls a Face–Heel Turn.
• No Name Given: the Nameless Hero. In fact, people actively try to shut him up whenever he attempts to introduce himself.
• Non-Combat EXP: The game gives you experience points for each completed quest.
• No Fair Cheating:
  • In the second game, you can use the Dragon Snapper transformation spell to massacre whole maps worth of monsters early on and get many levelups in the process. However, while this does get you the expected skillpoints, the HP increase you'd normally receive is applied to the Dragon Snapper instead of your regular form, and thus lost permanently as soon as you cancel the transformation, turning you into a Glass Cannon relative to your level.
  • If you attempt to simply overwhelm the enemy hordes by summoning multiple copies of the game's strongest summons (golem and demon), the summons will start fighting each other instead of your foes.
• Non-Indicative Name: "Scavengers" are aggressive and seemingly predatory.
• Non-Lethal K.O.: One of the parts that make this game unique is that characters enjoy engaging in close-combat duels with each other, where the loser will fall to the ground, have his HP reduced to 1 and will often afterwards be robbed and have his weapon taken away by the winner. In many parts of the Gothic world, this is a perfectly regular pastime and will even have nearby characters cheer on the fighters. A downed adversary can be finished off by driving one's weapon into their chest while they still lie on the ground, but this is generally looked upon less favorably by onlookers. If you don't finish them, they'll get up after a short time, usually acknowledging your victory with an annoyed comment or even running away from you. However, none of this is true for combat with any kind of monster (in which emptying the health bar is always fatal for either player or enemy), some always-hostile characters (like bandits), ranged weapons or most kinds of spells.
• Non Standard Gameover: Swiming too far out to sea in 2 will result in a cutscene of sea serpents eating your character.
• No-Sell: Some NPC's and monsters have such a high defense that you have to have a certain amount of strength to even damage them at all. Ditched in Gothic 3.

• Odd Friendship: The Hero can in the first and second game be friends with Ur-Shak, a Defector from Decadence orc shaman. Orcs in the first two games are basically Always Chaotic Evil and according to their prophecies, the Hero is meant to be the "holy scourge" which destroys them. Depending on your choices in the second game this friendship may end in blood and tears, however.
• One-Handed Zweihänder: Played with. Orcs are so strong that what appears to be a weapon made for one-handed use by orcs can barely be wielded with both hands by a human.
• One-Man Army:
  • Your character winds up becoming this for a lot of missions in Gothic III, as well as against the orcs for one mission in 2.
  • Arcania is pretty much built on this trope.
• Optional Sexual Encounter: The Hero can visit the Khorinis harbor brothel in the second game, leading to a largely clothed sex cutscene.
• 'Organized Crime Sidequest: Second part allows you to join Thieves' Guild in Khorinis City if you helped it’s members in crimes. After joining them you have access to new criminal sidequests.

• Penal Colony: First game setting in which the prisoners were supposed to mine magic ore for the king's armies. Rather than geography, it is separated from the rest of the world by a magical force field that lets people in, but kills anyone who tries to leave. It doesn't work out exactly as planned, as the mages who create the barrier accidentally make it larger than planned, trapping themselves inside and causing the prisoners to revolt, kill the guards and take over the mines. By the time of the game they've split into three factions, the strongest of which managed to reach a deal with the outside world: they continue to mine ore, and trade it for resources (such as food and women).
• Piranha Problem: in the second game, schools of piranha will appear to act as Border Patrol, along with a sea monster.
• Power-Up Letdown:
  • The summoning runes for golems (circle 4) and demons (circle 5) are in some ways inferior to the skeleton summon (circle 3). While the former two are better in terms of raw stats and a more mana-efficient way of dealing with single threats, they are weak against groups, cannot block attacks from humanoids, and tend to get stuck in terrain. Worst of all, if you summon more than one, they will fight each other instead of the enemy. Skeletons, meanwhile, can block enemy attacks with their weapons, navigate terrain more effectively, and will happily team up, allowing you to Zerg Rush just about any problem to death so long as you can afford the mana cost of summoning multiple of them.
