Gothic Returning 2.0 - The most ambitions mod and the closest thing to a GOOD remake that we ha

[Cryomancer]

Is silly because when you talk about RPG here, people assume the games about androgynous teenager with oversized swords saving the world since here is like the unique non developed country where consoles was more popular than PC's.... My first RPG was M&M VII.

I will try search on threads with translation and see if i can pass chapter 5, complete quests that i an having problems and find Xardas...

But Risen 1 is OK but not good as Gothic 1/2 and even 3 with consequences mod, AB, etc;

Has the same faction structure of G2

• The Mercenary/Don's guys
• The paladins / the fighters of the inquisition
• The magician / the fire worshiping magicians

IS the same thing but with far less interesting things. NO epic weapons like Claw of Beliar, no epic spells, only one summon limit(...) Risen 3 also brought cooldowns on certain spells like Fire Rain that now can be obtain relative early on.

And honestly, central/eastern european game devs are the uniques who produce things that worth be played. Not only on RPG's. Compare Children's Online Daycare and Fortnite with Escape from Tarvok and Metro. Look to Gothic 1 remake. A piece of trash. Made by south western europeans to appeal to US demands.

 

[deama]

Frankly, the bugs in the mod aren't that scary, the latest version (and AB especially) run well enough, it's terrible writting and bad design that are much worse, especially if you don't know russian.

Have you looked at the german version? Or at least know whether it's comparable to the russian translation?

 

[Sjukob]

Have you looked at the german version? Or at least know whether it's comparable to the russian translation?

I've never even heard about german translation until you mentioned it in this thread.

 

[Cryomancer]

One guide that is helping me is this ( https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1497870430&searchtext=returning ) but i decided to re load my chap 4 save and do a lot of side quests now that i have a (poorly translated) guide

One more thing about necros doing little damage. Their spells deals more damage than other spells. My black mist spell(only on scroll) can deal more damage than a fire rain BUT most of creatures that you fight in the game are creatures of darkness resistant to the dark magic and weak to the fire magic. Against undeads, mainly shadows, death to the undead is a must have spell. And 5 ectoplasms aren't easy to obtain early on. One quest that even with guide i an having trouble is the third trial of the keepers. "Tegon Guardian orders us to learn the language of demons. We go to Xardas and he tells us to go to Creola, he is in Gd behind the palisade of orcs in the fog tower" Where is this fog tower? I found only the swamp camp behind the orc wall...

HEre is how strong necro spells are

 

[Cryomancer]

I was looking on youtube and guys, sinitar defeated the Ice Dragon using only circle 1 magic



Yep. The same dragon that took many tries to me.... He was able to OHK my demon army with a single storm cast. But i liked that Dragons are powerful enemies in returning. I mean, i could cast fear and punch the ice dragon to the death on base game. But on returning

• They have way more HP than anything else
• They have summons
• They can cast circle 6 magic(and fire rain can nuke a orc army/demon army out of existance in one hit) and it can 2HK a high level well geared PC
• They have good health regen and will exploit the fact that you are focused on his minions to regen health
• They have a strong aura. Fire/Ice dragon can manipulate the weather where they life and if you are near(around 300m) from his lair, you will took constant fire/cold damage
• Their melee attacks are far more dangerous than any melee weapon that i've faced at this time.
• Their breath weapon dealt more damage than any spell that i could cast(spear of darkness, ball of death) and is hard to dodege

Dragons are truly legendary creatures. Returning has his fair share of bullshit bosses. Like the 2 archedmons that can only be damaged if one is near another ...

======================

But anyone played Xere's return? The mod is playable on english? Is hard to be a dark magician? https://www.moddb.com/mods/xeres-return

 

[Cryomancer]

Anyway, i did it. I managed to find all reagents to craft the summon demon on my second run and now i can upgrade then.

I din't knew that not only you need demon essences but also SP to upgrade your demons since i had used cheats on my first run due now knowing what is "resin" and "ore 1 bar" to craft that spell. Now apparently resin is just skulls and "ore 1 bar" i still don't know but i coud make the rune without it... Lets see if this time i can get Ulu Mulu, my own camp and the rest of quests that i have. I entered chapter 4 now. will not rush to chapter 5. Still having a lot of trouble on the 4th guardian(where i need to go?)

I really wish that the mod gets a proper english translation...

