The Importance of Gothic 1+2's Music: A Review of Kai Rosenkranz's Soundtracks

A lot of different components go into making Gothic 1 and 2 such great games, but one of its more subtle, understated triumphs is the excellent quality of its soundtrack, composed by Kai Rosenkranz. Music is something that I feel often gets overlooked when it comes to video game reviews, because most gamers aren't music critics, and aren't very knowledgeable about what goes into making great music -- we just know what sounds good, and what doesn't. The thing that makes Gothic's soundtrack so good, to me, is that it strikes a perfect balance between melody and ambiance -- it has enough melodic structure that you can pick out themes and quickly come to recognize its motifs, while also serving as an ideal backdrop to set the tone of your adventures, without crossing too boldly into the foreground and calling too much attention to itself.

Some games have really awesome soundtracks that don't always blend well with the gameplay, or that end up sticking out a little too much. Sometimes that latter "issue" is actually the point and can be a good thing, such as Mick Gordon's compositions for Doom 2016, or Chris Christodoulou's with Risk of Rain, since those tracks are so prominently a part of those games' style, and even their very DNA, but it can have the unintended consequence in other games of making the soundtrack a little obnoxious when it has really overt melodies that pierce through the rest of the soundscape and pull your attention away from the rest of the game. Repetition can also be a problem; open-world RPGs can last a hundred hours or more, which is a lot of time for a composer to try to fill out with a soundtrack, and so music will necessarily get repeated a lot. With these types of games usually having huge, sprawling landscapes, those tracks also have to cover a lot of literal ground, too, with individual tracks playing over a very wide area, and playing continuously with little regard for more specific circumstances of what you're doing, unless there's a dramatic shift like entering combat. It can be pretty jarring, for instance, when the soundtrack builds to a majestic swelling fanfare while you're doing something completely mundane like looting cutlery from a dining table -- even if sounds nice, it doesn't really match what you're doing and feels out of place.

The video version of this article with all the music on demonstration.

Gothic 3's soundtrack creeps into this territory a bit, where Rosenkranz decided to step up his compositions to be fully orchestrated, with much more prominent melodies, denser harmonies and countermelodies, and far more bombastic phrases. Critics and audiences panned the game for its weak gameplay and broken technical state upon launch, but everyone unanimously praised the soundtrack as its best quality. Taken on its own, Gothic 3's soundtrack is a marvelous masterpiece in composition, capturing the whimsical thrill of running across rolling hills, and the foreboding unease of treading through dark forests -- and all the emotional tones in-between -- but in the context of the actual game, it sticks out so much that I find it actually distracting from the immersion because the whole thing is so overdone. The combat music is particularly grating with its repetitive low brass lick kicking off every single fight in the exact same way. Don't get me wrong, the soundtrack is great, with pieces like Exploring Myrtana, Vista Point, and Sad Strings all being salient enough to evoke strong imagery and memories of playing, but even though it's arguably superior to Gothic 1 and 2's soundtracks in pure technical prowess, I prefer the more subtle, nuanced, and underscored feel of the first two games.

With these types of open-world games, a good soundtrack should be like wallpaper: it should add accents and character to a scene, but should ultimately blend into the background and not distract from more important elements like gameplay and immersion. Gothic 1 and 2 accomplish this tremendously well, with many of its tracks being simply chords or arpeggios plucked on a lute or harp, and droning tones played on a fiddle with occasional percussive accents from a hand drum. As a track builds, it'll often add a melodic line, usually by a flute, which doesn't have a ton of movement and sticks to really simple note progressions. There's a distinguishable melody to each track, in most cases, but it's subtle, and the stuff happening underneath it is merely a framework to support the simple melody. Mostly, it's musical ambiance -- it sets the tone for an area, and manages to be pleasant to listen to without ever becoming repetitive or ostentatious. The motifs, meanwhile, provide enough of a hook to catch your interest with a sense of musicality, and to make each track distinctly memorable.

I also appreciate that Gothic 1 and 2 don't use a typical orchestral instrumentation, which has become somewhat cliche in fantasy soundtracks, especially after Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, which were being released around the same time as Gothic 1 and 2, and may have possibly been an influence on Gothic 3. Rather, Rosenkranz uses a lot of medieval instruments like the lute, mandolin, harp, fiddle, hurdy gurdy, flute, recorder, ocarina, bagpipes, sackbut, and so on to give the game's music a more authentic, era-appropriate sound. For the most part, it sounds like music that could actually be played by this world's inhabitants -- in the German release, they actually featured a cameo by the real life folk metal band In Extremo, playing a concert on stage in the Old Camp. The actual music for the Old Camp very much sounds to me like a couple guys sitting around a camp fire plunking on instruments in a super chill jam session, and I can easily picture the music for the Swamp Camp being just a percussionist and a flutist improvising around a weed masher with a chanting vocalist, all of whom may or may not be high on swamp weed. Overall, it sounds more like atmospheric folk music than a classical score, and the instrumentation feels more organic for this type of game.