  • The Eye of Innos is depicted as an extremely powerful mystical artifact of the gods which will give the Hero the edge he needs to defeat the dragons. That's true From a Certain Point of View. All it does is force dragons to talk to you and take away their Plot Armor, though it's unclear whether the latter is an in-story thing or just a game mechanic. The amulet does provide a sizeable (if unremarkable) defense boost when worn... but it loses its power after talking with a dragon until you power it back up again with a dragon heart, meaning in the fights where you'd really want that boost, it's unavailable.
• Plot Armor: In Gothic I and II, all plot-important NPCs are completely immune to damage, none of it in Gothic 3, though.
  • A rather literal example occurs in Gothic 2. Sylvio the mercenary captain is said to possess magic armor making him invincible, which is used as the justification why the player cannot challenge him to a duel and win yet. You can, however, beat up his Dragon. Oddly, he later on decides to ditch it in favor of a Dragon Hunter armor, which has the better stats in gameplay terms, but presumably not the magical properties, enabling the Hero to kill him.
• Plot Tumor: Adanos. In the first game, he is simply a deity who the Water Mages are sworn to. The vanilla version of Gothic 2 establishes him as one of only three gods in existence and shows that in addition to the normal Innos cult among humans, Adanos is also worshipped regularly in the cities. The Night of the Raven expansion has the agents of Adanos act as a major Big Good who are arguably a lot more sensible and competent than the forces of Innos, introduces an entire civilization dedicated to Adanos, and notably lets the Hero quip that maybe he is not The Chosen One of Innos, but rather Adanos, to the expansion's Arc Villain. Come the third game, and Adanos not only has two more cultures dedicated to him, he is also the true god of the orcs now (who had previously been established as Beliar-worshippers). The third game additionally has Adanos firmly usurp the title of Big Good from Innos, with the (canon) Golden Ending, in which you banish the gods from the world, being directly aligned with him and accomplished by tracking down his artifacts all over the world.
• Pre-existing Encounters: They also won't respawn if killed.
  • Somewhat averted in the Community Patched versions of Gothic 3 and Forsaken Gods, with some enemies set to respawn with a given percentage of possibility.
• Prestige Class: Guards / Fire Magicians, Mercenaries / Water Magicians and Templars in Gothic 1, Paladins and Dragon Hunters in Gothic 2
• Prophet Eyes: Xardas has atrophied white eyes. It isn't clear if he's blind or not seeing as he reads books, but he may have used magic to help with that.
• Purposefully Overpowered: Many of the spell scrolls, such as summoning demons or skeleton armies, shrinking monsters, creating a rain of fire, or turning into dragon snappers and similarly powerful enemies, are basically an "I win"-button. The purposeful part comes in because these are all It Only Works Once items, meant to provide an emergency way out for a poorly optimized build to still get past the occasional Beef Gate or Climax Boss when required to progress this Nintendo Hard game. Players who know what they are doing can use them for power-levelling instead.
• Raptor Attack: Snappers and their even more dangerous relatives, the Razors and Dragonsnappers, all of which are basically small, armless theropod dinosaurs.
• Rare Candy: In the form of permanent stat-boosting herbs, which can be refined into potions with a more powerful version of the effect. The second game additionally uses the stone tablets of the ancient civilization, once you can read them. There's also a few smaller cases, such as certain foods when consumed in large quantities (apples and dark mushrooms), some unique food items (Thekla's stew, Coragon's special beer...), and occasionally just story moments where a character (or book) will teach you a new trick, causing a permanent stat-up.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Pyrokar, High Mage of Fire, in the second game. While stern and a bit of a Knight Templar type, he supports the Hero's quest against the darkness to the best of his abilities and is even willing to work with Xardas the necromancer, who serves the deity Pyrokar's own is opposed to.
