Gothic Remake Playable Teaser - Feedback and Review

In a surprise news release that seemingly no one saw coming, THQ Nordic announced that they're looking to remake the original Gothic, and released a lengthy demo (or as they call it, a "playable teaser") as proof of concept, available for free on Steam to anyone who owns any of Piranha Bytes' games on Steam. This news follows seven months after THQ Nordic acquired Piranha Bytes, the small German studio responsible for the original Gothic trilogy, making them and all of their IPs official subsidiaries of THQ Nordic. The remake, however, is not being designed by Piranha Bytes, as they're presumably busy working on Elex 2 -- rather, it's being handled by THQ's Barcelona studio. The demo opens with a few slides of text from the designers stating that they're huge fans of Gothic and wanted to revamp some of its clunkier, more out-dated designs while "maintaining and strengthening" the "amazing atmosphere" of the original game, but rather than simply doing a straight one-to-one remaster, they wanted to treat the project like more of a re-imagining, adding a bunch of new content and expanding on existing ideas while putting their own unique twist on what they consider to be a "legendary game." The purpose of the demo is to showcase early ideas they're working with and to gain feedback from fans about the direction they're going with the remake -- upon completing the demo, it actually links to a survey where you can fill out responses and grade them on their efforts.

In essence, this development process feels like a more open form of Early Access and will hopefully provide the Barcelona studio the opportunity to shape the remake into something that will live up to the great legacy of Gothic, and which will satisfy fans of the original game while also introducing it to a new audience. While the demo showcases some promising new ideas, and I'm absolutely ecstatic for the opportunity to play a brand new Gothic game heavily-inspired by the original, the current version of the demo isn't really what I would want out of a Gothic remake, or even a re-imagining. Supposedly they're still very early in the alpha stages of development and nothing is set in stone -- a full release isn't even a guarantee at this point -- but early impressions suggest to me that, although they may have a lot of love and respect for Gothic, it seems like they don't fully understand what it was that made Gothic so unique and special in the first place, because there are a lot of design elements that seem to go directly against the core design philosophies of Gothic and which make it hard for this demo to truly feel like Gothic.

Watch this review in video format.

Gothic did a lot of great things back in 2001 which still hold up incredibly well to this day, and there are a lot of specific things you can point to when trying to define what it was that made Gothic so special, but I think it ultimately comes down to three main elements: its incredibly immersive design, its almost complete lack of hand-holding, and its unique prison atmosphere. Unfortunately, the demo for the remake seems to completely miss the mark on all three of these core design elements. (In truth, world design would probably be a fourth main element, but the remake seems like it's sticking pretty close to the original map so that's much less of a concern.) Now obviously, with a re-imagined remake there are going to be differences from the original game, and I'm of the opinion that change can actually be fun and exciting by giving fans of the original game a chance to re-experience their favorite game for the first time, but at the same time there are some things that absolutely shouldn't be changed because they're an integral part of the original game's unique appeal -- a remake of a beloved classic should pay tribute to the things that made the original so good in the first place, and if you start changing or doing away with those core design elements then it stops feeling like a tribute and starts feeling more like a lame bastardization.

Gothic 1's main appeal to me is that practically everything about it was designed to facilitate immersion, not just from a lore and world-building perspective but from a mechanical gameplay standpoint as well, and pretty much everything in the remake stands in blatant defiance of immersive design. Right off the bat you're hit with invisible walls and artificial barriers, restricted hot-spot climbing, tons of intrusive UI elements like on-screen button prompts, icons over items, exclamation points over NPCs, a lockpicking speed gauge, white outlines highlighting interactible objects, console-style dialogue windows, a combat system that relies heavily on icon-watching, quest logs immediately popping up telling you what to do, a main character constantly narrating his thoughts and actions, game-stopping tutorial windows, an inventory screen in a separate window that also completely pauses the game, items being consumed instantly from the inventory without animations, a radioactive green glow over your entire body when you heal, notifications telling you in advance that NPCs will remember certain choices, chime sounds and floating messages whenever you pick up new loot, cutscenes yanking control away from the character, moments when the game decides for you whether you'll be walking or running, characters not caring whatsoever if you swing your weapon at them, and so on.

None of this stuff was ever present in the original game, and for good reason -- because they don't make any sort of contextual sense in the world you're supposed to occupy, and thus serve to disrupt immersion by reminding you that you're playing a video game. Things like icons over items, outlines around characters, floating messages telling you what to do, button prompts telling you how you to interact with the world, and so on, don't actually exist in the game world, and really shouldn't be visible or present at all -- we should be able to know intuitively that these are things we can interact with, and the controls should be consistent enough that we know what to expect when we press a button, or how to interact with something, without the game throwing an icon or a message on screen to tell you how to do something that should be pretty obvious. Approaching Diego, for instance, shows not one, but two floating messages telling you what button to press to interact with him, and what that button press will do, when you should just know that E is the action button, and that taking an action in this situation means talking to him, because if you wanted to do something different like attack him then that would be a different button -- pressing R to draw your sword and then clicking to attack. Having even a single floating message like that is unnecessary, and having two is utterly redundant.

Ladders in the original game didn't have any sort of button prompt appear because it was pretty obvious that the action button is what you would press to climb it, whereas the remake puts a key cap icon over the ladder to indicate not only that you can interact with it, but how to interact with it. Climbable ledges do the same thing, with the space bar icon appearing on screen to indicate that you can climb something, when in the original game you simply knew to press the climb button to try to climb something, and if you could climb it then the camera would pan up in an immersive way like your character was looking up a the ledge rather than throwing UI elements at you.

Meanwhile, the remake uses a white outline that shows through everything -- even your own character model -- to indicate that you're targeting something, which again, is not something your character would ever see in the world, and so the player shouldn't be able to see it either. The original game was far more subtle with its UI elements on both fronts, since it kept the controls completely behind the scenes so that interacting with the world felt like a natural extension of being in the world, as opposed to the user interacting with the software, and used an almost subliminal high-lighting effect on the model to indicate what you were targeting, which roughly translates into the game engine how your eyes might focus on something in real life to make it more clear. It also displayed the name of whatever you were targeting in plain text, without a graphic window around it, so that it didn't stand out quite as much. With today's hyper-realistic high-definition graphics, I'm not sure that high-lighting effect would work as well as it did back in 2001 -- it never felt distracting or immersion-breaking back then, but it could now -- however, I'd imagine it would have to be better than getting superhero vision to see white outlines around objects. I'm not even sure name tags need to have that graphic around them, since high-contrast, bordered text should show up just fine.

