Gothic Teaser: Feedback (Review)

INTRO.

And here we are. THQ Nordic some time ago definitively bought Pyranha Bytes and by extension all the brands of the German softwerehouse. Last week THQ Nordic released a basic prototype of a possible "remake" of Gothic (Gothic Playable Teaser). The prototype runs on the Unreal 4 graphics engine, a very adequate engine to make an rpg today. Engine which was recently used for The Outer Worlds and many other games. The main objective, for now, from THQ Nordic, is to receive feedback from fans about the idea of developing a remake of Gothic. Now we analyze and develop a critique that, as you well know readers of this site, as always, will not touch the mechanics but rather the basic concept on which this prototype is based upon and we will also try to give advice to make this "new" Gothic, finally the true, not spiritual, but in fact, successor of Gothic 1 and 2. Now dealing with a remake or a reboot is a very delicate matter, especially if you touch a masterpiece of the past. How many movies and games have had remakes and reboots to have ultimatly negative receptions from fans because who ever worked on the remake or the reboot there, has done his own thing or completely ignored (or not understood), what made the original movie or the original game that masterpiece. This happens because you are dealing with memories of the older generations. Think about it: movies like Terminator Genesys (also known as Terminator Geneshyt, a movie where it is not enough to have Arnold and Khaleesi to be good) or games like Torment: Tides of Numenera. But when the remakes and the reboots are done well, they are acclaimed greatly: like DooM 2016 and BladeRunner 2049. So THQ... I would probably look unprofessional but with Gothic 1 remake, a fan pretends the best experience ever.

When you ask a fan what made Gothic so great, most of the times you get the same answer... The atmosphere.

EXPLORATION & ATMOSHPERE.

For now there is not much to say about exploration itself. The prototype is limited to showing only the initial part of Gothic 1, which is the famous descent from the northern mountains of the Colony. But it must be said that the realization of this part of the map is not exactly faithful to the original one. It is immediately clear that the dimensions have expanded so much that, sprinting, is required if we want to reach, for example, the closed mine where in the original Gothic, the pickaxe could be found. Do you remember? Dispite of this map expansion, new "locations" have been added and more details to the environment have been added aswell. So while some parts of the map expands and makes the world more interesting (also because if the world didn't expand and didn't add new content, given that fact that most fans know every inch of the original map, it would be boring because the Colony would have been exactly the same and devoid of something new) but on the other hand for example the temple of Beliar (?) along the road, placed there without having anything interesting visually and by design, could make exploration a little bit useless. Speaking of which, for now I do not notice that sense of "World Story Telling", that is when certain background stories are not purely written or told directly by a NPC or a book, but rather by some scenario elements such as props and texture details that alone they tell what happened. For example in Gothic 1, but also in 2, if you enter a cave and find blood stains on the ground and various skeletons next to some remarkable equipment items, the world, without telling you directly from some NPCs, that further on, deeper, where darkness reigns, there is a creature or an orc that will probably crush you like an bug. Now, if I missed this element in Gothic Teaser, let me know. But to make it clear, Gothic had a strong emphasis on the atmosphere. Now, let's try to analyze the design of the map or at least, how the design was conceived and we will also try to give advice in this regard. The design of the maps has always been and I speak as modder, the most fun part. Personally Gothic, being an old school game, like the games of its time and those prior to its rise, had a strong sense of "level design". One would say: secrets! Of course, secrets were pillars for some fantastic games that rewarded the player if they explored carefully, such as Quake 1, Deus Ex and many others. Games that had a very branched and maze-style level design because, those games, had not yet developed a technology that allowed them to have big worlds but since Gothic was one of the firsts to have an Open World exploration mechanic, the level design strangely has managed to stay on top quality levels. This is because the level design is concentrated not only on horizontal but also on vertical exploration thanks to the fact that the map itself extends from a height sea level to plateaus, canals, gorges, irregular forests and valleys. These variations in heights also next to one other, allow the implementation of many secret areas and aesthetically original areas with molti-layerd landscapes. But all this was possible, at the time, because the Colony was hand-crafted and not auto-generated by the game engine. Certainly game engines like the one used by CD Project and by Bethesda aswell as the Unreal 4, give the possibility to auto-generate a world unlike the ZenEngine. But if on one hand, time is spared in the actual composition of the map, on the other hand the manual composition leaves room to the creativity of the developer who has the possibility of inteligently exploiting design ideas. BUT I DIGRESS. How does exploration actually work in this Gothic Teaser? Despite some design choices, that are not so convincing, others are surprising. Now, I don't know exactly how much time they took to make this map but leaving out this detail, I must say that I was pleased to find secret areas, even if a few of them, which distract, so to speak, from the main road towards the south. For what there has been done, it's quite good but I would like to emphasize the lack of interaction in the exploration itself. Having parts of the map closed in a Gothic is a kind of sacrilege. Right from the start of any Pyranha Bytes game (unlike Risen 2), the player is free to reach every parts of the map at will, even in areas that would be forbidden to him because he is not strong enough to face certain monsters (the so-called "Natural Progression Borders"). In this Teaser they did exactly the opposite, which is of closing gates and parts of the map until the player "reaches a pre-requisite determined by the main quest". This in a Gothic game is not good! I really appreciated the possibility to climb: now the prototype obviously does not allow the player to climb everywhere like in Gothic 1 because obviously the developers had no time to make every surface climbable. Also they have not implemented swimming for example probably for the same reason. But it is to be seen.