  • The same can be said of Vatras the Water Mage, who calmly hears out the Hero's seemingly absurd, unsubstantiated tale about dragons, does not condemn him for being an escaped convict, and also agrees to work with aforementioned Xardas for the good of the realm.
• Recurring Riff: Title theme of Gothic III sounds in several battle themes, mostly boss encounters. It's also a version of the original Gothic's title theme.
• Religion is Magic: An interesting case in that all magic comes from the gods, and all mages are technically meant to be priests at the same time, however channeling it has nothing to do with having faith in any way, shape or form, but rather relies on the standard wizard tropes of pseudo-scientific study and experimentation to be unlocked. The most a player mage gets out of their technical priesthood is being able to occasionally pull rank and intimidate characters with the authority of the position. A mage sidequest in II also involves performing what amounts to a series of exorcisms, although this is done by making people drink magic potions, rather than prayer or rituals.
• Resources Management Gameplay: Became a major thing in the second game's expansion pack. Diminishing Returns for Balance applies massively on learning point use, to the point that you're eventually pumping half a dozen levels worth of learning points into just a minor increase. Yet, some equipment does require maxed-out attributes. Therefore, it is imperative to maximize XP gain (other than using exploits/cheese strategies, there is no unlimited source of it) and stat booster use if you're hoping to get anywhere near that value. The amount of stat boosters is very finite and you may end up accidentally using them in suboptimal ways, while enemies can die in ways which do not give XP, namely if they are not killed by the hand of the player or a companion. With all that said, despite being unapologetically Nintendo Hard, the game offers a variety of Purposefully Overpowered It Only Works Once spells that make it beatable regardless of your build efficiency, you just likely won't be able to beat the bosses in a fair fight if you screwed up with resources management.
• Retcon:
  • The first game barely concerned itself with religion in the setting and claimed that many gods exist, but when the second game dove into the topic further, it set up a cosmology of explicitly only three deities, further built upon in later entries. The first game also implied mages to be normally "unaligned", with the split into fire mages, water mages and necromancers as something unusual which specifically happened among the mages trapped in the Colony as part of a feud. The second game would go on to establish the opposite: There are no "unaligned" mages and in fact, these three types of mages have always been the respective priests of the three gods everywhere in the world.
  • A minor one: Gothic ends with the Nameless Hero leaving the Sleeper-Temple completely unharmed, Gothic 2 starts with the Hero buried beneath it.
  • A bigger one, or perhaps just a particularly unusual change in perspective, happens between the second and third game in regards to orcs and the nature of the war they are locked in with humanity. Though there were a few sympathetic orcs capable of communication and implications that orcs do have their own culture, they for the most part seemed like a race of brutes and savages following a Religion of Evil, and the struggle of mankind defending themselves against the orc onslaught while drawing strength from their faith in their light-god Innos was portrayed as fairly heroic. Come the third game and orcs are all civilized and capable of speech and while they oppress humans (just as humans used to keep orcs as slaves), they are a somewhat honorable Proud Warrior Race and try their best to keep order in their subjugated territories, far from the all-destroying chaotic force they were previously shown to be. This is somewhat handwaved by saying that the Khorinis orcs encountered in the first two games were a less developed, more brutish subrace of the orcs. Meanwhile, the conflict itself is presented as a neverending struggle that only wastes lives on either side, making humans and Innos just as responsible for it as Beliar and the orcs. In addition, it is revealed that orcs are creatures of Adanos, not Beliar, while the true champions of Beliar are the assassins of Varant (which are humans) and that the orcs have just as much a right to make their own destiny in the world as humankind does. It is not a bad twist, but lacking in foreshadowing.