I should also point out that the original game didn't put those tags on every single interactible object, I think because they realized it would be distracting to have tags constantly popping up over things you could interact with, but likely weren't going to -- like chairs or barrels or torches or wooden slats and what not -- rather, they relied on the old high-lighting system to indicate that you were targeting something you could interact with, which was far more subtle and less likely to actively draw your attention towards them, unless you were specifically looking at them. The amount of interactible items in the remake seems drastically reduced, but I would hate to see icons popping up over everything if they were to make a come back, and that's where something like the high-lighting system might be beneficial.

The remake's use of hot-spot climbing, where you can only climb in designated hot-spots that the designers specifically intended you to climb, is almost a deal-breaker, because the original game was all about freedom of exploration. If you saw something that looked climbable, then you could climb it, and the primary limitation on where you could go was simply the range of your curiosity, because you could realistically go anywhere that was realistically accessible by hand or by foot, even if it meant going outside of the intended play area. Sometimes you were even rewarded for doing this, especially in Gothic 2 where you would often find valuable hidden loot or amusing easter eggs in out-of-the-way and seemingly out-of-bounds areas. You could even swim and dive underwater, which was sometimes necessary to access certain areas of the game. The only real barriers were if a cliff was too tall to reach by hand, or too steep to walk on, and of course, the actual barrier enclosing the penal colony that would zap you if you got too close to it. The remake, on the other hand, puts all kinds of invisible walls and artificial barriers around that prevent you from going places you would realistically be able to access under normal circumstances -- early in the prologue, for instance, they use stacked crates and wagons to funnel your exploration down a particular path, when in Gothic 1 you would've been easily able to climb over those things. Later there's a locked gate that you should be easily able to climb around, but the remake puts up invisible walls so that you have to access this area in the one way it's intended to be accessed -- through the locked gate. It's worth pointing out that Gothic 1's introductory area also used somewhat linear level design to funnel your progress down the mountain path from the exchange zone to the river, but it accomplished this via natural and plausible constrictions of the world design -- you had to follow the path because you were in a canyon, basically, not because there were three-foot stacks of crates blocking your way.

The early stages of the demo are the worst offender because they're clearly forcing you into following a particular script based around cutscenes, and thus some of those artificial barriers go away once you get through the scripted intro sequence, but the invisible walls and hot-spot climbing and complete lack of swimming remain persistent throughout the entire demo. Invisible walls are a bane in practically every video game ever, but they especially don't belong in a Gothic game, and there's really no excuse or justification for them being here. The lack of swimming combined with the hot-spot climbing greatly reduces the explorable area of the demo and makes exploration a little more straightforward because explorable spaces are more specifically telegraphed to you, like when you see an obvious set of staircase-looking ledges that scream "come climb me." And if that wasn't obvious enough to indicate that there might be loot up there, you've also got those obnoxious icons pinpointing items before you even have line of sight to see them. So instead of being about your own curiosity to explore and your ingenuity in finding creative ways into hidden areas, it's more about simply finding the intended paths of exploration and then playing the game as expected. In the demo's defense, there are apparently still some hidden areas that even I -- an avid explorer -- managed to miss, and the new inclusion of using crouching as a way to navigate through tighter areas both show that there is promise to make exploration as good and satisfying as it was in the original game, if the invisible walls and artificial barriers could just be removed. I'm not sure how feasible the freeform climbing system of the original game is to implement, but making the climbable ledges a little more discreet would probably be to the remake's benefit.

Going back to the user interface, Gothic 1 had a fairly minimalistic HUD that only showed your health bar and that of your current target, and discreetly placed them on the edges of the screen so that the information was there when you needed it, but out of the way when you didn't. The remake, in contrast, puts the health and stamina bars right on your character model, right in the middle of the screen so that it's impossible not to notice them whenever they're active. I like that they auto-hide when not in use, because it's ultimately more immersive to have no visible HUD whatsoever if it's not necessary, but it's a little distracting having floating bars following your character around when they're active, especially with the way they suddenly jump into view from out nowhere, right in the middle of your screen where your vision is usually focused, and the way that they follow your character's movement within the screen. It would be nice if that information could be put back on the edge of the screen so that there's a little bit more of a physical separation between the HUD and the game world and so that you can look past the HUD if you so desire.

The inventory in the original game likewise displayed as bars on the side of the screen so that you maintained a consistent perspective of the world when you looked through your inventory, thus making it feel like you were more connected to the world even when using the interface, which was important because the game didn't pause when you brought up the inventory -- searching for items and using them took place in real time, so you were vulnerable while doing those things, which not only makes sense because that's how actions work in real life, but also added a little depth and challenge to the gameplay since you had to find moments of safety in the middle of a fight to grab a potion and then play out the animation of drinking it -- you couldn't just pause the game and magically heal back to full health in an instant. If there's any flaw with the original inventory system it's that it didn't display enough items at a time, with each tab being displayed in a single column meaning you had to do a lot of scrolling once you accumulated a lot of stuff. Other windows like the character sheet, journal, map screens, and so on likewise weren't displayed as full screens based around a universal interface system, but rather as overlays that also maintained continuity with your perspective of the game world, as if they were a close-up view of something your character was actually looking at.

In the remake, the inventory screen completely pauses the game and reduces the challenge of combat by allowing you to spam healing items with no consequence, while enemies apparently stand around patiently waiting for you to dig through your inventory and munch on a dozen berries before attacking you again, but it also takes you completely away from the game world and your perspective in it to put you in a completely separate screen that doesn't or shouldn't exist anywhere in the game world, and that also shows your character model staring back at you. What's interesting is that the demo already has a quasi-side bar inventory screen when looting corpses and chests, so it'd be nice to see that system expanded and pushed further to the edges so that it could function similarly to the original inventory system. I like the way the journal looks, since it has the appearance of being a hand-written notebook that the character is actually writing in -- the notes are actually written from the character's perspective, like they were in the original game, and it actually goes into more detail than what was present in Gothic 1 by noting the character's observations on other characters and locations as well -- I just wish that it and your quest log could be removed from that heavy-handed interface hub and be made to feel more like physical items your character holds onto and uses, as opposed to a well-illustrated interface screen. They could, for instance, use the old Gothic 1 and 2 system where books and maps are actual inventory items that you can press hotkeys to bring up, which then get displayed as overlays, with more immersive tabs and bookmarks to flip to desired sections like quests or characters or whatever.