 

[Cryomancer]

Sorry for nekroing my own thread but I don't wanna create a thread only to say that... I decided to give returning another try almost 6 months later and using google translate on RPG russia is helping me a lot

My stats

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://rpgrussia.com/mod/returning-online-2.0/index.html?quests_story_26.html

Now I an near the end of the game and ... Circle 6 necromancer is pretty dope. Video bellow. Only summons on the final.

a quick gameplay

A lot of people say that necromancer is awful on DPS, but this is not truth. The Ice Dragon can goes down in 3 minutes

a quick gameplay

 

[deama]

So I recently played through this, with the alternate balance mod that is supposed to balance it out more and fix some issues I heard.
Anyway, this mod is both good and bad, I played on the "normal" difficulty (gothic), and I also adjusted the lp per level to 10 instead of 5, and you get +10 max hp per level instead of 0.

Spoiler

So I decided to play as a 2h warrior and right off the bat I pretty much had no choice but to spec into archery and exploit the fuck out of the game, from climbing a wall so that animals can't reach you while you gun shoot them down, to using some meta game knowledge and finding secrets early, to aggroing mobs for your companion to kill for you.
After a while it started to get more manageable once I put more points into STR and 2h and got some decent armour and weapon, I could manage most human fights, monster fights were still tough, especially against some of the more agile monsters.
I also found an exploit with alrik, the guy behind the warehouse where you can fight him in this mini-arena place. If you do his quest chain and then fight him, then loot his body before he gets up and make sure to take his sword, he'll ask for it back if you try to fight him again, and if you give his sword back to him you'll be able to redo the bet pretty much giving you infinite money if you don't mind beating him up for several hours, sadly though I did not want to do this as it was kinda annoying and only gave you 50 gold at a time.

Progressing the game over to Jahkendar, it wasn't too bad there, the power level was mostly kept in-tact (bandits weren't made stronger for no reason), and the monsters weren't too crazy either.
After Jahkendar you get access to the valley of the mines and that place was tough, but that was expected, I ended up being able to beat some elite orcs though with enough practice, and even a dragon snapper on a 1v1 scenario.

After returning from valley of mines was where the mod started to show some cracks.
The hooded dark mage you encounter when you're entering khorinis was rediculious, he had 1500 hp, ok, but he could throw a lighting bolt that took 1/2 my hp...
You'd think my 2H attacks would stun him, but nope, I could only get his hp down to 1/2 before he killed him.
I basically had to crossbow him a few times, run away, heal up, and return before he healed up and continue shooting him.
After this I encountered more hooded mages, but for some reason their HP was more than doubled? They had 3-4k, wtf?
At this point I literally could not do anything about them, only way was to use iceblock spells to freeze them and try and kill them before they unfroze, but these iceblock spells were very valuable and did not respawn in shops.
At this point I had to avoid the mages and do a lot of various shit to grind up and be able to kill them. In the end though I wasn't able to, I did all the quests I could in khorinis, killed as many mobs as I could, found as many plants as I could to produce perma stat pots, but it just wasn't enough.
I am sad to say this, but I had to cheat, I basically gave myself about 80 LP to work with and put most of it into HP, I think I gained something like +600 max hp, this allowed me to just barely be able to handle the mages, I could finally progress in the game.

So now I had to assemble the eye of inos and heal it, but the circle stone place was guarded by several hooded mages, and for some reason for lols they decided to add in super-hooded-mages... that had over 10k hp...
thank god I saved up ice wave spells for this.
For those that don't know, these mages end up teleporting behind you if you get too far away or start hiding from them, so I basically cast ice wave to freeze all of the mages that aggroed to me, hit them a few times, and then cast ice wave spell again.
I ended up using up all my ice wave spells and so if another retarded situation like this happened I'm gonna be stuck again.
Anyway, after finishing that mess up and getting the eye of inos, I could return to the valley of mines!
At this point I was able to reasonably take most things up, even the orc warlords with some practice, so I slowly started killing off all the orcs and eventually killed most of them on the map, then I went back to Jahkendar and killed off the orc invasion and now I was stuck again.

