Welcome to the colony… again!
You can find all updates here: Gothic Remake release date
Update 2021-11-12: The studio Alkimia Interactive released a statement announcing that they are strongly working on the game and they clearly got the message for the feedback given by who played the Playable Teaser, so maybe soon we might have an official release date for Gothic Remake!
What is Gothic Playable Teaser? Is this a remake of the original Gothic?
As announced on Steam it seems that Piranha Bytes and THQ Nordic Barcelona are working on an official remake of Gothic. They just released this playable Demo Teaser, for free on Steam if you own any of their games. Being a teaser, it is just a one-hour-long gameplay, but I think it’s enough to get an idea.
It is interesting to notice that Piranha Bytes was hiring a Gameplay Programmer in October, 2019 and they filled in that position. So this could make us think they are really working on something important.
Anyway, this demo is made with Unreal Engine 4 and allows you to live again as the nameless hero that was sent to the colony… You will meet Diego and Bloodwyn, and some new characters also. From what we can see in this demo there is already a lot of new stuff, like new characters, quests and even the map is different. Looks good, and you can watch the videos I uploaded to get an idea:
Gothic Playable Demo Teaser – Gameplay Video
Gothic Remake - Playable Demo Teaser Gameplay - Quests, combat, creatures, characters (Youtube)
Gothic Playable Demo Teaser – Human combat mechanics against Cayden – Video
Review
Graphics
(+) means positive, (/) means neutral, (-) means negative
- (+) In general, I liked the graphics. It’s made with Unreal Engine 4 but I am not as disappointed as I thought immediately.
- (-) There is too much fire at the beginning, I had to lower the graphics settings because it was going slow with all that fire.
- (-) I had to turn up the Gamma because by default it was really too dark and I could see nothing, I don’t know if it was intended.
Audio
- (+) The overall audio gave me good feelings
- (+) Good sound effects
- (/) Voices are ok, but I would change the voice for the intro narrator, I like him but Xardas’ original voice fits better in my personal opinion.
Gameplay
- (+) The gameplay was a good experience
- (+) Quests look good, I like the fact you have no compass to see where you have to go, like in the original game, I hope it will stay like this, because it makes the game harder but gives much more satisfaction when you complete something.
- (+) The equipment I could see (swords, rings, etc.) is on the same line of the original Gothic, so I liked it.
Combat and fighting mechanics
- (/) Naturally, fighting mechanics need a lot of improvement
- (/) Understanding how to fight properly is quite hard, but surely the player needs to learn how to fight. I am glad they didn’t use Gothic 3’s mechanics where you just needed to spam mouse clicks.
- (+) I like that multiple enemies attack you at the same time, not like in Gothic 3 where they just waited their turn like at the supermarket…
- (-) Human combat is quite fair, but it is too slow. I understand tho that this could easily change when you improve the fighting skills, but the feelings I had from those fights were mostly negative.
- (-) It is senseless that you are able to heal yourself while fighting, if this is something definitive, maybe the healing foods should be harder to get or give less health
- (-) Parrying seems useless whereas dodging seems much better. But of course this could be just my fighting style.
- (-) I didn’t like much the fights against wolves, they seemed to me pretty unbalanced in the mechanics (not in the difficulty). When they attack you they are very hard to dodge.
Bugs
Since I want to contribute as I can, I want to report some bugs I found even if it’s just a teaser:
- I played the game in English. Some subtitles were mismatching with the audio. Not big differences, just some small things.
- When killing meatbugs and looting them, they kept being hightlighted for all the gameplay and I could see their corpse while going around. You can see it in my videos.
- It seemed to me that rotten meat could be picked up more times from the same spot
- Sometimes, loot menu (when you kill a creature expecially) appears empty or there is extra space in the list.
- Health bar and stamina bar are not always visible when opening the quick menu with Tab
- Probably intended, but Cayden’s health keeps going up to 100% (with the healing green visual effect) when you take him to zero.
Ideas and suggestions
Of course we could list hundreds of new idea, so I just want to write down what could be improved based on the actual demo, not on the whole game.
- Most important thing: Make an open early access! Open beta, open alpha, chapter demos, anything, make the people try the game because without that, there will be a high risk to make a game that will be just bought, played once and then ignored by the great part of the community. And you know the Gothic community really wants a remake
- Remove some fire at the beginning
- Add “group looting” (like in Elder Scrolls Online, just an example). When you kill more creatures in the same area, you should be able to pick up the loot from all of them at the same time
- Add a list of picked up items. Sometimes it is not clear what you just picked up. (Also this is in ESO, if you want an example)
- Change intro narrator voice because Xardas’ voice was just something else, in my humble opinion.
- Sometimes it is not clear how to turn the character in the right way against the wall to climb it.
- Keep the original feelings: Bloodwyn seems even too friendly and soft to me. The dark and hard atmosphere from the original game was really something. You could feel that there was really sadness around because of the situation of the people. With some funny moments like with Diego and Gorn once in a while.
- Don’t change the original Gothic story too much, because it worked very well, I think the best idea is just to add content but not remove original stuff, as it could be really easy to ruin the atmosphere and the general feeling.
PC build specs: Intel i7 4790k, RX 290X 4GB, AsRock Z97 Pro4, 16 GB RAM DDR3
What do you think of this demo?