GPU: GTX 980, Nvidia proprietary driver 390.48
Proton 3.7-5 Beta

Afaik Proton needs beta drivers of versions > 396 and above.

I know, but game is old. Just re-checked with latest drivers and proton and.. no, than not the case, still bad.

My System:

Distro: Ubuntu 18.04
GPU: GTX 960, Nvidia proprietary driver 396
Resolution: 1920x1200
RAM: 8GB
Proton 3..16-6 Beta

In my case the game doesn't launch and is running in the background until I end Steam. The funny thing is in the past I was able to play Gothic II on my System with some major issues like low fps or game breaking down after playing for a longer time. It seemed like some memory was running full, because the fps got lower and lower the longer I played.
I would appreciate any suggestion.

Ok the game is working now.
I you have a problem with constant resolution change go to the Gothic.ini and
change zVidResFullscreenBPP=32. Above you can change the resolution if you want to. Also set extendedMenu=1 to set the changes permanently.
First I updated my nvidia graphics driver to 396 and then I followed this guide
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1496419226
to setup WINEPREFIX and WINEPATH and to install winetricks.If you follow the guide from the website it is necessary to replace ~/ with your actual path to the library. It could be necessary to replace your different Proton version in the path. Then you run the following command on your terminal: winetricks directmusic dsound. After that you run winecfg and go to libraries and delete the dsound overwriting.

I just played a few minutes but it seems very stable.
In case the website is not reachable anymore I post the guide below.

WineCFG
Chances are, you are going to run games that are not supported by Proton, and you might have to go into winecfg to get the fix you need.

Step 1
Change your wine prefix to the proton prefix:
env WINEPREFIX="/YOUR_PATH_TO_LIBRARY/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Proton 3.16-6 Beta/dist/share/default_pfx"
Then, change your wine path to the wine path in the Proton directory
WINEPATH="/YOUR_PATH_TO_LIBRARY/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Proton 3.16-6 Beta/dist/bin/wine64"
Step 2

WineCFG:

Just type in winecfg into the terminal

Winetricks
There is probably some DLLs that you will need to install to run your unsupported games.

Step 1

Do the entirety of Step 1 from the WineCFG section above.

Step 2

You will need to grab the Winetricks script:

Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint
sudo apt-get install winetricks

Arch Linux
yaourt winetricks
Then follow the instructions that yaourt gives.

Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora
yum install winetricks

openSUSE
zypper install winetricks

Then after that, you can run winetricks, and it will install to the Proton wine directory.

You can overcome problems with resolution switch with setting zStartupWindowed=1 in Gothic.ini and keep game windowed, not perfect solution but the game works.

I already commented a Solution in my second comment. It is written at the beginning of my second comment.

@leonardSchaar In my case, your solution didn't work for me on Proton 3.17-x. So this may help someone :)

With the SystemPack and D3D11 mods installed, this game runs great for me. Waiting on Proton 4.21+ for the music bug fix.

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43280
https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45661

https://www.worldofgothic.de/download_591.htm

https://forum.worldofplayers.de/forum/threads/1340357-Release-Gothic-½-—-SystemPack-(ENG-DEU)

Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: Gothic II: Gold Edition
• Steam AppID of the game: https://steamdb.info/app/39510/

System Information

• GPU: GTX 760
• Driver/LLVM version: NVIDIA 440.44
• Kernel version: 5.4.15
• https://github.com/shoober420/linux-scripts/blob/main/home/shoober420/sysinfonvidia
• Proton version: 4.11-12

LOG:
steam-39510.log

Symptoms

Gets to the main menu, then crashes

Setting "musicEnabled=0" in the "/Gothic II/System/Gothic.ini" file will remedy the issue for now.

Hello @shoober420
Looks like this issue can be closed.
I tried with new Proton 5.13-4 - and there are no issues with resolution or any Video settings at all.
Game can be installed and running pretty clean.
Only issue is with music which can be fixed using winetricks and missing videos in cutscenes.
To fix music just use this:
winetricks -q directmusic

System Information

Distro:Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS
Kernel:5.8.0-7630-generic
RAM:32 GB
GPU Driver:NVIDIA 455.38
GPU:NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER
CPU:Intel Core i5-10400F @ 2.90GHz
Proton 5.13-4

Anyone have an idea for video content just being black with Proton 6.3-7 and Experimental? The System Pack mod doesn't seem to be able to fix this when the game is run in Proton.

@GloriousEggroll While Proton-6.19-GE-1 changelog mentions "-Removed deprecated mouse focus patches (no longer used in upstream proton) -- fixes mouse focus issues in some various games.", the cursor is still not correctly captured in this game with System Pack mod. It seems the cursor hits screen borders so camera movement can't continue. It works with regular Proton.

Anyone have an idea for video content just being black with Proton 6.3-7 and Experimental? The System Pack mod doesn't seem to be able to fix this when the game is run in Proton.

It appears, that cutscenes work properly with Proton-6.21-GE-2.
I have also tested it with: GE-Proton7-35, Proton Exprimental, Proton 7.0-4, and none of these versions worked.
I hope these findings may be helpful.

Gothic II: Gold Edition is crashing when launching the game with Proton 9.0-1. It launches fine with Proton 8.0-5.
Presumably something related to DirectMusic?

I can reproduce the same behavior as @HK47196. It works with Proton 8.0-5, but crashes with Proton 9.0-1 after the intro video with Access Violation.

@kisak-valve here is the log from my system: steam-39510.log

It's the same for Gothic I (65540): steam-65540.log

Steam Runtime Diagnostics: https://gist.github.com/davidak/1654f4d9c8064143ffcc7258d8d4fd22

Miles Fast has no reverb, this is fixed by the second audio provider, D3DSound HW.
There's a huge problem though: the audio breaks after under a minute, crackling like crazy and desynchronizing.

This pisses me off to no end, Gothic 1 worked like a charm with Miles Fast, reverb was perfect... why has Gothic 2 been downgraded?

Do someone has a solution or a suggestion?
I tried with dsound.dll set as builtin, set as native, unset, tried EAX wrappers, of course they won't ever work with that damn game because it's hardcoded to fallback to MilesFast, regardless of what pre.load tells it.

steam-39510.zip