Finished my Gothic Remake playthrough today on Hard difficulty after 143 hours on Steam and 97 hours on the save file. Way longer than original game took me a few years ago on my first playthrough (also on stream). Hard difficulty sure made an impact and not levelling lockpicking to keep those puzzles more challenging did affect the difference in Steam and save file playtime with reloads.
There might be spoilers, even though I will try not to touch the story much, mechanics, locations and other parts of the game will be mentioned.
First thing that I want to say about the remake is that it does feel like Gothic, I don’t know what specifically contributes to this effect the most, but it just feels right from the very first moments. Very subjective thing, but there are many people from my community who did feel the same way and I think that’s the biggest part of remake’s success. Later when you play more that feeling only intensifies when you visit familiar areas and encounter recognizable monsters with NPCs.
Visual part of the game is amazing, all those familiar areas are now also looking great, not just from the graphics standpoint, but from the perspective of frame composition – lots of gorgeous views in the game. Old Camp being visible from many different angles and looking great especially at night with all the lights.
Many familiar sounds and music tracks, including classic death sound are also there to reinforce the nostalgic feeling, but also sound good for those who are playing the game for the first time.
Finally good combat system, that is totally better than original one and better than whatever they had in some of the first demos years ago. Magic now also has something solid in the early game, but for me it’s a bit of a negative, because in Gothic mages are a special caste and becoming one of them was never easy, suffering in the early game. Now you can clear most of the map in Act 1 with basic Firebolt even on Hard, so you don’t feel like some weak future novice, trying to level up and climb the ranks to be able to cast something decent. In the same time at least on hard later spells feel way weaker than in OG, even though I was a cultist, so circle 4 maximum, but hear highest circles aren’t that much better. So you used to be weak and then becoming a god with spells, now you just hit decent level instantly and then sort of plateau happens. Most strong spells have a very long cast time, so you cast them once and then get interrupted or killed by monsters running at you or you become a rooftop mage and cheese enemies. Can also cheese without positioning with some spells, like timing Ball Lightning to damage enemies while keeping them in permanent stun.
Lockpicking is a very divisive topic among the players, it’s a really nice puzzle that you need to solve to unlock something, but if you don’t invest skill points into lockpicking you might spend a lot of time on locks. I personally loved the puzzle, didn’t invest a single point and unlocked pretty much every chest, in camps I systematically went inside houses and made sure I yoink everything. And it seems pretty fair to me – increase the skill if you don’t want to spend a lot of time on the puzzle or save the points, but think on the puzzles. I can understand the criticism though, it does kinda break the pace of the game with this format of lockpicking, original game had super simplistic mini game that was very fast and barely took you away from regular gameplay. Another point is that behind some puzzle that you spend an hour solving (I had those moments early on considering getting caught, reloading etc) might be 2 pieces of cheese, 1 bottle of beer and 5 ore, so time investment and reward might be off. Then again – invest into skill and it won’t take long.
Game is still pretty brutal, especially for someone who doesn’t know what they are getting into. Have my friend currently playing through it and it’s his first encounter with Gothic, he had a really rough start and was constantly complaining about different gameplay aspects and even some visuals (probably because mad and wanted to hate on more stuff). But the more he plays, the more I see him enjoying it, so that aspect of the remake is working fine seemingly.
Tech issues and bugs are sadly present, I did encounter around 3 crashes over my pretty long playthrough, had some sound issues that were fixed later and had some bugs with NPCs getting stuck. Nothing game breaking, no soft locks, but still annoying, at least they keep patching it. Performance for me was great, but I currently have a pretty good setup, so would be really bad if I had issues with it.
Overall there are some little things, that could be better (inventory sorting is there, but it could use even more QoL improvements for example) and I do hope they will improve it for Gothic 2 Remake. Second game remake is pretty much confirmed at this point and next year we might hear or even see something about it, I really can’t wait, even though it probably will take me even longer to finish.
Can absolutely recommend the game to the OG game fans, but also to anyone new to Gothic, join the ride to enjoy the second game later and who knows maybe remaking third game will make it better (it wasn’t that bad, but worse than previous).