It's a little concerning, meanwhile, that the quest log already has a system in place to "track active quests" -- as of right now it doesn't seem to bring up quest markers, but the fact that the toggles are there are at all raise some yellow flags. Quests in the original games were great in large part because they didn't spoil their solutions for you by showing quest-tracking waypoints or GPS markers, thus requiring you to explore and figure things out on your own, using immersive directions and leads given to you by characters in the world, so it would be another huge disservice to the Gothic feel if those were to make an appearance in future versions of the remake. We're fortunate not to have a mini-map constantly active on screen, and that we don't magically start the game with a map of the Colony, so those are two things they got right in this department.

Then we've got a bunch of distracting notifications popping up to tell you things that you probably should already know, like when a chime sounds in accompaniment with a text window saying that you picked up a new type of item (when really it should be up to your own memory to know if the thing you've just picked up is something you've seen before or not), or when quest logs immediately pop up during dialogue telling you what to do (basically just reiterating what the character has just told you in a bullet-point format), or when a notification informs you that a character will remember a certain decision you've made when it seems obvious that they would remember something important like your witness testimonial regarding a catastrophic event, or that you literally saved their life. As with all the other overbearing UI elements, none of this stuff was ever present in the original Gothic, and they all tend to draw your attention away from the game world towards the UI -- especially when it's throwing multiple pop-ups at you, like to tell you that you've picked up a new quest, and then showing you the quest objectives, and then popping it up again to indicate that you've already made progress in it, and giving you experience for the objectives you've already completed, and saying that an NPC will remember that, and also hitting you with a Steam achievement, all at once. When this happened to me near the end of the demo with Bloodwyn I literally lost focus on the actual conversation that I was having with him, because I was reading and trying to keep up with all this information being thrown at me instead of the game just letting the dialogue play out. The actual dialogue system, by the way, uses console-style inputs where it only displays four options at a time, and even then only shows a vague idea of what your character is going to say -- unless have subtitles turned on, in which case it shows the actual line underneath. This is less than ideal to me, because those directional inputs call attention to the method of control and also forces you into sub-menus to access more information, when it would be a lot smoother to just show a full list of options like we had in the original games.

The remake also uses a lot of heavy-handed tutorials to explain game mechanics to you, which pause the game and pull you out of the world to show videos and a bunch of text that the character would never see. The original game didn't have any strict tutorials about things like controls, but it did teach you important lessons about the world and how to interact with it through immersive means -- notably, with early characters like Drax and Ratford informing you that you can't use a map until you acquire one and that items can often be stolen from NPCs, or that you can draw enemies away from a group by getting close enough to agitate a single one and then waiting until it charges at you, or that the sooner you learn how to take animal trophies the more valuable that skill will be because animal corpses rot and disappear meaning that unharvested trophies will go to waste. These sorts of tutorials are great because they don't just teach you -- the player -- things, but the character as well, and they happen through the context of the actual game world. The remake introduces a new mechanism where you can drop food on the ground as a means to try to lure animals to a certain position -- an interesting idea in and of itself -- but explains this to you through a game-pausing tutorial window, when it would be far more immersive to have the character find a note sitting on a table next to the meat trough that's meant to act as instructions for the guards about how to use the meat. Likewise, the game feels that it needs a game-pausing tutorial window to explain that you can cook food at a campfire but that you'll need recipes, when in the original games (specifically Gothic 2) the character would clue you into the fact that you lack a requisite item or skill to do something, such as by saying "What with?" if you try to use a stove without raw meat, or "I know nothing about picking locks" if you try to open a locked chest.

The remake, in contrast, has the main character talking to himself way too much and thereby making it harder to put yourself in his role and to become immersed in the gameplay. The whole reason a lot of games take the "silent protagonist" approach is so that it leaves the character as a blank slate for you to fill in with your own emotions and reactions to situations, rather than depicting the character a certain way that might not mesh with the way you might feel as a player. The original game gave the Nameless Hero a bit of a snarky, sarcastic personality, but it was usually only in situations where you specifically chose those dialogue options, or in situations where it felt thematically appropriate. For the most part, however, he was portrayed with a relatively dry and straightforward personality during dialogue sequences and kept almost completely silent during ordinary gameplay -- usually whenever he made active commentary it was to convey gameplay information, like that there was no loot left on a corpse and therefore "nothing to plunder." His inner monologue was mostly restricted to the journal system, which makes sense because most people don't vocalize their thoughts, especially to nobody, unless they're exclaiming interjections. The Nameless Hero in Gothic struck a solid balance of being enough of an empty vessel that emotional reactions during gameplay were typically your own, and also having enough of a personality during certain moments in dialogue to actually have a bit of character about him.

The "Rookie" (as he's called in the remake) spends the first 15 minutes of the demo talking like he's a "Let's Play" streamer, not only narrating his thoughts and actions at practically every passing opportunity, but also speaking in first person plural as if he's including his audience (or the player) in his narrations with comments like "Let's light this up," "Where are we?" and "Let's get out of here." At the very beginning he says "Now it's just you and me my friend," which is particularly bizarre because there's no one else there for him to be talking to, and no item of importance that he could possibly be personifying by calling it "friend," so he's either suffering from schizophrenia or else is referring to the player directly and thus breaking the fourth wall by openly acknowledging the player's existence when he's supposed to be a representation of us in the game world; it's a lot harder to identify the avatar as the player-character when the character is making a point of separating the player from the character. Likewise, it's virtually impossible to inject your own emotional reactions and feelings into situations when the character is constantly conveying his own emotions, especially when those emotions feel like they're deliberately exaggerated to give the character even more of a personality.

