Birth, Life and Death of the Gothic Franchise 

I just reinstalled Gothic 2 after watching this video xD ( after a decade or so xD)

@@snoomtreb I had all 4 games on CDs, so I just bought digital copies three days ago since my new laptop doesn´t have CDrom and I am halfway through G1 again. Still getting chills from old camp soundtrack in a almost 20 years old game, that is how you know it is really good game ;-)

@@ebonyPM absolutely if you’re ‘actually’ afraid of high level bossed you know you got your emerging down ^^

I’ve just installed Gothic 1 and Risen 1 this month and finished it. Now I’m going for Gothic 2 heh.

I still play it from time to time on classic old XP machines. Absolutely love the atmosphere the games in this series have.

Even at 18 he should have known better than to use that stock roster sound. Some things can never be forgiven.

@Coding Only Consoles? Gothic is a PC title, and should stay away from console peasants if it doesn't want to tarnish its legacy. /looking at you Deus Ex 2, Dragon Age 2 and so many other console fuckups based on legendary PC titles.

@@itarH I think he is talking about Deus Ex: Invisible War.

@@itarH Deus Ex 2 was not Human Revolution, that was 3.

@@frankdesmet4468 calm down and drink the tea mum made for you.

​@@petr-nagy As she died 26 years ago.that is very much impossible. Besides that I don't like tea anyway.

Thanks for the praise.^^ It took 2,5 months for me to make it and it ended up being a rushjob at the end because I was about to move. 1 month of which was purely spend in researching (luckily I was with the Gothic series from the beginning so I knew where to start finding sources) and 1,5 more months in a mixture of ongoing video editing and more research/finding sources. :D

@@criticalbytes1739 you welcome! you deserve it! it's amazingly put together and what info! the things i did not find in other videos. 2.5months! omg!!!

​@@criticalbytes1739 for someone who hasn't played any games in years and is just here for some nostalgia and emotional connection to the game and the one and a half decade old memories associated with, i must admit that this is the video i've been waiting for. thankfully not the 100th let's play game, but something that tells the story from the perspective of the developers and veteran followers. you obviously are a true connoisseur of the game and also a member of the old forums. is it known what the original founders do these days? who or what is the main culprit of gothic's demise in your opinion? greed? production deadline? development constraints? jowood? what was the role of that weird wisecrack ivan ertlov guy in the development of gothic3? he's an excentric guy who publishes fantasy books from time to time a quick search on google reveals. thank you for your efforts.

@@andriypohors2538 First off thank you for the praise.^^ Those are a lot of questions. I have been able to trace the steps of most of the original founders but not all of them, if I remember correctly, some of them have unfortunately passed on by now. In my opinion there is no main culprit to point a finger at, pretty much everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. JoWooD was facing bankrupcy once again and had to make deals with Koch Media to survive until the release of Gothic 3, the leading developers of Piranha Bytes were way too overconfident to tackle the development of both a new engine and a new game within just 3 years and a small dev team, the communication between JoWooD and PB already started to show cracks and there were moments of the developer not knowing what the publisher is doing and vice versa. Ivan Ertlov is actually a pretty nice guy in my experience, sadly he just blindly followed his superior's instructions back in the day, which led to him making his false marketing promise and eventually quitting JoWooD. His role was to keep the community hype in the active forums going, answering questions with PR answers, the usual customer support stuff. The main problem with him were his new guidelines for the Gothic 3 Community and that his superiors didn't care what he said as long as it made sales. The whole "behind-the-scenes" story of Gothic 3 is a series of unfortunate events in my opinion: JoWooD was greedy, certainly and eventually way too much, but they were in a constant fight with insolvency. It didn't help much either that the decision-makers of JoWooD were more interested in their own salary and constantly made bad moves to "restructure the company's business model". PB was overconfident and were basically on a "high" coming from the success of Gothic 2. There is a rather infamous interview with, I think it was Mike Hoge, where it was stated that PB didn't believe that bigger games don't require bigger teams. On Paper he was right, bigger games don't necessarily require bigger teams when it comes to the mere size of the game's world. What PB completely disregarded at the time (or at least during the interview) was the workload for everything else. In the end, it all collapsed on top of their heads. With my limited knowledge and experience, I would say that in order for Gothic 3 to have turned out alright, JoWooD would have needed 4-12€ million of additional funding per year (from 04-07). Perhaps even a change of CEOs could have helped a lot. JoWooD desperately needed to restructure their company, a lack of personnel and the thick-headed elite at the top completely missed out on that though. Eventually the decision-makers of JoWooD, who from the get-go had no idea about anything regarding videogames, ran the company into the ground. PIranha Bytes would have needed a team three times its size with enough time to work out a good plan for team coordination, Piranha Bytes also would have at least needed an assistant director or another project manager in general. The game and the engine could have both used a QA phase time of 6-12 months as well. The development time of Gothic 3, to release in a mostly bug-free and actually finished state, would have taken another two years from the way I see it. I hope that answered most of the questions. :D

Blame Pankratz

More like they were forcefully rushed with Gothic 3. Look at Risen 1, it's a good game. You know why? Cause freaking JoWood didn't rush it. Never played Risen2/3/Elex so I cannot say anything about those games.