I tried taking on the dragons but they ended up being too strong, well ok I guess, I went exploring again. Killed off all the orcs in valley of mines, killed off all the monsters in valley of mines, and even went into the orc city and killed them all of there except for the final boss. Still couldn't go up against the dragons.
I decided to go back to Jahkendar and found out that there was a quest chain I missed from the main story concerning raven, so continued with that, and ended up unlocking a new location, valley of the ancients.
That place gave a lot of those perma stat tablets as well as mob exp etc... however the "puzzles" were really annoying.
Regardless I did that area and was just about strong enough to take on the swamp dragon.
After killing the swamp dragon I tried the stone dragon and was just about able to kill him but had to resort to a lot of exploiting (hiding, saving, reloading).
I then tried to go after the other two dragons but was unable to, they were just too crazy, mostly due to them being in areas where my stamina was constantly drained and I couldn't figure out how the fuck I'm supposed to stop that.

At this point there was nothing else for me to do except to go and defeat Raven, so I entered Raven's nightmare and boy was it a nightmare.
The first few mobs you encounter were tough but manageable, the first boss (giant lizard) was a decent fight, tough but able. But the next boss, geeze.
One of the bosses was a 2H human, and for some reason in this game they 2H weapon AI is bugged or something as they tend to spez out like crazy at times and hit you in middle of blocks or during recovery.
Regardless, I managed to get him down to 1/2 by hitting him a few times, running in a circle while healing, and hitting him a few times, rinse and repeat at least 10 times and then he starts casting a spell that kills me in 1 hit...
at this point I had 3.5k hp, 130 fire/magic resistance, and 1 hit kills me...
At first I thought I could avoid the spell by running away from him, but no, he does it so quickly it doesn't even give me enough time!
So I decided to try and crossbow exploit him. After finding out a nice spot that I could climb and keep myself safe while he runs around like a headless chicken, I got him to 1/2 hp and I died...
Ok, I guess the range is pretty big? I again get him to 1/2 hp and go hide behind a wall and I die...
At this point I said fuck you game and cheated, I forgot how much hp I was supposed to have to survive that, but I think it was like 5k or something ridiculous.
And now for the next boss... if you hit him and run around while trying to heal yourself up he insta kills you... are the devs trying to patch the exploits NOW?
Ok, let's try crossbowing him from some wall... the moment you try and do that he starts doing some weird thing that takes away 1/5 my hp every 5 seconds until I die...
Only way to kill him is melee, but he's got over 20k hp, how in the hell am I supposed to do that without running away and healing up?

At this point I gave up, there was nothing else I could have done back in khorinis or Jahkendar to power myself up, or even valley of mines.
I explored pretty much everything I could, did as many quests as I could, and I had enough.
It might not be obvious, but I had to exploit a lot in this game, it was ridiculous. If anyone decides to play this and they go melee, make sure to crank up the LP per level to at least 15, and hp per level to at least 30, even then...
Or just play as a mage, I think they balanced this game for mage players.

Is the alternative balance addon any good then?

 

[Baron Dupek]

Took a quick glance at some potato Gothic worshipping forum, they mentioned that 2H was, for some mysterious reasons, heavily gimped in comparison to 1H in any form (shield, dual-wielding, nothing in left hand), both basic and New/Alternative Balance.

First time with Returning is rough and choosing vanilla LPs+HP values is bad idea in general, some bosses are killing machines that require glitches and dirty tricks to make it.

They mentioned something about "main stat" for certain classess that let you increase them by 1 for every 1LP no matter how high they are.

 

[deama]

Took a quick glance at some potato Gothic worshipping forum, they mentioned that 2H was, for some mysterious reasons, heavily gimped in comparison to 1H in any form (shield, dual-wielding, nothing in left hand), both basic and New/Alternative Balance.

First time with Returning is rough and choosing vanilla LPs+HP values is bad idea in general, some bosses are killing machines that require glitches and dirty tricks to make it.

That would explain it, normally in original gothic 2H were the best because of the reach, but in this mod, enemies are so bloated and they themselves sometimes have massive reach, as well as some enemies just being able to spez attack makes it unwieldy.

Next time replaying this I'm gonna bump up the LP per level and hp per level, and I'll also play as a mage as from what I can tell, the mod has been mostly balanced for mage playthroughs.

They mentioned something about "main stat" for certain classess that let you increase them by 1 for every 1LP no matter how high they are.

I've no idea what that is, I never found out how to do that.