A lot of this happens during cutscenes where the game yanks all control of the character away from you, which is a cardinal sin when it comes to immersive design because when you lose control of the character you stop being that character. Gothic 1 only had like three cutscenes in the entire game -- that being during the introduction when you're first thrown into the Colony, then when you restore power to Uriziel, and then at the very end when you defeat the Sleeper. Except for those three cutscenes, you were basically in constant control of the character. Although it had a few moments where it took control of the camera away to show you something, it was almost always other characters doing those actions, while the main character's dialogue typically remained part of the usual dialogue system where you got to choose what he'd say -- if he spoke out of turn it was usually in a way that advanced or contributed to the plot, like when he comments that Baal Lukor has gone crazy in the orc cemetery, not to convey character emotion like acting tough while trying to cover up how scared he is. In a similar vein, the remake also has random times when it decides to restrict your movement to a slow walk, presumably so that the game can give those moments a more cinematic look/feel, which again creates another disconnect between the player and the character when the character randomly stops responding to your controls and starts doing his own thing.

The combat system shows a little bit of promise in terms of how it aims to implement the directional inputs of the original game's control scheme in a more modern fashion -- with the new system, you can still attack left, right, or forward like you could in the original games, except that now instead of just blocking at the right time you also have to block in those directions, in addition to being able to counter-parry if you press the parry button at the right time while also being aimed in the right direction, in addition to performing light versus heavy attacks. You can also perform quick-step dodges laterally and backward, as opposed to just backward in the original. There's also a stamina meter that depletes every time you perform one of these actions. That, in theory, is all an improvement over the original game since it adds a little extra complexity to how you avoid attacks and try to attack around enemy defenses, but like everything else it's a bane for immersion because so much of it relies on simply watching and reacting to icons to know where an enemy is attacking or blocking, instead of something more immersive like simply letting you discern that information by watching their animations. While it's possible to tell how a human enemy is guarding to know how you should try to attack them, there's way too much reliance on the red icon telegraphing where an enemy is going to attack before they actually attack, thus making it so that you spend basically every fight against every type of enemy just watching those icons with little regard for that enemy's specific attack patterns or animations. In a way, it feels like a gimmicky quick-time-event mini-game as opposed to a more natural, organic combat system.

The system also feels very sluggish and unresponsive right now. You could actually move pretty fast in the original game by strafing, but in the remake the character moves very slowly when locked on to an enemy, which then makes trying to position yourself in a group of enemies extremely cumbersome unless you unlock from the enemy which then prevents you from being able to block directionally and thus makes you unable to block certain attacks. A lot of times I'd find inputs just not registering, like if I pressed an attack right after a counter-parry, or when I'd feel confident that I pressed the dodge button before the enemy followed through with their attack only to find myself standing still and getting hit. Sometimes attacks would seem to just completely whiff even though I was supposedly attacking an exposed direction. Ultimately, I found it was easier to just ignore dodging and parrying and just focus on blocking attacks, because the timing for pulling those maneuvers off was a little unforgiving and hard to perfect, if not a little inconsistent, and I also found that it was easier just to attack a random different spot than the enemy was guarding because you'd either hit (if they didn't change their guard in time) or get blocked, which was really no penalty to you. And so if you just kept the offense up, backing away occasionally to regenerate stamina, you'd eventually whittle the enemy down without having to worry too much about quick reflexes or reading the icons properly.

I'm also not fond of the way the camera works during fights, since it hugs so closely to your shoulder that it makes it hard to see anything that's happening around you, with things like trees and obstacles either tripping you up or getting in your way and completely blocking your view. Plus, with your health and stamina bars being attached to your character model, it means that they bounce around an awful lot as the character and camera both move somewhat independently of one another, so in the one situation where you really need to see that information clearly, it's hard to see clearly. The controls don't feel very satisfying, either, since it seems like the inputs for directional aiming were designed around controller inputs as opposed to a mouse. With a controller you get more tactile feedback about how the stick is oriented relative to the neutral position, with spring tension always trying to move it back to neutral and with an audible and tangible click when the stick bumps into the edge of the controller, but with the mouse, you don't get that tactile feedback, and therefore it never really feels like you've moved your sword into the right position based on your input because the mouse feels the same whether it's in the left, right, or forward position -- you can only tell that you've moved it correctly because the icons indicate as much, which again brings your attention back to the icons to make sure your sword is actually aligning the way you need it to because you can't confidently feel it with the mouse.

It's hard to tell right now how much of the combat system's clunkiness is due to lack of polish, or questionable design decisions, or because this is how your character is supposed to fight when he's untrained in sword combat. In the original game, after all, your character fought like a buffoon before investing points into combat training, and the light attack animation in the remake seems pretty similar to the untrained forward attack in the original. It seems like you're also incapable of performing any combos in the remake, which was also the case in the original until you learned level 1 sword training. So it's possible that the system might improve down the line with training, say by giving you faster attack animations and allowing you to execute different combos, but with the demo being presumably based on untrained combat I don't want to judge it too harshly because the original game's combat was extremely rough in the beginning by design, to make your character's growth as a fighter feel more dramatic given how bad he was at the start.

It seems feasible to make it fun and engaging if they could just get rid of those icons and make the animations a little more broad so that you have to actually pay attention to the enemy's attack animations to learn where each type of attack is going to go, and how to time blocks around the animations, with different enemies having different animations, timings, and combos, thus requiring you to learn specific strategies and tendencies for each type of enemy. There's also the possibility to have more advanced enemies perform feints and ripostes and multi-hit combos which would of course probably be more interesting to try to defend against than lazily drifting the mouse to a new spot every few seconds, as it is currently. I'd be perfectly happy with having encounters with new enemies rely on a lot of trial-and-error learning their movesets and committing those animations to memory, as opposed to simply staring at icons, because it feels far more natural and engaging to interact with the character models as opposed to a piece of interface. It would probably also help to speed the combat up just a little bit, in terms of animation speeds, movement speed, and damage ratios, so that it can match the pace of the original game a little better, and so that it feels more like a visceral blitz of action as opposed to a drawn-out chess match. And also, pull the camera out a little bit and stabilize it. I think the whole point of the camera being so closely zoomed in and moving so much during combat is to give it a more intense feel, sort of like how action scenes are filmed in movies; it certainly works in that regard, but it feels a little extreme right now, and so I'd like there to be a little more continuity between how the camera functions while you're exploring and while you're in combat.

