The Gothic Remake finally lays its cards on the table and shows in the trailer what it really looks like. Especially in the detailed analysis it shows: Gothic was really understood here
The Gothic Remake finally doesn”t make my stomach ache anymore! And I know, I know: we Gothic fans are a funny bunch. With a remake of Dragon Age: Origins, the community wouldn”t care if Bioware redesigned the Templar armour for the remake. And there would be no roaring cheers because I can sit on chairs and fry bulbs in the game. And don”t you dare let the main character talk too much, he has to be a laconic grumpy head who waves his fists in front of him while talking!
But Gothic is Gothic. Fans fell in love with the red guardsmen”s armour 20 years ago because they had to work damn hard for it. We fell in love with spinning meat skewers, campfire grumblings, spluttering, squealing meat bugs and a million other details that Goth just can”t be Goth without.
And to recognise these million details with surgical precision, to pack them into a remake that must please feel as great as before, but at the same time new and fresh, because the new in a remake needs its raison d”être somewhere … whew, the Barcelona-based developer studio Alkimia Interactive is tackling an incredibly challenging Herculean task.
The first playable teaser for the Gothic remake caused a lot of joy in 2019, but also a lot of criticism, including from me. The armour, the atmosphere, the characters – none of it felt like Gothic at all. Would it evolve in a good direction?
Yes, it would. The new trailer shown at THQ”s big showcase event wipes away any worries I had three years ago. Of course, the remake may end up failing on the things all games can fail on: Gameplay, balance, bugs and so on. But four details make me optimistic that the developers have absolutely understood one thing: How to make Goth look like Goth.
Table of Contents
1. swamp fiends in the old mine
Take a look at the trailer for yourself first so you can understand what I”m ranting about here:
Well, have you spotted the swamp rats? Just for reference: In the trailer, the camera flies through the Old Mine – a very familiar location for those who know Gothic 1. There, the Old Camp is busy mining ore in order to have economic leverage against King Rhobar II beyond the Barrier, who needs the valuable ore for his war against the orcs. The Old Mine is a very busy place, but is plagued by crawling minecrawlers that pounce on unwary diggers and eat the workforce.
It would probably have been enough for most fans if we had seen heaps of diggers and guardsmen in the remake, mining ore or pulling the legs of lazy good-for-nothings. But at 01:10 and 01:27 there are a few novices from the swamp camp mixed in too!
A very important detail, because also in the original some swamp templars like Gor Na Bar hired in the mine to hunt minecrawlers or sell swamp weed or both. My nameless hero could even learn from them to extract crawler tongs from the monster carcasses.
For a first in-engine camera tour, there would have been no need at all to think of the few incidental Templars from the original – and I am all the more pleased that Alkimia spares no extra mile here to show: The details in Gothic count!
2. the armour!
And while we”re on the subject of Templars and Guardsmen, I”ll point my finger right at probably the most obvious detail: the armour finally looks the way I imagine it as a fan! Red guardsmen, half-naked Templars, filthy Buddlers – gone seem the days of smoothly polished silver armour from the original teaser demo.
3. This is what a dying flesh bug must sound like
Now there”s a wonderful fleshbug you”ve got is not a compliment I”d fire out over dinner, but in the case of the Gothic remake, I tip my hat: this is what a fleshbug must sound like. More generally, the trailer”s sonic tapestry is much more decidedly in the right direction than 2019”s Playable teaser.
Clearly, in English Gothic always feels somehow … strange, but the bleating of the guardsmen, the busy fleshbug at the very beginning, the puffing orc at the big wheel, the sparking grindstones, the pickaxes in the ore, it all sounds like Gothic should sound.
But the developers also modernise a few sounds, above all the hissing of the Minecrawlers at the very end of the trailer. Where they used to crawl around with a mix of hissing and hissing, the new crawler scream vibrates through marrow and bone. A very cool innovation that captures the menace of the crawlers amidst the dark mine shafts even better than the original.
4. there are people eating
Gothic can”t function without campfires, seating and munching. Although the series never put much emphasis on survival, roasting or boiling down food always played a very atmospheric role. Also because the strength of the Gothic NPCs was their believable daily routine. During the day, people gathered around the campfire, chatting, haggling, grumbling and blaspheming. And at minute 01:11 in the trailer you can see exactly that on the right edge of the screen. There are people munching, drinking and bitching around the fire.
Now we”re talking about a staged in-engine trailer, not a real gameplay demo. But I”d be very surprised if the developers set up a complete food situation in the trailer for a tiny second, only to kick this aspect completely in the finished game. In general, the trailer”s greatest strength is how alive it looks.
Orcs puffing and heaving their huge wheels, guardsmen shouting orders and sometimes swinging their whips, diggers chopping ore or complaining about their back-breaking job, other workers carrying ore baskets and sandbags on their backs. Of course, I can”t judge at all yet how much of this will end up in the finished game. How dynamically such situations arise, whether these mine diggers really go about their own daily routines and so on … but should all that be in the game, then the Gothic remake could be really, really, really good.
