Night of the Raven/Gold Edition[edit]
If this is your first time playing Gothic II it can be a good idea to hold off installing the Night of the Raven (NotR) add-in if you can; while it does add many new items and Gothic cameos to the game it greatly increases the difficulty of enemies and makes character development slower. Once you have a good feel for the game or have finished the original feel free to try NotR. If you want to have both installed simply make a copy of your Gothic II directory before installing NotR. Note that Gothic II saves don't work in NotR and vice versa. NotR is an add-in, not an add-on because the base game also changes when it's installed.
Gothic II with the NotR is awesome. It really is. Gothic II with the NotR add-in is also hard. Seriously, Gothic II with NotR is stupidly hard. Are you an expert in the first Gothic game? That won't help one bit with the sequel. If you find yourself unable to level past level 3, get killed hundreds of times by goddamn bandits and low level monsters and cruelly try to beat up nice guy Brahim the cartographer out of necessity because you can't afford a bloody map after playing for hours there is only one remedy:
It's an amazing game with a lot to offer, and you shouldn't deny yourself the experience. The game isn't just hard, it's nigh impossible. If you cheat and multiply your strength, dexterity and hitpoints by 10, you're still far from invulnerable. (in the first game you'd be Godlike if you did that) If the default difficulty is "nightmare" (and it is), this would make the game "hard". If you also increase all armor types with 100, it becomes "medium". If you increase your strength, dexterity, hitpoints and all armor types to 300 it will become kind of easy, but not super easy. To make it super easy (at least the combat), you'd also have to insert dozens of powerful spell scrolls because a dozen enemies who are spamming you with attacks can make it impossible to fight back at all.
It's to be determined how the damage calcuation works.