A cameo by real life folk metal band, In Extremo.

The monastery, for instance, uses bell tones and pipe organs prominently in its soundtrack, which is of course perfectly representative of the type of instruments a church would use, thereby giving the monastery a genuinely religious tone. The pyramid valley soundtrack, where the crumbling ruins of an ancient civilization are found, is played entirely on a set of (what sound like) congas and a wooden flute, lending the area a more primitive sound to match that of a more primitive culture.

Besides that, these tracks all do a really good job of capturing the specific tone of each specific area. The music for Khorinis uses brass horns to lend the area a sense of regal dignity as a once prosperous shipping town for the king, but with long sustained tones in a minor key that ultimately give it a more somber tone, reflecting the fact that the city's economy is in shambles and everyone's worried about their livelihoods, both in terms of making ends meet and also because of the impending threat of the orcs. The plucked arpeggios and counter-melodies on the lute, meanwhile, give the piece some motion, symbolic of the every day hustle and bustle of a major hub of civilization as different entities all go about their daily operations. The use of the lute also contrasts the timbre of the brass horns, providing a more commonplace sound for the area that would be more readily heard in taverns and on city streets, where most of the city's activity occurs. The old Valley of Mines map, which has been absolutely devastated by the orcs, uses sparse instrumentation featuring a slow eighth-note plucking on a classical guitar (or something similar) with a wistful flute melody and occasional accents from a bass drum, using the relative emptiness of the track to capture the desolate feel of the area and the hopelessness that the knights in the castle feel, while the drums serve as a steady reminder of the threat the orcs pose right outside the castle walls.

It's possible that I'm reading too much into all of this, and might just be making stuff up to fit the ideas I have in my head about the soundtrack's intentions, or what I think Rosenkranz was thinking when he wrote this music, but even if that's the case and this is all nonsense, I think it still speaks to the strength of the soundtrack that I'm able to pick out these kinds of themes and ideas in the music, and relate it to the actual gameplay and story. The music in these games is so powerful, really, that it practically killed the mood, atmosphere, and immersion any time I ran into a glitch that caused the music to stop playing, leaving me with only the ambient background noises. That approach can certainly work in some games -- Dark Souls is a prime example of a game using only ambient sound effects to immerse the player and set the tone for its levels, to great effect -- but the music in Gothic 1 and 2 is such an integral part in establishing these games' unique atmospheres that, if you were to replace the music with generic fantasy music, I feel they would lose a lot of their unique charm and character.

To test that theory, I recorded a short gameplay sequence from Jharkendar, where I first had the idea, and replaced the original soundtrack with free music from public domain, just to see how much the tone and atmosphere would change. The following footage shows Nameless Hero running through the ancient ruins of Jharkendar, talking to an NPC, and fighting some basic enemies, first with the original soundtrack, then with two different public domain fantasy pieces, and finally with no music -- just the background effects. See the embedded video below.

Gothic 2 soundtrack comparison

My first observation is that the "no music" version is easily the least interesting, but it could maybe work with some more ambient sound effects, like rustling foliage, or distant animal noises, or more dynamic wind sounds, or an occasional rock crumbling and falling to the ground, and so on. The game was designed with a soundtrack in mind so they probably realized they didn't need to go too far making a full background soundscape -- the game was clearly intended to be played with music, and so the "no music" version seems like an obviously inferior version.

Next, I should point out that this isn't really a fair comparison, since the original soundtrack was tailored specifically for this game, and for this specific area, whereas the two public domain tracks are generic "catch-all" compositions with only vague ideas for intended application, so naturally they aren't going to fit this specific area as well. With that being said, I actually kind of like "Magical Theme," and "Soliloquy" works surprisingly well, too, even though it feels like it belongs in some other game, like Morrowind or something. Neither of these really compares to the original "Forgotten World" in my opinion, however, since the original has a slightly more exotic, mysterious quality about it. It could just be that I'm so used to hearing the original version that it just sounds "right" to me, and nothing else can ever really take its place for me, so I'm curious to know what other people think. Do any of the other versions sound better to you, and if so, why? Let me know in the comments.

I don't really have a conclusion for this article, other than to reiterate that I really enjoy the soundtracks for these two games, and feel like they play a bit of an unheralded role in establishing these games' strong and unique atmospheres, without really drawing attention to themselves. They're quality compositions by Kai Rosenkranz, and I actually prefer his earlier work in Gothic 1 and 2 to his technically superior work in Gothic 3, and wanted to take some time to showcase why I think these soundtracks are so good.

Mods used in this playthrough/review include the latest SystemPack, PlayerKit, and DX11 enhancements, which you can find by following these links: Gothic 1, Gothic 2. I did not use the Riisis texture mod or L'Hiver, which are mentioned in these guides.