Of all the changes to the original game, the new combat system is probably the most extreme, and so a lot of people probably won't like it just because it's different, but I kind of like the approach they took with it -- just not the execution. With some modifications and sword training, I think it could work pretty well, but at the same time I probably wouldn't be too upset if it was scrapped altogether and they went with something more like Risen or Elex. The biggest thing is that the combat needs to maintain the feel of dynamically evolving attack animations as you get better sword training, and there needs to be steep damage thresholds preventing you from fighting tougher enemies until you get stronger yourself, because that's what made the original combat system so satisfying since it gave you a tangible feeling of growth and progress as you got stronger.

The second core philosophy guiding the original Gothic's design is its almost complete lack of hand-holding. That kind of ties in with the third point, about its unique prison atmosphere where the game isn't afraid to beat you down and treat you like the low man on the totem pole in a brutally harsh prison colony, but it also just goes into the basic gameplay design, where the game is open enough to let you figure things out for yourself and to try whatever strategies you think might work, even if that means making mistakes and dying constantly. As I said previously, the original game didn't hit you with heavy-handed tutorials teaching you how to play the game, and although it warned you that going into the forest or certain dead end areas was dangerous, it made no effort to stop you if you chose to venture in anyway. Likewise, if you mouthed-off to guards they made no hesitation in kicking your ass. The remake, in contrast, seems to go completely overboard with excessive hand-holding, the likes of which were never present in the original game.

The demo mostly consists of a prologue sequence based around a greatly expanded exchange zone, before you would normally head down the mountain path towards the river, and this entire prologue feels like a streamlined, railroaded tutorial where gameplay is restricted until the game allows you to do things. Before meeting Diego, for instance, you're completely incapable of even interacting with the world unless it pertains to the heavily-scripted storyboard -- you find meatbugs that you can't kill, berries you can't pick up, a dead guy whose inventory you can't loot, and so on -- and then you can't leave the exchange zone area to go exploring the rest of the world until you complete Diego's quests to find a better sword, and then to complete tasks for Bloodwyn. Diego, in particular, makes a strong point that he's taking you under his wing as an apprentice and seems to be deliberately escorting you all the way to the Old Camp, whereas in Gothic 1 he gives you a few guiding directions and then basically says "good luck" and leaves, specifically saying to meet him at the Old Camp, and then you're entirely on your own. In fact, once you're done with Diego's opening dialogue you have full reign of the entire map (except a few dungeons that don't open until later chapters).

In the original game, there wasn't a giant objective window popping up commanding you to find a better sword -- it was just a suggestion conveyed immersively through dialogue, and then it was up to you to seek out better weapons because of your own initiative and determination. Actually acquiring better weapons was something you sought out organically by exploring the world -- someone tells you there's an old pick-axe lying around the derelict mine, and so you set out looking for a pick-axe, but you can also find a rusty sword lying on a skeletal corpse elsewhere. In the remake, a large point of the tutorial area is to complete a quest line to acquire a new sword, and the only way to get a new sword is to follow through with a specific quest line that Diego deliberately sets you on, and then doesn't let you advance further in the game until you complete it. Even when faced with an opportunity to simply steal a sword when an NPC isn't looking, the game restricts your options and forces you to go through with the quest line. If this demo had been designed with the original game's philosophies in mind, you would've been able to just take that sword and then face the consequences -- either Cayden would kick your butt and take the sword back, or you'd run away and he'd remain hostile towards you until you came back and either beat him up, or else let him beat you up. The game doesn't even let you attack him at this point, which also goes to break the immersion when characters don't react to you drawing your weapon around them, or even attacking them, which caused NPCs in the original game to immediately draw their weapons in self-defense and threaten to attack you if you didn't lower your weapon.

Furthermore, everything you encounter in the starting area is capable of being defeated with just the basic, crappy, broken sword, which is technically the case in Gothic 1 as well since everything on the path down the mountain consists of weaker "juvenile" versions of even the most basic enemies, but the difficulty curve in the remake is all wrong since it makes wolves and snappers perfectly beatable targets at level 0 without any combat training whatsoever, when in the original game you can't even begin to think of fighting wolves until you join a camp and get some armor and a substantially better weapon, and snappers are more of a mid-game enemy. Both of these enemies one-shot you at level 0 in Gothic 1, and a successful hit against them with the basic starting weaponry barely knocks even a sliver of their health off. Hell, you can't even take on a group of adult scavengers in the original game without getting seriously wrecked, and the remake makes adult scavengers complete pushovers once you get get an actual sword. Human enemies likewise would absolutely destroy you, and yet in the remake the first human enemy who attacks you is intended to be beaten as part of a tutorial (granted, he's partially weakened, but still -- you shouldn't be fighting and beating trained guards at level 0 with a broken sword). Once you get the actual starter sword, you're even capable of beating Cayden, although he's apparently coded as immortal because his health immediately resets to full as soon as you would've beaten him.

I suppose the intention is to make the early stages of the game easier and more accessible, because new players would die frequently in the original game and could get discouraged, but that steep upfront challenge is what really makes Gothic so satisfying, because it makes leveling up and getting stronger feel so much more rewarding when you're able to come back later and defeat enemies that were once impossible for you to handle. And having enemies that are way stronger than you makes the Colony feel much more dangerous and scary, and also further emphasizes the "zero to hero" arc that the main character goes through. While I'm sure a full version of the remake would make tougher enemies that we haven't seen yet actually too tough to fight at level zero, the fact that they already have us successfully fighting snappers in the prologue leaves a lot less room for vertical growth unless they go back and completely re-scale the enemy stats.

(As an aside, why do scavengers and snappers look so similar? I'm alright with redesigning enemies in the remake, but scavengers and snappers are very different creatures in Gothic, and yet in the remake it looks like they share the exact same model just with minor variations in textures and meshes. This also seems like a good opportunity to point out that creatures like wolves and scavengers are now instantly aggressive and come at you with the intent to kill as soon as you get close enough, as opposed getting defensive and trying to scare you away from their turf like they did in the original game, which was way more immersive than the auto-aggro in the remake.)