Now let's talk about the artistic direction of the design. Here the excuse "but it is only a demo" does not hold. From the beginning it is evident that the developers have completely ignored the tone of the Gothic atmosphere. Although the beginning is quite dark, once under the sun light, the colony does not look exactly as dark as the original. Now to clarify, Gothic 1 was not exactly a dark fantasy like Dark Souls but it presented some peculiar well-defined landscapes. The colony is very arid and a barren valley with ugly grass fields, full of bare vegetation, yellow in color: very similar to the region of Italy where I live (Puglia). Here we have a generic atmosphere, not so different from any other fantasy games. Even if the textures are detailed and the enviroment is also very accurate, the art direction has not really nailed the actual "feel"... If you know what I mean. The so-called color pallette is too saturated (look at the flames for example) and devoid of dirty and aggressive colors.

Let's talk about the music now. I noticed right away that whoever is the composer, he is actually using the same instruments used by Kai Rosenkranz in the original Gothic. Leaving aside the piece that starts during the fights that is completely inconsistent with Gothic (it sounds more like a The Witcher music), I appreciate the compositions more or less. Obviously Gothic had a very solid and recognizable soundtrack but I am very open to new interpretations and new, more articulated pieces. Of course having the same pieces composed by Kai with a more modern and better sound and maybe reinterpreted differently without going off topic, would be really appreciated. But let's remember one fundamental thing: Kai Rosenkranz composes music and does not only create backgrounds for flat and generic atmospheres. Whoever the composer is, he has an arduous and difficult job ahead. Good luck!

"Many people today confuse immersion with realism. To make myself clear: Gothic cared about the details that highlighted realistic aspects of the surrounding environment such as human NPCs who had their daily routeens, had relationships with other NPCs, they interacted with the objects of the game world and fauna Npcs that at the same time settled in their habitat, hunt weaker animals, fought with other animals for the domination of certain areas etc ... If in other RPGs we can find this element of immersion, at the same time these rpgs do not nail the true concept since they do not give the possibility to the player to interact with such environment. For example in The Witcher 3 which takes a lot from Gothic from this regard, it does not offer the player the possibility of interacting in any way with the common npcs, which Gothic does and not only. You cannot interact with the scenario (apart from torches), when in Gothic you can even sit on the benches, the AI ​​reacts in a natural way in front of the player's reckless actions etc ... but I am not talking about The Witcher 3 as an isolated case but in reality it is something that can be found in many open world RPGs today. In a nutshell many RPGs believe that immersion is like going to a western theme park while Gothic believes that immersion is like actually living in a western town."

