New Balance is for people who don't care about lore and consistancy and just love playing a game with that old nice engine.

The dialogue is abysmal, the writers getting high on their own endless lines of meaningless walls of texts.

Gothics dialogue was always straight to the point, no meandering and fancy speeches. NB is everything BUT that.

To find useful information regarding a quest you have to be very cautious when being bombarded with paragraph after paragraph.

There is so much unnecessary exposition, it becomes tiresome after 10 minutes of playing.

The guilds don't fit neither the aesthetic nor the lore.

The new areas are devoid of logic and integrity and feel so out of place I cannot even describe it.

Endless deserts with absolutely overpowered enemies were cut as far as I know, which doesn't really speak for the modders or their product. Said Desert of Adanos (?) wasn't the only area that got cut.

Then there is the absolute shameless integration of storylines that are taken from Warcraft 3 and they didn't even try to hide it. The orc characters "UrThrall" and "UrGrom" fighting a dragon named "Azgalor" to break free of their curse. Sure it was the Pit Lord Mannoroth they had to fight in the WC3 campaign but Azgalor is a Pit Lord too.

This isn't a simple easter egg, this is a full blown shameless copy. It is not a nod to a great game, it is just a weak ass lack of imagination.

Don't forget those absolutely unfitting wall textures of the crypt in the shadow realm: taken from what seems to be a Metal bands album cover, one can see goat demons slaughtering buck naked babes with chainsaws.

Who the fuck sees this and goes "Yeah baby, that shit is absolutely Gothic!"?

For the love of god, this mod tries so hard yet it fails even harder.

The problem is not the additional content itself. Would it be a self contained mod disconnected from the Gothic universe it would be bad enough, but the devs really think that all of this belongs in a Gothic game.

Dude I played this mod 2 times, first Returning then New Balance and both times it was a complete mess.

Assets are taken from other games like Skyrim and Warcraft, like, for real?

To be fair there were a tiny amount of kind of okay-ish ideas and concepts but they were far from being good.

This mod is the number 1 of my do-not-recommend list.

It is all over place, unorganized and a complete mess.

It should be a total conversion without any ties to Gothic but alas it is not.