  • The nation of Varant, one of the three regions of the third game, is actually briefly mentioned in a book on warfare in the first installment. It's said to be an area containing swampland and whose troops rely on super-heavy infantry and cavalry in battle. Come Gothic III and Varant is presented as a typical "Arabian Nights" Days setting with endless desert, ruled and populated for the most part by a demon-worshipping take on The Hashshashin whose warrior culture is based around being a Dual Wielding Fragile Speedster.
• Reverse Escort Mission: Various Escort Missions have NPCs escort you. When the normal order is the mission, if your NPC partner gets too far away, his character can go crazy trying to find you or may even vanish. For some missions, the tendency of this NPC to vanish accidentally was anticipated and he will appear at the last waypoint, waiting for you.
• Riddle for the Ages:
  • There's the hidden Chromanin questline in the first game, which is never followed up on. The Stranger apparently discovered a power that is neither the Sleeper's, nor of any of the gods', but surpasses them all. What secret would he have shared with the Nameless Hero, had he not been murdered? Just what is Chromanin?
  • What happened to Nek? The circumstances of his disappearance are mysterious, yet nobody seems all that concerned with it. When his corpse is finally found, everyone seems content to assume he was killed by molerats while collecting mushrooms. But molerats are among the weakest enemies in the game, completely incapable of even piercing the armor of a guardsman like Nek, not to mention all his combat training. It's heavily implied Nek was murdered as part of some kind of intrigue or power struggle, but we never learn why or by whom.

• Rogue Protagonist: King Rhobar III (the Nameless Hero from the previous games) in Arcania. It turns out he's possessed by a demon and gets exorcised at the ending.
• Roof Hopping: While not required, the roofs of Khorinis have some very nice stuff for the early game that can be found if you do this.
• Rule of Three: Three camps, three guilds, three deities, three endings...
• Scary Black Man: Gorn has the look, but is subverted by the fact he's a fairly nice guy (He's said to has "a lot to pay for" in the 2nd game, but it is never said what). Thorus plays this trope straight, though he gets less scarier each game.
• Schmuck Bait: In the mining canyon area in the first game's New Camp, there's a mercenary who suavely promises to get you an Infinity +1 Sword for only the price of a medium-sized banquet worth of foodstuffs. If you haven't been clued in that this is a bad idea by the fact that you can do it at level one, and that even your questlog expresses skepticism, maybe the deliberate invoked Fridge Logic concerning why he's only using standard mercenary equipment when he has access to that kind of hardware will do the job. Actually get him his things anyway and it turns out he just wanted to party with his friends. There is no Infinity +1 Sword and he mocks you for being gullible to the point of deserving it.
• Scenery Porn: All of the games to some degree, but perhaps more notable in Gothic 3, since it has the most modern graphics of the three games.
• Sequence Breaking: The Insurmountable Waist-High Fence subversion above, combined with the willingness to run like a maniac past enemies you cannot overcome at low level, means you can get some nice loot early and basically run entire quests well before receiving them as actual tasks.

• Small Role, Big Impact: Ian only appears briefly in the first game and is never even mentioned again afterwards, but from him the Hero apparently got his Catchphrase.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog:
  • In II, after spending two chapters having Lothar insult you and call you mad, you've finally gotten something you can shove in his face to prove he is wrong and you're right, but by the time you get back to town, he has been murdered.
  • Also in 2, even if you manage to take out Hosh-Pak and the dragons, the castle in the Valley of the Mines still falls, after you leave the island for good.
  • In the first game, the hidden Chromanin sidequest. In a dungeon full of the undead, you come across a book written by a person who claims to have discovered true enlightenment and a source of infinite power capable of changing the world, which he calls "Chromanin". Trying to track this person down leads you on a wild goose chase through the whole colony as you constantly have to solve riddles and find further volumes which continue his teachings. Eventually, a meeting is set up in the same place where you found the first book. As you arrive, however, you find out that the man has already been murdered by more undead in retaliation for your earlier destruction of their kin. His body holds the final volume on "Chromanin", but the book is empty. Whatever secrets he may have held, he took to the grave with him. That said, this questline has some of the best XP yield in the whole game, so it's not entirely pointless.