STORY.

As far as the main plot is concerned, the Teaser is limited only to the beginning of Gothic 1. The intro is exactly IDENTICAL to the original but the developpers changed the famous fall of the hero in the lake into a simple elevator that goes down into the valley. Of course the hero eventually falls but the dialogue with Pyrokar and the Judge of Khorinis is gone and this is bad from a narrative point of view because it is not explained why the letter is delivered to the protagonist. Maybe they didn't have the voice actors for the two roles? The other negative point that goes a bit to ridicule this Teaser are the personalities of the hero and Diego. The hero does not necessarily have to ALWAYS TALK: "Oh a torch, this is used to make light ... Oh, some fire, now I light it up! Look, I'm walking, now I put forward my right foot and then my left foot!"

The dialogues and the voice acting is really atrocious and cringy. Anyone would have written better dialogues than these. Not to mention the initial dialogue with Diego, which in this Gothic immediately becomes boring, tedious, badly written, badly voice acted, and it's incredibly long. And we also take into consideration that the character of Diego has been changed considerably. THQ, Diego is not a musketeer with a theatrical body language. In addition to this, most of the dialogues do not seem at all consistent with the theme of the Colony. If I remember correctly every NPC addressed the player with a hostile and vulgar attitude, reminding you that in the colony there is no room for the weak and for the innocents. Here we are dealing with real animals and you are one of the damned among the fallen.

RPG ELEMENT.

The RPG element in Gothic pushed the player to find solutions on his own and these solutions were numerous and free to find and choose. For what has been shown, let's say that for what it is, it's not exactly what a fan could expect. In fact here the excuse of the "demo" does not hold up because here in this Teaser, It was evidently made a design choice for an RPG that had a target for the casual gamers. The typical 4 radial dialogue choices in the Fallout 4 / Mass Effect-style, greatly limit the possibility of having further dialogue choices which are expected from an hardcore RPG like Gothic. In Gothic generally we expect more or less between the 5-6 choices of dialogue and in some cases even more (look at Elex where you can also have 7 or 8 choices) and instead here in this Gothic... only 4.

I've got nothing else to say about this Teaser in this regard. For now, I'm just highlight the current trend of the RPG aspect of this Gothic.

COMBAT & GAMEPLAY.

There is little to say given the few material shown. The inventory system and the quest journal are really well-designed. The skill screen is practically copied from the original game and the talents remained unchanged. It will be really interesting to see if the developers will introduce the evolution of the combat animations at every level of training. Speaking of combat system, this is very reminiscent of For Honor. The basic system nailded in concept but has obvious technical problems in terms of execustion that will certainly be fixed in the future. For now I don't know how they will manage the issue of balancing though. If this combat system works perfectly for duels with humans, I noticed that it doesn't work so well with animals. Not to mention the magic system of which we don't know anything about it and we don't know how they will make it fit with the melee combat system. It will be difficult to try to balance and synchronize 3 combat systems, because as you remember, we also have ranged weapons to consider aswell. Reading the various opinions regarding the combat system, I'd say that there is no unanimous consent. And how could it ever be? The difficulty and the gameplay is always subjective. Some players want a Dark Souls-style combat system, others a Risen 1 style and others a The Witcher 3 style (please no!). What I want to say is that whatever the combat system is going to be, my opinion is that the gameplay must be easy to learn but difficult to master... if you know what I mean. I have no real advice to give because, like I said, it is really subjective.

It is not possible to draw conclusions on this teaser unfortunately. It is a prototype that needs a complete restyle from top to bottom, especially in terms of art direction, design and RPG element. THQ Nordic has an arduous and very difficult task ahead. If at the same time we could finally have the true Gothic that we all deserve to play, at the same time we could have the definitive death of the franchise.

Game is not classified.