@@LourdeDev they suck

I wouldn't go as far as to say they suck. They have extremely high potential but it feels like Piranha Bytes is making games now because it's their job, not because they want to make something special or unique anymore.

While JoWooD certainly carries a lot of the blame in my opinion, if not the most blame about Gothic 3, let's not pretend that it's exclusively their fault. Piranha Bytes did their fair share of stupid decisions and they could have made compromises during development, but didn't in an attempt to fix a burning trashcan. They were overconfident. When the game released, they tried to halfway justify the unfinished game's mechanics by blaming everything on the Publisher. After the split JoWooD/PB, they pretty much tried to stick everything on JoWooD, which is a popular spin on the narrative, and one of their ways of avoiding unpleasant responsibilities, like answering questions about the core design decisions (writing quality, quest design etc.). PB has screwed up just as hard as JoWooD with Gothic 3, but for different reasons in my opinion.

we are

Thank you for your time of writing the comment and thank you for the praise. :) The mobile game isn't even that bad, it's pretty good for 2008 in my opinion. Nobody wanted to talk about it in the media or in the community, as it was seen by them, including me, as a quick cashgrab from JoWooD. I eventually ended up playing it sometime around 2014 if I remember correctly. :D

Arcania is alive and kicking also so hate on it some more but it technically is keeping this series relevant sure there's pc mods for the older games but Arcania isint a bad game at all I can't believe how much hate it got

It'll be a while until the next video but thanks for the compliments. :D

They said they liked Gothic and made the demo nothing like Gothic.

@@SSchithFoo that's what the feedback option was for

please no, PB does not have the original team anymore and all the games they made in recent years have been very meh at best. If another Gothic ever gets made, I think it is best to be made by a different developer. That way, it at least has a chance to be good.

@@Orrphoiz sorry just trying to understand how bringing a new developer ensures better results than the original developer (even if majority of the original team is indeed gone).

true, true. my nameless hero!

i made an amazing let's play of gothic 2! maybe the hero intereseted?

Hey your the guy who talks about fucking horses in gothic

@@kyronix560 YES HORSES!!!! 😂

wtf gothic 1 and 2 had no helmets too.

Gothic 3 has the best music I have ever heard in any videogame

Eww

I'd rather say the only good thing it had is the ost. The rest is completely shit!!! The fighting mechanics and model textures are the worst. Also when Arcania (gothic 4) was made by other company, they absolutely killed the games saga.

@@xxxdark-urielxxx8985 It's pretty good with mods.

@@Andrew85or Nah, The game is still broken. The modders can't fix the core problems, at least the game is beatable now...

U 2

Aye :D

"remake"

you should definitely try it 1 and 2, gothic 3 was my first gothic game, but right now i started 2 and belive me u might not like it at first comparing to 3 but trust me its really enjoyable, it will take a while to get acustomed with the combat movement system, but everything beside graphics i guess is better than g3, especially the quests and story and cutscenes.

1 bere cand te vad daca te apuci de gothic2 :)

go play 1 and 2 and you will never be able to play the 3rd again :D

3 tried its best OK?!

really? did not notice.

After 2 it went to shit

gothic 3 without patches and such was mostly unplayable.... some enemies were invisible, meaning you had no idea where you got damage from. some important quest items fell through the map, like the teleport into the sieged city in myrtana. some npc´s had the tendency to run into big rocks and never coming out again, meaning those quests were unfinishable.... and those are only the BIG ones

​@@alexanderzack3720 There was even a worse problem with the first version: every non-human enemy didn't have any kind of attack cooldown, so if a lizzard landed a hit on you, it would be attacking endlessly until the main character died.

Heyho, I can't say much about the other projects but in regards to the remake: The Gothic 1 Remake has hit full-development, based on the press release, in Februrary/March 2021. This means that, considering the size and the mechanics of a game like Gothic 1, you should be expecting the remake around 2023 if they end up rushing it. Personally, I would prefer if we would get it around 2024-2026, simply due to the reason that I would like to have a Gothic game that actually launches in an acceptable technical state. :D

Not really. Gothic 1 brought the High-End PCs of 2001 to their limit, thus the statement about its graphics is accurate. Also, I was specifically referring to the german (and polish) voice acting, the english localization (chronologically speaking) did not exist at this point in time.

Literally noone wrote such a comment, even though it's true. xD