• Sole Entertainment Option: The bubble-world of the first game has a single fighting arena in the Old Camp. The Sect Camp is composed of narcotics-users, and their whole religious cult around the Sleeper, so they have something to occupy their time with. The New Camp is most egregious: asides from mining and rice-growing, there's not much to do. (Well, except for going to the pub.)
  • In the German version, the Old Camp had (on the gallow platform at the entrance to the inner keep) the real world Medieval Metal Band In Extremo, performing their song Herr Mannelig. This was cut from all other language versions due to copyright problems.

• Soup Is Medicine: One of the earliest healing items you can get in the original game is a bowl of soup, and one be always handled to you if you bring ingredients. It's not particularly effective, but it's definitely better than nothing.
• Sprint Shoes: The running jump gave you just a little extra speed—enough to outrun most sword-wielding maniacs. Well, OTHER sword-wielding maniacs. In G2 this was changed, but still true if you had Acrobatics.
• Staging the Eavesdrop: In the first game, one of the tasks you need to complete in order to join the Swamp Camp is to find a way of having Baals, i.e. the spiritual leaders of the camp, speak to you. Newcomers are not allowed to speak with Baals, so it must be the Baal who speaks to the newcomer first. Lester, a friendly resident of the camp, suggests that in the case of Baal Namib, what you can do is making him think that you just had a vision from their god and you've renounced the other gods because of it. To do this, Lester and your character stage a comically exaggerated conversation where they almost scream everything they say while standing right next to Baal Namib. It works.
• Stationary Boss: In the first game, Sleeper. He just stands in one spot and shoots fireballs at you while you try to break 5 pedestals standing around him.
• Stoners Are Funny: Presumably why swamp weed was chosen as a recurring element of the setting. The mercenary Dar in the second game is a more concrete example, having some of the game's funniest lines.
• Storming the Castle: Expect to spend a good portion of Gothic 3 doing this, since by meddling into ongoing struggles between rebels and orcs (in Myrtana), nomads and hashishin (Varant) and nordmarians and orcs (Nordmar) you'll usually end up assaulting fortified places full of defenders with little to no help from your chosen allies.
• Story Branching:
  • In the original Gothic, you could decide which camp to join after starting the game, opening up different quest lines which eventually converged back into a single plot.
  • In Gothic 2, you get to do it all over again, choosing to join either the Militia/Paladins, the Mercenaries/Dragon Hunters or the Fire Mages at the Monastery.
• Story Branch Favoritism:
  • In the first game, joining the Old Camp is unique because it later allows you to become a Defector from Decadence and switch to being a member of the New Camp, which means experiencing a bit more content in one run than a pure New Camp or Swamp Camp playthrough, adds a bit of It's Personal drama to the story and, when playing a mage, leads to the otherwise inaccessible and settingwise Beyond the Impossible scenario of having sworn an oath to and obtained the magic of all three of the mutually exclusive gods at the same time!
  • In the second game, by far the most rewarding path storywise is joining the Fire Mages since it gives you more unique dialogue options and lets you discover the backstory of the Seekers. Next are the Mercenaries because their storyline involves characters from the previous game and progresses Lee's character arc. Militia / Paladins are favoured the least and only give you some additional orc lore.
