#GOTHIC 1 REMAKE FULL#

“It should not feel like a ‘dance’ where you basically have to just wait for the perfect moment before striking. “Our combat should be easy to pick up,” Pollice tells us. Mechanically, combat will feature directional attacks, in the ballpark of Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Chivalry, but simpler. RELATED: Elden Ring's Bosses Have Nothing On The Wolves Of Risen

#GOTHIC 1 REMAKE FULL#

As we watch the protagonist in the Remake (who, in the presentation, is a character fans might recognise from the original game called Nyras, though you’ll be playing as the Nameless Hero in the full game) haphazardly swing a pickaxe at some Scavengers, Pollice says that the animations will change as you progress in a given skill, so Nyras’ clumsiness is very much intentional as he oafishly picks off the Scavengers. “They sometimes travel quite a long way, and it will create some interesting situations because there could be other creatures that they don't like, and then they’ll fight.”Ĭombat was, infamously, never a strong suit of Gothic, and even around the time of release was one of the most criticised parts of the game.

Pollice provides an example, talking about the dino-ostrich-like Scavengers, which he says will migrate to different parts of the game world depending on the availability of food and water. “We definitely want to lean into that and expand on it, giving everyone more in-depth behaviours and reactions from the NPCs, but also from creatures.” Pollice is pleased that I grill him about this, proudly pointing out the easter egg in the studio’s name that ‘Alkimia Interactive’ abbreviates to ‘AI.’ “I can fully confirm AI is one of our core focuses,” he begins. “So one of our core missions was to tell people that what we’re doing now has nothing really to do with the teaser, this really is a complete reboot.” With the Teaser continuing to get mixed reviews on Steam to this day, with players clearly concerned with the direction, it seems that not everyone’s got the message yet.

“I agree, and at times I was doubting that this would give us a good result, I was afraid that people would take only the negatives and say ‘Oh, they don’t know what they’re doing,’” admits Pollice. I suggested that it was a bold strategy, to present something to a passionate, long-suffering that they felt wouldn’t be well received by said community, especially in times when people tend to make swift judgements and take what they play at face value. “But I think you cannot go on something where you are like ‘yeah, maybe that's OK,’ because then you don't get a strong reaction and for us it really worked out because we got a strong sentiment about what people liked about the original.” “We intentionally went in a direction we knew like ‘OK, we don't think they will like this,’” Pollice begins. But Pollice tells me that the teaser was always designed to gauge the fanbase’s feelings, rather than as a blueprint for what the game would eventually look like. The Teaser, which is still available on Steam, was heavily combat-oriented and quite divergent from the original game.

The Gothic Remake’s current direction, which opts for a gritty no-nonsense graphical style and a close observance of the world design and story beats of the original, was largely shaped by the strong, though not strictly positive, feedback to the Gothic Playable Teaser in 2019.

Gothic 1 remake