A lot of them are usually pretty mundane ("Harvest turnips for Lobart," "get Matteo's money from Gritta," "chase down the thief Rengaru," "kill the bandits at Jack's lighthouse," etc) or devolve into tedious busy work ("purify all the shrines," "kill all the orc warlords"). Gothic 2 has a ton of quests, and they're all pretty good, mechanically, but the subject matter of those quests isn't always the most interesting. There's a lot more exposition and buildup to the main plot in Gothic 1, and it has a way stronger progression as you go through the various stages of the story and uncover new information. Except for one moment when you're sent to retrieve five Focus Stones, it never really feels like cliche video game objectives in place of plot, since the story flows logically and organically from gaining admission to a camp, to being sent on your first mission, to investigating the curious goings-on at the swamp camp, to helping them prepare for a ritual to commune with their god, to seeking out the orcish graveyard seen in the ritual's vision, and to realizing that the swamp camp's Sleeper is really an orcish god and that you have to stop him from awakening.
The story in Gothic 1 plays out more like an actual story, with the Nameless Hero arriving in the colony simply trying to find a way to survive before getting wrapped up in a plot to stop the orcs from summoning a god that will destroy all human life inside the barrier.
Gothic 2, in contrast, consists of a more conventional harbor city and neighboring farmlands, which isn't all that unique, and the faction system with the town militia, the farmers' mercenaries, and the magicians of fire, don't play as interesting of a role in establishing the world's lore and backstory like the factions from Gothic 1. The whole world, in fact, is relatively dark and dangerous, filled with exotic, dangerous beasts, ancient crumbling ruins, savage orc lands, and a weird sense of the occult. Then you've got the way the convicts have split into three factions, each with their own lifestyle and ideologies, from the Old Camp where the ore barons are content to live as kings inside the barrier by mining magic ore and negotiating the ore trade for outside goods, to the New Camp where they farm rice and brew schnapps while the water mages work to find a way to blow up the barrier, to the Sect Camp where they harvest and smoke swampweed while praying to a god known as the Sleeper, who they believe will set them free. At the end of the day, however, they are separate games with some key differences, so I thought I'd take some time to review the two games against one another and discuss the relative pro's and con's of each game.
With Gothic 2 being a direct sequel to the first game, directly continuing the story with many of the exact same characters in the exact same world, and being built on the exact same game engine, they're about as similar as two games in a series can be, and so I often like to think of them as essentially one game broken into two parts. I sometimes struggle, however, to decide which of the two Gothic games I like better. While most people in the early 2000s were raving about how great Morrowind was, I was busy playing Gothic, and my experience with those games fundamentally altered my ability to appreciate other, similar types of games because the early Gothic games were truly ahead of their time and did some really impressive things that other developers weren't doing at the time, and still aren't doing to this day.