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Way up there on the list of reasons Gothic is remembered as an RPG innovator is that it didn’t default to lethality. In an early quest a fellow prisoner in the penal colony recruits you to help mug his enemies. It turns out to be a trap, and suddenly you’re the one being attacked. After a few blows your hit points drop away and you end up prone on the ground, where they take whatever they like from your pockets. A dribble of health returns and you can get up and limp away, or start swinging and get knocked down again until you learn your lesson.
In Gothic, while beasts in the wilderness will kill and eat you given a chance, humans will happily let you live. Melee attacks default to non-lethal, and only when you’ve knocked someone down do you have the option to finish them off. If you do, it’s a big deal. Even among the rough-and-tumble miners, renegades, and drug-addled swamp cultists of the penal colony, murder is considered a bit of a no-no.
That’ll be true in the remake as well, game director Reinhard Pollice explains. “For the humans, that’s definitely the case,” he says, “and it’s connected to a crime system. Obviously, if somebody would see that, word would get out in the whole faction—that you’re kind of a rude guy who is attacking people. And then at some point, people won’t talk to you.”
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While animals aren’t part of the crime system—unlike Skyrim, where chickens witness a theft and report you to the guards—they do have behaviors. Building on the original, which let you aggro an animal then run away to lure it from the pack, the remake will let you use food to manipulate wolves, molerats, and the like.
“I can place food as a bait,” says Pollice, “and then they would obviously go for the piece of meat. Through that, I can involve them in a situation where they would fight against other creatures. Not every creature fights against everyone, there’s a kind of relationship system and also on top of that, the prey-and-predator system.”
Presumably we won’t be able to take down a harpy by assembling an army of meatbugs then. Still, it’s nice to hear that Gothic Remake will continue in the tradition of allowing for inventive problem-solving.
“I think Gothic is an immersive RPG,” Pollice says, “so every feature leads to offering a type of immersion that you would probably not get that same way in any other type of RPG. There’s features that give you the possibility to solve situations in a different way.”
Gothic Remake is also committed to the original’s immersive world, to the point of not having a minimap. Exactly the kind of detail old heads will appreciate when Gothic Remake arrives on June 5, via Steam and GOG.
