Are these universe releases exclusive to US market or will they be available in continental Europe or at least UK?
Any info about the content in the boxes? Any printed material (manuals, maps...) or just plain discs.
They´ll probably be released in all territories JoWooD / DreamCatcher / The Adventure Company cater for with their own distribution or distribution partners. This means North America, DACH, parts of Eastern Europe (though CDV), the UK, Scandinavia and most of Old Europe.
Content: Unclear. Probably only a couple of DVDs. Manuals on disk as pdf. It is possible that the bundles come without copy protection though. It´s often dropped somewhere down the value chain to save a few cents per game.
Since I've finished installing the Canadian release of Gothic Universe, distributed by Dreamcatcher, I can tell you what I've found.
The only manual included for any of the Gothic games was a Pdf for Gothic 3.
Gothic 1
Has a brief html file listing basic Keyboard/mouse commands. Infact it appears to be the file released for the original Demo. It even says "In this Demo you will be able to play a part of the surface level."
Although each game comes on its own DvD this was also the only game of the 3 which would auto-install.
Gothic 2: Night of the Raven
Includes an extremely basic readme.txt file with a few lines about some keys changing for Night of the Raven and why. If a person never played Gothic 1 or Gothic 2 it's useless.
Gothic 2 is installed with the expansion "Night of the Raven" in place as a complete game. It installs to the C drive and oddly the installer gives no option to change where you can install it. You do not have the option of playing Gothic 2 as a stand alone first and then start over with "Night of the Raven" expansion.
I never install games to the C drive, I have a large seperate drive explicitly for game installations. So this behaviour really annoyed me. When the installation completed, before attempting to run the game, I copied the whole folder to another drive. This appears to work fine but of course the uninstaller will not remove the game now.
Concerning Copy Protection:
After reading Gorath's statement saying copy protection might be removed I tried running each of the 3 games without the DvDs in the drive and surprisingly each appears to run fine without the DvD. I played each of them a ways past their intros and even tried reloading saves without issue. Possibly at some future point into the game they might want to check the DvD.
It's a real shame and I was stunned not even the Pdf manuals for Gothic 1 & Gothic 2 / Gothic 2: Night of the Raven were not included. To me this is simply unforgiveable. Anyone attempting to play the games for the first time will be doing so at a severe disadvantage.
Using your Google Foo I'm sure the "Game Manuals" situation is resolveable
Ubbax
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." - Galileo