Furthermore, I have to wonder why snappers even appear near the exchange zone at all. Enemy placement in the original games made logical sense, with every enemy type having a sort of natural habitat that they would naturally inhabit. Lurkers lived near water, shadowbeasts in dark caves and forests, swampsharks in swamps, minecrawlers in mines, skeletons in crypts, harpies on mountain tops, snappers in rocky canyons, and so on. While the rocky canyon of the exchange zone is consistent with typical snapper habitats, it's also an area with a lot of human activity since it's a major trading post and there are always multiple guards stationed in that area, whose primary job is to guard the exchange zone. In the original game we see guards stationed throughout the Colony for the explicit purpose of keeping dangerous beasts out of populated areas, and so the exchange zone where Gomez does all of his dealing with the King should be a top priority to keep clear of such threats. Roads between major locations are likewise usually clear of any sort of serious danger, with only pesky varmints like molerats, scavengers, and bloodflies occupying those spaces, which all feel more like wild animals as opposed to apex predators like snappers -- it makes sense why human traffic would drive creatures like snappers away but leave generally more passive wildlife who aren't deemed as anything more than a nuisance. Unless there's some plot point yet to be revealed that the New Camp wrangled some snappers and let them loose in the exchange zone as part of the attack on the lift, then there really shouldn't be any snappers in that area. There is a throw-away line from Diego about this, where he says that monsters are starting to act more strangely at night, but that's not really a satisfying explanation and doesn't explain why the snappers are there in the first place. It kind of feels like the developers just wanted a tougher enemy to put into the area and tossed a bunch of snappers in, and makes about as much sense as there being snappers stationed right outside the entrance to the Old Camp.

I also have to question the main plot element of the New Camp sabotaging the lift right at the beginning of the game, because that potentially causes issues down the line when it comes to the Old Mine collapsing. According to the original game's story, when the old mine collapsed Gomez lost his bargaining power with the King since he no longer had access to magic ore, which is what prompts him to murder the fire mages and seize tyrannical control over the Old Camp while also launching an assault on the New Mine, because he fears that he'll lose his position of power if he's unable to continue trading with the King. But, if the lift at the exchange zone is already destroyed at the start of the game, then that would seem to make the sudden loss of Gomez's ore supply a little less pressing, since he's already unable to do trade with the King while the lift is out of service. Certainly, losing his ore supply would cause him to act more drastically, and he might still feel justified in attacking the New Mine to regain an income of ore, but with trade already on hold there's less of an urgent need for him to take such drastic measures, which would lessen the shock value of that moment in the story because it would make less sense for him to act that way.

While on the subject of the story, I should also point out that the main quest loses a lot of its narrative thrust without being shown the scene where the main character is given the scroll, and told what he's supposed to do with it. In the original game, you're about to be thrown into the barrier when a mage shows up with an urgent letter to be delivered to the mages in the castle -- the Nameless Hero refuses to cooperate at first, but then accepts the mission because he's promised a great reward from the mages if he makes the delivery. So right from the beginning of the game, before you even take control of your character, you're given a clear goal to guide the rest of your actions with a clear motivation for why should care about fulfilling this task, and you even have a bit of a role-playing option with the scroll regarding whether you'll break the seal and read it yourself, or keep it confidential in hopes of a better reward. If you do read it, it gives a little foreshadowing to the main plot about the true nature of the god that the Sect Camp is worshipping. In the remake, you're simply thrown a scroll right as you step onto the lift with no explanation of what it is or what you're supposed to do with it, and it's not until later when Diego tells you that it bears the seal of the fire magicians that you know to take it to the castle. So the game does get there eventually, but you'd think if the scroll contains such an important message then they would want to give clear directions to their messenger instead of just putting blind faith in him figuring it out, or in someone else finding it and knowing what to do with it. Depending on what dialogue option you choose with Diego, there's not even a promise of any reward, which makes delivering the message a more selfless act and thus gives you less motivation to pursue that quest line, or else paints the main character as more of a hero from the beginning as opposed to having him start as a common criminal who evolves into the role of the hero over the course of the game.

This is probably a good time to talk about the barrier, too. In the original game, the barrier looked like a plasma field with occasional lightning bolts and thunder claps -- it was fairly ominous, and its presence felt more tangible in the world because we got opportunities to see it in action, and even to interact with it ourselves. During the intro cinematic, for instance, we see goods being lowered through the barrier into the camp -- the slave woman seems to get a brief shock when she passes through -- which helps to visually show the idea that living things can enter the barrier, but can't leave. And then, at the edge of the trading zone, you also get the opportunity to walk to the edge of the barrier where you could see blue light building around you before it eventually zaps you and knocks out a chunk of your health so that you, as a player, get to feel the presence of the barrier and also the practical effects of being trapped inside of it. In the remake, the barrier looks more like a soap bubble, which is not only harder to notice against the blinding white sky and clouds but just doesn't look as menacing. Plus, the exchange zone seems to be entirely contained within the barrier so you don't get any opportunity to interact with the barrier, or to see goods or characters being lowered into the Colony. With the barrier being the defining characteristic of the setting it should probably be featured a little more prominently than it currently is in the remake.

Anyway, the third main design element of the original Gothic is its unique prison atmosphere, which it achieved by making the world feel genuinely grim, dark, dangerous, and hostile. The whole Colony had a pretty bleak and dreary look to it with its dull, muted, washed-out color palette featuring a bunch of dried-up looking grass, plenty of dead or dying trees, a mostly sunless sky overcast with gray clouds, flat low-contrast lighting, dark forests, and grayish fog limiting your view distance, whereas the remake gives the Colony a much brighter look with tons of sunlight reflecting off everything, a bluer sky, greener vegetation, blue and yellow flowers, pure white mist everywhere, glowing bloom and post-processing effects, and so on. Everything is just literally too bright -- sometimes so much so that it's painful on the eyes. Diego's camp looks particularly out of place, because you wake up and you're presented with this glorious, majestic view of a beautiful waterfall glistening in the mist and sunlight, thus making your first impression of the Colony during the day time that of serene beauty, which is really the opposite of what the Colony is supposed to be -- it's a wretched hive of scum and villainy, a dreaded hellhole that men fear to be cast into, a place once ruled by evil orcs who still occupy the neighboring lands inside the barrier. This new Colony doesn't look gloomy or scary, and doesn't really feel like a prison -- and yet, by disabling some of the post-processing effects it immediately bears a closer resemblance to the tone and style of the original game, so there's clearly potential for this visual style to work with some modifications to lighting and post-processing.