 

[thesecret1]

I played Returning 2.0 on Legendary difficulty and didn't face much in the way of such problems. Rather, the game seemed designed in the way of taking the path of the least resistance – if some boss keeps killing you, then it's time to leave him be for the next ten hours while you go on killing easier shit somewhere else, then come back stronger (of course, cheesing them is always encouraged). I played with 1H + shield though, and I think I dabbled into magic somewhat? I know that some enemies absolutely required having some manner of a decent ranged attack in order to beat them

 

[deama]

I played Returning 2.0 on Legendary difficulty and didn't face much in the way of such problems. Rather, the game seemed designed in the way of taking the path of the least resistance – if some boss keeps killing you, then it's time to leave him be for the next ten hours while you go on killing easier shit somewhere else, then come back stronger (of course, cheesing them is always encouraged). I played with 1H + shield though, and I think I dabbled into magic somewhat? I know that some enemies absolutely required having some manner of a decent ranged attack in order to beat them

I played with the alternative balance ontop, so I donno, I never played returning 2.0 vanilla.
I was going through an installation guide and the guy said to install alternative balance, I later found out that apparently it's crap and screws with a lot of things, but that was from just 1 person, no idea if it's true or what.

 

[Anthedon]

Is there a definitive verdict if the Alternative Balance/New Alternative Balance mods are recommended?

And did anyone play the German version? Apparently that one is made by people and more intelligible than the English one.

 

[deama]

Is there a definitive verdict if the Alternative Balance/New Alternative Balance mods are recommended?

And did anyone play the German version? Apparently that one is made by people and more intelligible than the English one.

I would say not to go with the alternative balance one unless you have a lot of time to throw and don't mind plowing through forums to figure out quests.

 

[Mikeal]

LMAO Retarding and good don't fit into one sentence.

 

[Cryomancer]

Is there a definitive verdict if the Alternative Balance/New Alternative Balance mods are recommended?

And did anyone play the German version? Apparently that one is made by people and more intelligible than the English one.

I would say not to go with the alternative balance one unless you have a lot of time to throw and don't mind plowing through forums to figure out quests.

IMO AB makes certain quests like the going against Raven in ch 4 way bloated than already is. I also don't like cooldowns, hp bar above enemy models and other things that AB adds. But like some stuff that AB adds, like a good circle 3 water mage spell and Hubaxis.

 

[Anthedon]

Is there a definitive verdict if the Alternative Balance/New Alternative Balance mods are recommended?

And did anyone play the German version? Apparently that one is made by people and more intelligible than the English one.

I would say not to go with the alternative balance one unless you have a lot of time to throw and don't mind plowing through forums to figure out quests.

IMO AB makes certain quests like the going against Raven in ch 4 way bloated than already is. I also don't like cooldowns, hp bar above enemy models and other things that AB adds. But like some stuff that AB adds, like a good circle 3 water mage spell and Hubaxis.

The HP bars at least can be turned off, Interface wise my setup looks almost exactly like vanilla Gothic 2. But I should have installed the full Russian version. Currently old dialogue is in German and modded dialogue is in Russian, which is a bit immersion breaking.

 

[Cryomancer]

Deathknight, Shamans, Dark Mages(and necromancers being separated), hp bars above models, cooldowns, is alternative balancing attempting to make returning into wow?

 

[Anthedon]

Ok, I fixed the language issue. Some madmen over at the WorldofGothic forums voiced the new dialogue lines with a text to speech tool. Works surprisingly well, it's curious to hear the Nameless Hero or Xardas speak new lines all of a sudden.

 

[Mikeal]

 

[Anthedon]

After playing a bit more, I can conclude it's definitely super janky. There are a ton changes seemingly just for the sake of change (or to satisfy some modders autism). The enemy density alone is bananas. Google Translate does a pretty decent job with the Russian guides, if you are ever stuck (https://rpgrussia-com.translate.goo...tu.15389/?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en).

Now excuse me, I'll go play some unmodded Gothic II to forget about the madness that is Returning.

 

[Cryomancer]

The enemy density alone is bananas.

Just learn how to make fire rain scrolls.

 

[Outlander]

Returning is shit.

 

[agentorange]

so the mod turns gothic into a fucking retarded ugly looking mmo. i love gothic but im ceaselessly surprised by how many people seem to like the game for all the wrong reasons and insist on turning it into shit through various mods

 

[Cryomancer]

mmo

Only AB does that. It adds cooldowns, hp bars above enemy models and so on.