• Stupid Neutral: Inverted with Adanos, whose portfolio of neutrality seems to imply this, but in practice he rather comes across as the god of Heroic Neutral and reason and ultimately a much better option than the Knight Templar ways of his light-god brother, doing the same things for the good of the world without otherwise enforcing his will on the people.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Normally averted: "monster" enemies generally do give warning to back off for a few seconds and will break chase if you run far enough, though they don't react to being injured.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Still one of the only videogames in existence where characters will freak out if you brandish a weapon in their face and warn you to put it the hell away, reacting with appropriate force if you don't.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: The Seekers in the second game are basically Nazgûl, except there's a lot more of them than nine, they're more mages than warriors, and they don't have mounts.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: In Gothic 3, NPCs with magical abilities will never run out of mana, and sometimes will surprise you by throwing remote-controlled magic missiles at your face, with said 'nukes' even slipping through several other enemies - and even environmental objects - before hitting its moving target (usually, your ass) with deadly precision.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything:
  • The pirates in Night of the Raven. Justified: With the war going on, there's a shortage of merchant vessels for them to raid, so they're just twiddling their thumbs in the meantime, hoping for the situation to improve.
  • The Colony from the first game is also a downplayed example. Theoretically, it's a society of convicts and hardened criminals. In practice, however, many inhabitants were framed, are guilty only of ridiculously petty "crimes", or got locked in by accident for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Rebels and nomads are supposedly the "good guys" in Gothic 3, yet don't expect them to take prisoners when reconquering strongholds or villages.
• This Loser Is You: Interestingly combined with eventual Take a Level in Badass. Originally, the Nameless Hero starts out like a newbie (which, if you are playing for the first time, you are), and he's weak and has no clue how to fight and survive (again, for a first time gamer, this is also true). He also starts out not knowing what's going on and dependent on others for help (again, a new gamer will also be like this). This trope was strongest in Gothic II, but was dropped in Gothic III, where it would be in universe impossible to justify the Nameless Hero being a total newbie all over again, hence why he doesn't start off nearly as incompetent and dependent on others like the other games.
• Threatening Shark: Swamp Sharks combine traits of sharks with Sand Worms and are very dangerous creatures early in the first game.
• Took a Level in Badass: Just compare what the Nameless Hero says in the start of either Gothic 1 or 2 to what he says when he faces down the undead Shamans and Cor Kalom in 1 or makes his demands to the dragons when he has the Eye of Innos in 2
• Trauma Inn: Sleeping in a bed for any amount of time will regenerate all your health and mana.
  • Spending too long in someone else's house will eventually make them attack you, but if you're quick, you can dash in, lie down on the bed, get a good night's sleep and run out again without setting off the attack.
  • In Gothic 2, the Seekers can "possess" you, causing you to have nightmares that prevent you from this kind of recovery.
• True Companions: Diego, Gorn, Milten and Lester, with the Nameless Hero as the Honorary True Companion.
• Unexplained Accent: Not present in the original German version, where almost all the characters^note the exceptions being Jack and Greg, who have a North German accent, which is (stereo-)typically associated with sailors like them, and the Assassins in III, who talk in a Middle-Eastern accent speak regular High German. The English version however chooses to go this route, giving the characters a wide range of different accents, even though they're almost all supposed to be natives of a fairly small island duchy. Sometimes, this is used as a joke or nod to a character's role, for instance Onar, who runs a mercenary protection racket, having a The Godfather-style Italian accent, or Sekob the farmer being given a Texan accent, but most of the time, it's completely inexplicable.
• Unexplained Recovery: One dialog option when meeting Bloodwyn in Night of the Raven is to comment that you killed him back in Gothic 1 ^note Note that killing an NPC in Gothic 1 meant impaling him while he's unconscious (while never required or even recommended, killing him was common because he's pretty damn evil). His response is that he survived a lot of things.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: In the third game, the rebels are persecuted and killed on sight by the orcs. Nothing prevents you from running around in an orc settlement in rebel armor, and there are no negative consequences for it. Notably not the case in the second game, where putting on bandit armor will make everyone who is not a bandit try to kill you and vice versa.
• Unwinnable: The manual for the second game explicitly states that the dev team went out of their way to avoid this. The game should always be winnable in some form, even if you choose to go on a wild killing spree in a plot-critical zone. Within reason, of course. They said you can still break your game by, say, throwing the Eye of Innos into the sea. This is wrong, of course. They prepared for that, too.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: With limited enemies / experience, it pays off to kill (or at least knock out) as many civilians as possible.