Otherwise, the Colony in the original game felt like a brutally harsh and dangerous place, with deadly beasts around seemingly ever corner and with even the weakest of basic wildlife capable of killing you if you weren't careful. In the remake, they tell you the Colony is dangerous, but it doesn't really feel dangerous because every enemy you encounter is intended to be beatable when you first encounter it. That first encounter with the three snappers is supposed to establish how dangerous and scary the Colony is, but it doesn't really succeed at that when A) the main character is making playful banter and heroically trying to fight them, and B) when the game doesn't even give you the chance to fail at the encounter. I, for instance, felt like I was doing alright in that first battle -- I was avoiding hits and managing to land occasional hits of my own, and felt like I could maybe get through the fight if I was careful enough not to make any mistakes -- but then before I could even take one hit of damage, a cutscene butted in to show my character getting overwhelmed (which is yet another massive break in immersion to not only lose control of my character, but to have him suddenly performing far worse than when I was controlling him) and then Diego rushing in to save me.

If this had been Gothic 1, there wouldn't have been any cutscene at all -- the snappers would've just been really tough enemies placed in the environment that I chose to engage, and then quickly learned my lesson against, with the dangers of this world being something I learned through my own curiosity and exploration. Really, if the cutscene has to be here, then the character should talk a lot less so that the player can internalize the fear and threat posed by the snappers, and it should force you to have to actually fail in combat before Diego comes in to rescue you -- either the snappers should be so tough that you do practically zero damage to them because you haven't leveled your strength or sword training and are using a crappy broken sword, and/or they should be much faster and more aggressive so that you're way more likely to take damage without having leveled up your stamina enough to block or dodge every attack, and/or they should be able to out-run you if you try to run away, all so that you actually get to feel how dangerous and challenging the Colony is through first-hand, mechanical gameplay experience, as opposed to simply being shown in a cutscene or told by an NPC in dialogue.

In fact, the whole intro sequence before you meet Diego feels like a weak attempt to make the Colony seem hostile and scary with a bunch of mostly superficial aesthetics -- it's dark, you hear spooky noises, see the mauled and bloody remains of a guard, catch a glimpse of a terrifying monster, and then get attacked by a whole group of them. It's window dressing, a bunch of fabrications made up specifically for this highly-scripted quasi-walking-simulator theme park ride from the lift to the amphitheater, and doesn't represent what the ordinary gameplay feel is like, as is evidenced by the fact that all normal gameplay functions are turned off during this sequence and how bright and cheery everything looks when you wake up in the morning. Whatever effect that intro was going for is lost as soon your character wakes up the next morning and you realize it was all a theatrical production and doesn't translate to how the world actually is in practice. And those snappers, which are supposed to be the big bad scary threat, turn out to be not much of a threat at all since the game has you beating them with relative ease as soon as you get an actual sword.

Human NPCs in the remake likewise aren't as intimidating as they were in the original game. The original game made a point of treating you like a worthless scrub in the beginning because you were the new guy, and as the new guy in the Colony you were everyone else's bitch. Hence, Bullit's "Standing Godfather" hazing ritual, bouncers calling you derogatory names like "boy" and "kid," guards trying to shake you down for protection money, people treating you with utter contempt and not giving you the time of day, taunting your prospects, yelling at you to get lost and get out of their sight, ridiculing you for your ignorance, clobbering you for making smart-assed comments, forcing you into doing menial tasks, and luring you into traps to rob you. In the remake, everyone is surprisingly nice and courteous to you, they praise your abilities and talk about how much potential you show for a new guy, and speak promisingly of your future. It's like everyone is patting you on the back in encouragement, as opposed to knocking you down and spitting on you.

Diego, for instance, is too nice and helping in the remake. Sure, he was one of few good guys who didn't treat you like crap in the original game, but that was part of his job to recruit new members to the Old Camp, and it never felt like he was going out of his way to help you or give you special treatment; here he gives you an endearing nick-name and makes it clear that he's taking you under his wing as his apprentice, and doesn't let you leave the starting area until you're properly equipped and even then insists on escorting you around the Colony. I mean, he just gives the letter for the mages right back to you because he's just such a nice guy in the remake, when in the original he made it clear that he would've mugged you for it if not for the fact that he was in bad standing with the mages and couldn't show his face around them anymore. Bloodwyn, likewise, used to be one of the main antagonists in the Old Camp, as he was the primary guy trying to extort money out of you and scheming with other convicts to beat you and rob you, but in the remake he's a totally chill, nonchalant guy just standing around doing his job who harbors no ill-will towards you and also seems to think very highly of you after completing a mandatory quest for him.

The voice acting doesn't do much to suggest that this is a prison colony full of criminals, either. In the original game, a lot of the NPCs spoke with a rough and gruff tone of voice like you would expect from hardened criminals, and the fact that they spoke with American accents (in the English version, at least) lent the world a more unique charm since you don't see a lot of fantasy games with American accents. In the remake, the NPCs tend to sound a little too prim and proper, like they're wealthy noblemen who only got thrown in the Colony for being a day late paying their taxes, as opposed to being a bunch of thieves and murderers. Diego is easily the worst offender in this regard, especially when you combine his voice with his fancy wardrobe, formal bowing, Shakespearean posturing, and ornate flourishing of his rapier. (He also puts a lot of absurdly unnecessary pauses between lines and even between words, which seriously degrades the quality of the actor's performance.) Orry and Bloodwyn's voices sound somewhat similar to the tone characters had in the original game (although Bloodwyn's mannerisms and way of talking don't match the role and personality he was supposed to have in the original), and I kind of like how sniveling Sarus sounds, but the others -- Diego, Cayden, and main character -- don't really do it for me. The main character, in particular, acts a little too exuberant with his witticisms and commentary, especially for someone who's brand new to the Colony, and as I've said before, giving him so much blatant, over-the-top personality can be a detriment to immersion. It doesn't help that everyone speaks with a vaguely English accent in the remake, either, since that makes it sound more like it's taking place in a generic fantasy land as opposed to a thuggish prison.

