By: Nick Evanson Aug 23, 2007

The Gothic series of action RPG games has quite a cult following. Gothic fans love the fact that you're thrown right into the thick end of things at the start of the game, they enjoy the textural depth of the NPCs and they really like being able to wander off and bump into level 50 monsters before you've even picked up your first weapon (no monster level scaling here).

Unfortunately, not everyone loved the games - the American market never quite liked the feel of them, especially the last one, Gothic 3. The snag for American gamers was that they didn't like the very steep learning curve or the fact that you could get squished right at the start. Worse still was that the Gothic games were developed for the German market first and then translated for other countries some time afterwards; much of the subtleties were lost in this language cross-over, giving many of the characterisations a very wooden feel.

So perhaps it was very encouraging to hear Piranha Bytes state at GC 2007 that this is something they were conscious of. They personally want to give their games a very open feel, even with your first steps into the title, but they knew that this had a significant impact on the success in the non-European markets. All of this was covered at the press meeting where three leads from the company, newly emerged from the disintegration of the previous Piranha Bytes, talked about their current project. Currently at a very early alpha stage ("pre-alpha, pre-everything" were their words), it doesn't have a title yet - those who follow gaming industry news will no doubt be aware that the name "Gothic" will not be used for this one.

Well, what can we expect? Firstly, say goodbye to massive open worlds and move into a more constrained environment but with more detail: the story will be set on a volcanic island, run by an inquisition-style group of people, hell-bent on not letting the island's big secret out into the open. How you get involved in all of this wasn't covered (perhaps because this is yet to be decided) but the gameplay will be action-RPG, with adventure elements again. There will also be less emphasis on stats, and more on general skills and characters. The feel should be a balance of some kind between realism and fantasy-cartoon. Dungeons will be more prevalent than in previous games, and the connection between monsters and weapons that can hurt them tightened further (no more using a sword to kill a rock golem).

It's all far too early to even speculate about how well this project will do, but Piranha Bytes are setting their sights even higher than before - they're looking to see if developing console ports would help US sales, and factors such as DX10 support are up for consideration. Needless to say, the real Gothic fans will almost certainly lap this up but the cynics will probably need to see quite a lot more before they're convinced.

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