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Reliving In A Simulation
The beloved, but underplayed, 2001 open-world fantasy RPG is getting another chance with Gothic 1 Remake, and it’s being done the hard, but hopefully satisfying way
Gothic, the 2001 PC game that was arguably ahead of its time, is the ideal candidate for a remake. It was an early experiment in the open-world fantasy RPG genre (notably launching almost a full year before The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind), and though it released in the United States only a few months after its European debut, it did not find a strong audience in the West. It certainly has its players in North America, but its most fervent fans live East of the Atlantic Ocean.
“I think a lot of this was due to how the game industry worked,” managing director and Gothic remake game director Reinhard Pollice tells me when I ask why he thinks it never took off in the West. “Back then, there was no such thing as digital distribution or Steam, so you either have a big publisher in the U.S. or you don’t.”
The result of its admittedly unintentional geographic separation is that, despite its creativity and ambition, Gothic is a generally underplayed game. The simply titled Gothic 1 Remake is an opportunity to introduce a wider international audience to the game and its world, and ideally, improve everything across the board.