Thought I'd add this for future reference - should anyone wish to do the same. I'm on my millionth play through of Gothic 1/2 (loved these games to death since they came out!) and always wanted to play with the German voice overs. However every time I asked someone, I was always told it couldn't be done - but it can, and it's very easy to do.

This process can be used for Gothic 1 and 2 - with any language.

1. Install two versions, English and German.

2. Erase "Scripts" and "Video" folders (\Gothic\_work\DATA\) from the German version.

3. Paste the "Scripts" and "Video" folders from the English version into the German version.
*Save copies of the folders somewhere for future installs.

4. Uninstall the English version.

Play!

Over the years, I witnessed a lot of debate on various forums which voice acting is the best.
Some argue Polish beats them all, some say Russian is the best, etc.
I however concluded that best voice over we like the most is the one we used to play the games for the very first time. :-)
But yup, it would be a different experience to play in original German.

Thanks for the tip!

No problem ;)

Yeah there are definitely perks for each one. So far I've noticed German seems to have more voice actors in general, you won't hear the same voice twice - at least for major characters like Xardas etc. This was a problem in English, although the VO for Xardas was the best overall, the actor also did practically every other mage in the game - annoying. Another problem being that they changed Diego's actor in Gothic 2 and he sounded ridiculous! At least there is some consistency in German.

It adds so much more immersion, for me anyway, to play again with a new VO. It's a nice gimmick, tricks the mind into thinking the game is new again. Hehe I'll have to try in Polish/Russian next time.

The voice actor pool for the German versions is larger than for the english dubs, sure, but the Hero and Xardas are still pretty much the only characters with unique voices. Actually, I'm not even entirely sure about Xardas.

The German VA for the first game is generally well done, but can get really bad in a few places, (Some of the fanatic sleeper worshippers, or Homer, the guy overlooking the dam in the New Camp come to mind.) A few of the actors come of as really try-hard when attemting to sound rough too, it just doesn't work at all. But overall it was good enough for a fairly low-budget game and definitly a lot better than what we were used to with german dubs of english language games.

The second game uses mostly the same set of voice actors, but the result is sooooo much better. It's genuinely great. The actors also do a much better job at trying to sound different when speaking multiple characters. More than they did in the first game at least, there are still a lot of duplicate voices, but with so many fully voiced NPC's, what do you expect.

In any case, from what I've heard, the english dub is way worse in both games.

The English voice changes for Laras from I to III was the pits! He also changed from a rough and tough leader of the rogues who taught weapons use to a coward afraid to fight by the time III got around. He was at least still himself in II.

Hi hello every1!

Does this mean I'll have English subtitles and a German VO, when I do this?

If not, is there a way to do it?

Reason for this is that I speak English alright and I wanna use my favoritestestest game of them all to learn and practice a new language.

Hope this thread ain't dead :D

Cheers and long live Gothic!

Yes. Sorry if this response finds you a bit late

I know this post is from 8 years ago, and you might not see this, but I registered just to say THANK YOU. I was looking for this option for a while, I wanted my non-polish speaking friend to get to enjoy the polish dubbing as well and everyone else said that it can't be done, and your thingie worked just fine, was easy to do as well.

So thanks a lot. Have a great day!

There is however a slight caveat in case of Gothic 2 Gold. There are two files in folder "Gothic 2 Gold\_work\Data\Scripts\Content\Cutscene", named in English version ou.dat and ou.lsc. But in German version they are named ou.bin and ou.csl. Only after renaming these will you get German audio with English subtitles (or vice versa).