Gothic 1 Remake

I’m writing this having finished the game and having sunk quite a bit of time into it. For context, I’ve played a bit of the other Piranha Bytes games, but only ever fully completed “ELEX”, which I really enjoyed despite (or because of) the jank. I never played the original Gothic, but played a very limited amount of Gothic 3. This review is therefore exclusively about Gothic 1 Remake (G1R) and I won’t be comparing it to the original. I’d cautiously recommend G1R. There’s a lot to like, but there are many frustrating aspects as well. It has a lot of the great bits about PB games like starting you off extremely weak and giving you the opportunity to work your way up into being a powerhouse, should you decide to aim for a pretty focused build. The factions are all difficult to back, because they have their own flaws, but you do have to choose one. That level of unease is kind of novel in games, especially RPGs, because many allow you to avoid such morally difficult allegiances. If that’s a concern for you, don’t let it be, as there are also opportunities to upend things. On that point, you can kill pretty much anyone in the game, which is refreshing, particularly in the later stages when you might want to exact a bit of righteous vengeance as I did. The characters are pretty one dimensional, but I quite liked the faction politics and the variations between each major camp. The game doesn’t really hold your hand so you need to carve out your own path via questing. On that note, there’s no mini map or a flood of icons telling you where to go, which I greatly welcomed. I’m not against them in some games that I treat like popcorn, but sometimes exploring and figuring out the mysteries of the environment are what really give a good RPG its strengths. There’s fast travel of a sort, but it’s limited and in some instances, you don’t unlock teleportation for certain locations until much later in the game. There is a mount you can unlock via a quest, which makes traversal a bit quicker. I’d say the backtracking got a little tedious at times, and I would have appreciated having fast travel to all of the major camps a little earlier instead of just two. The main story is fine. I won’t repeat the setup here as many other reviewers have already done that, but the game gives you enough incentive to want to keep progressing. Side quests are serviceable and feel relatively integrated into the world and main quest. A lot of your XP (or, should I say LP for Learning Points) comes from combat and advancing through the game rather than exclusively through quests. I like the system, but I also had a bunch of unused LP at the end of the game, which felt a bit of a waste, particularly since I didn’t really have a use for anything else as I moved into endgame. The combat is…ugh. I played mainly as a melee character but had so much LP by the end, I started using a few mage spells as well. My focus will be on melee. It’s floaty. There’s a lack of immediacy to the combat. I’m not super knowledgeable about the technical side of things, but I’ll say actions aren’t cancellable, and they feel a bit delayed. Parrying is particularly delayed such that at least one mod exists to improve it. With each move, it feels there’s a bit of lag or something indiscernible that gives the impression that the combat is flawed somehow. You won’t find the fluidity or precision here that you might find in something like Elden Ring or even ELEX, which was itself a bit janky. The combat is a means to an end, not necessarily a key focus of the fun, which is a bit disappointing. The graphics are fine, but the game just feels unoptimised. There are loads of traversal stutters despite a shader compilation pass the first time you load the game. Frame rates tank in certain areas and sometimes unexpectedly. I have two gaming PCs, one more robust than the other, and while a beefier CPU helps with some of these issues, the drops still occur; the lows just aren’t quite as low. The GPU matters but seemingly not in this particularly arena - at least in my experience. Like all Unreal Engine 5 games, G1R feels like it’s really taxing the system unnecessarily. I personally think UE5 offers too many compromises in its aims toward fidelity that really undermine the smoothness of gameplay. Maybe in more experienced hands than Alkimia’s this wouldn’t be as much of an issue, but I’m not convinced, as UE5 is pretty universally bad. And now to the bugs. They exist. There are quite a few. Most you can get over, but some are just annoying. A late game bug disallows you from being able to upgrade a specific armour set. At times, the game just sh**s the bed and crashes. Sometimes during dialog selection, the gamepad just wouldn’t work and I’d have to switch to mouse and keyboard to highlight a selection. If you do something slightly out of order in advance of your initial dialogue with Gomez, one of the camp leaders, the conversation simply won’t initiate. I had to stand in front of him for a solid minute spamming the action button to get him to acknowledge me (this is a known thing). I don’t think the developers really gave much thought to the fact that people play RPGs in unique ways and sometimes do not follow a very specific order or set path at all times. If you like to explore a bit before locking in on certain decisions, that can sometimes lead to annoying and unexpected results. So, yeah…there’s a lot of work to be done, and I’m not sure if it’s all really achievable, particularly given some of the more foundational performance and combat issues. All of these problems started to really chip away at my enjoyment of the game, but not so much that I ever wanted to stop playing. ***MINOR SPOILER*** Having said that, and having endured all of those annoyances, the lack of an ending is pretty egregious. I put like 70 hours into the game and when the credits rolled, I was like, “uh, that’s it?”. There are many people who will defend the fact that there’s no ending to speak of saying that the original was the same way, but given that the devs took other liberties, the least they could have done was to give the player a small since of accomplishment. Nope. ***SPOILER ENDED*** So, on the whole, would I recommend this game? Sure, but cautiously. The remake has a lot of its own issues that I don’t think are inherited from the original. The PB games were janky, sure, but they felt more responsive than G1R. The gameplay felt a bit more immediate, if not always fluid. There’s still loads of RPG fun to be had here, but just enter into it with a modicum of caution and tempered expectations.