• Villain Baal: Downplayed, as minor leaders of cult of Sleeper have their names preceded by „Baal”, by only one of them directly attacks us.
• Violation of Common Sense: Ranged weapons in the first two games are ironically at their most effective and reliable when used in melee range, where they never miss, stagger foes with every strike, preventing them from getting an attack of their own in, and can also hit surrounding enemies anywhere in a 360 degree radius, even behind you, just by firing forward. The only time when you'll actually want to switch to your melee Emergency Weapon or retreat rather than just continuing to stay rooted in place and shooting is when you're facing groups of enemies whose total combined HP grossly exceeds your damage output.

• Weaksauce Weakness: No enemy will chase you over water (and if trapped in water, none of them can attack, just like you). While this looks like gameplay limitations, it's noted by one NPC vaguely in 2, and water is representative of a god opposed to most of the creatures you are fighting.
• Welcome to Corneria: Especially so in Gothic 3, where after 2 or 3 hours of gameplay you can probably say all the stock dialogue NPC's have with each other by heart.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: In Gothic III. Not much point to it, though, since Forsaken Gods picks up the story at the end of G3 again anyway.
  • To elaborate, Gothic III had three endings: side with humanity and drive out the orcs; side with orcs and drive out the humans and head off with Xardas to another world; and the Hashishin ending which screws both over and hands over power to the third party. However, Forsaken Gods goes the route of Deus Ex and uses elements of all three endings as the starting point for two years after the G3 ending.
• Who's Laughing Now?: Remember Bullit, the guy from the opening who punched you in the face? You can go back to him near the end of the first game, wearing the most powerful equipment there is and by this point, being strong enough to slaughter the likes of his in droves. The Nameless Hero will even remark on how nicely the situation is reversed now. Then you can butcher the guy. Or, for added irony, punch him until he drops, provided you have trained your strength enough to do damage despite his armor.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Most minor characters from I either die offscreen or become nameless bandits infesting much of the Khorinis island, since they are nowhere to be found and they had no means of leaving the island.
  • Between II and III several members of Esmeralda crew dissapear without a trace: paladin Girion, novice Pedro and whoever you chose to be a captain (Jack the lighthouse keeper/Torlof the mercenary/Jorgen the sailor down on his luck). They may have been murdered by the pirates. The plotline leaving it unclear whether Pedro was an intentional traitor or under the influence of mind control is also never elaborated on.
  • Bartok's disappeared buddy Trokar seems like a setup for a quest, but he is never found. Unlike most of the missing characters in the game, he does not appear to have been abducted (and was already missing in the classic version of the game, before the missing people questline was introduced).
  • Someone in the bandit camp helped William escape, but you never learn who.

• Wretched Hive: The Khorinis harbor district in II is a downplayed example. Poverty runs rampant, the area is all but abandoned by the administration and law enforcement, with a thieves guild as the power truly in charge, a Mad Scientist alchemist runs a bootleg lab dabbling in morally dubious spells, brawls on the open streets are common, and people spend most of their time visiting the brothel, betting on illegal show-fights, consuming drugs, or getting smashed at the local tavern (the owner of which is a thieves guild member who uses it as a hub for trading in information and thieves' tools and a place for planning heists). However, it's still so close to the "respectable" part of town that criminals risk capture if they don't act without at least token discretion, murder is rare and stigmatized, and about half or so of the population are still ordinary law-abiding citizens, so it's actually a slightly more civilized place than the penal colony of the first game.

• You Have to Believe Me!: Defied in Gothic II. When the Nameless Hero has to gain Paladins' support against the dragons in Valley of Mines, he simply tells Lord Hagen, "The question is not if you should believe me, but whether you can afford to not believe me if I'm telling truth." It works pretty well — the Hero is sent to the Valley for confirmation.