The new quests show some decent quest design, where you actually get branching choices that would seem to have lasting consequences for future quests and interactions. The quest with Cayden and Sarus, for instance, gives you a few choices -- do you spare Sarus, or kill him? Do you tell Cayden that you killed Sarus, or that he's still alive? Do you give Cayden the dice box, or not? Depending on your choices, Sarus can live or die (either by your own hand, or by Cayden's) which could lead to or close off more questing opportunities with Sarus in the New Camp, and you could make a friend or an enemy out of Cayden which could make things easier or harder when trying to join the Old Camp. The quest itself is relatively straightforward in terms of what you're expected to do in it, but the choices add an interesting dynamic to the quest with several different outcomes.

Other quests, however, end up being pretty shallow, mindless fetch quests without a whole lot of narrative compulsion behind them. Fetching a seraphis for Sarus works because you nearly killed him and he's too weak to get one himself, plus he's portrayed as a sympathetic character who got caught up in some shady business that he now wants to get out of so you might care enough about him to make sure he survives, but fetching a wolf tusk (tooth?) and snapper meat for Bloodwyn feels forced, especially as a mandatory main quest. The idea with Bloodwyn is that he's guarding the gate down the mountain path, but can't leave his post until he's gathered a few animal trophies for Drax and Ratford, and for some reason that means he can't open the gate to let you and Diego go through, and then for some reason means that you have to go get that stuff yourself. Once you finish that, it triggers another main quest where they send you to douse the beacon from the same area you were just at, when in reality it seems like the beacon was the reason Bloodwyn should've been reluctant to open the gate, and that the quest to fetch him the animal trophies should've been an optional side quest you did along the way to dousing the beacon.

The music is alright but doesn't have quite the same charm as the original soundtrack, which I think actually played one of the biggest roles in establishing the great tone and atmosphere of the original games. In a previous video I experimented with replacing music from Gothic 2 with generic stock fantasy music and found that, while the new music worked reasonably well the game basically stopped feeling like Gothic, and that's kind of the case with the remake. The original theme gets reprised at the end of the demo, and there's a nice easter egg for fans of the German version, with a guard playing Herr Mannelig on a lute, but that's about it for original music -- everything else is brand new, and most of the music that plays during cutscenes feels excessively dramatic and over-orchestrated which stands in stark contrast to the original soundtrack's more subdued compositions with simpler instrumentation. The ambient exploration music comes close to the Gothic vibe, with it mostly consisting of a slow flute melody accompanied by simple chord progressions on classical strings, plucked arpeggios on a lute, and percussive accents from hand drums. It's not bad, and I could definitely see it growing on me, but as of right now it feels like a pretty short loop that periodically fades in and out.

The combat music, on the other hand, is completely over-the-top and sounds like something out of The Witcher 3, and it doesn't make any sort of immersive sense for such intense combat music to come out of nowhere just because you drew your weapon. The original games didn't even use combat music much or at all, which worked out fine because that made combat feel like a more natural part of the world as opposed to putting you in a completely different game state. Ultimately, however, I can't help but wish they'd just remaster and record new versions of the original music because of how iconic it is -- if, for instance, the music for Old Camp ends up being anything other than the original composition, then I'll be busting out a torch and pitchfork. New music is fine in areas, but at the very least some of the more iconic tracks need to be remade for the remake, if only for the sake of nostalgia, but also because they were just so perfect originally and there's no need to change or do away with perfection. Even better would be if they could hire Kai Rosenkranz, who did all of the original music, to come back and write new music for the remake.

Then we've got some technical issues, which is to be expected in a work in progress like this, so I won't go into much detail other than to list them out: there's no mouse support in menus, and different menus use different inputs which gets a little confusing (E is the action button normally, but then becomes "next tab" in the menu screen, where you have to press Z to use something and the jump button to equip something); the character sheet shows two different experience thresholds for when your next level-up is; the lockpicking skill shows a 100% failure rate at picking locks and yet I never failed a single one; Nordmar Soup claims to restore vitality in one window, but then says it boosts stamina in another; the item wheel seems broken and doesn't let you use items from the upper left slot; health displayed on the pause screen is often inconsistent with your health bar displayed in the world; quest progress sometimes tracks incorrectly; manual saving doesn't seem to work at all as you always revert back to a checkpoint; and finally, the optimization is absolutely terrible, as I felt no practical difference in performance whether I had all the options set to epic or low.

Despite an overwhelming amount of things that need to be improved for the remake to feel like a true Gothic game, I'm still incredibly excited for this opportunity, and I had a lot of fun once the demo got into familiar territory and I could start playing "spot the difference" to see how they adapted the old map into a new game. Some of the changes they've made are actually good ideas, I feel, since the remake gives the developers an opportunity to expand on lore, mechanics, and other ideas that were hinted at in the original but never really touched on -- like, for instance Gomez using signal fires to communicate with the exchange zone, actually getting to see the New Camp raid the Old Camp supply lines, more interactions between camps (what with Bloodwyn having new involvement with Drax and Ratford), and the idea that creatures are actually more dangerous at night, as just a few examples already present in the demo. There's also the opportunity to retroactively tie Gothic 1 to Gothic 2 a little more, since a lot of the series lore that we consider canon wasn't established until Gothic 2 and was therefore notably absent in Gothic 1 -- in a lot of cases it doesn't really matter, but it's nice to see an old shrine to Beliar in the remake because that hints at the cyclical war of the gods earlier in the series, and it's also a nice little touch to have Diego reference Gerbrandt.

There's clearly good potential in this remake, and they've already shown some good ideas -- I think if they can eliminate most of the graphical elements of the UI, ditch the heavy reliance on cutscenes and leave the player in control of the character more consistently, get rid of the invisible walls and artificial barriers and reinstate freeform climbing and swimming, tone down the excessively bright graphics to make the Colony look more bleak and grim, rework the combat system a bit, bring back the steep difficulty curve, and rewrite a lot of the dialogue to make NPCs more hostile towards you and to lessen some of the main character's personality, then we could have something special here. Here's hoping the developers get the opportunity to make it into a full game, and that they take a serious look at the fan feedback to shape it into something we can all be proud to call Gothic.