The last release of a Gothic game lies a few years in the past but the game still has a lively community to offer nonetheless. The arguably biggest community is domiciled at the worldofgothic.de forum. Countless of our developers take part in the lively discussion with the fans of our project there. With all that posts, there are some interesting pieces of information to be found. We know that not everybody has the time and the motivation to read through multiple pages of posts per week so we’ll post a summary here at irregular intervals. Those of you who want to join the discussion themselves, ask the team a question or just want to read the whole thing find the current thread here.
Will the CSP link Gothic and Risen?
TrueCore: No we won’t link Gothic and Risen. There isn’t one real reason to do this. For the CSP the Gothic series ends with Gothic 3 and we won’t consider Forsaken Gods, Arcania or Risen.
Jünger des Xardas: *of course this doesn’t count for eventual Easter eggs and allusions.
How many people are working on the CSP at the moment?
TrueCore: It’s tough to say. The activity of the individual members is in a constant state of small fluctuations. Everybody delivers as much as his or her available time allows. Currently the developer’s forum has 33 members, but some of them are honorary members or members that are no longer active but continue to have access to the forum for various reasons. I would estimate that approximately 15 to 20 of them play an active part in the development. Additionally there’s out PR & web team that has an own forum and about 8 members. The lion’s share of this team is made of designers and web developers from around the world, e.g. Australia and Italy.
Will there be long dialogs demoting the player to a mere observer?
Jünger des Xardas: Naturally we try to pay attention to tolerable dimensions of our dialogs. Whether we’ll succeed in the end, that’s of course a totally different question. But you can rest assured it’s something we have in mind. It’s very uncommon that a document is processed through our quality assurance without the one or the other dialog being split up.
In general the dialogs will be a little bit longer than in the original game but we take care that the hero doesn’t talk on and on without you having to make a choice what to say in between.
Will there be some remains of the big battles in the game world? Or will there even be big battles?
Jünger des Xardas: Most of the big battles happened some time ago. The only place coming to mind that would make sense in Vengard. This would be a nice idea for sure and we have thought about it already, but you would have to place every single skeleton and every single rusty sword there one by one by hand. This would be an immense effort.
Battles like the one in the mine or the one about the keep in Gothic 2 will be in the game. For some tortured and hung orcs there are simply no meshes, so this won’t be happening. But fear not, in our game there will be less black and white painting than in any other PB game. So don’t worry the rebels will get what is coming to them.
How many chapters are finished yet? And how many will be in the final game 4 or 6?
TrueCore: The work isn’t done chapter by chapter so you can’t say “X chapters are finished”.
Jünger des Xardas: In fact there will be 6 chapters. But as TrueCore already mentioned we don’t work chronological. The first three chapters are already playable but have some issues to be dealt with. Also some things for the last three chapters are already finished. All in all you can’t really rate all this if you haven’t deep insights into the actual work being done.
I’d like to play Gothic 3 again. Should I play the original version now or wait for the release of the CSP?
Jünger des Xardas: That’s up to you but you will surely have some time to decide.
Are you changing the distribution of the music in the world?
Jünger des Xardas: In some cases we’ll change the distribution of the music and some music zones might be added. In the big picture we won’t change much. We will definitely not just glue some different tracks together, that wouldn’t sound right.
Will the CSP change the combat system and add new animations?
Robespier: I’m sorry to disappoint you but the CSP will not add new animations to the game. The combat system will be the same as used in the last Community Patch 1.75.14.
TrueCore: You’re right that the combat system in Gothic 3 is horrible and if there was any possibility to enhance it we would do it. Problem is: this possibility doesn’t exist. For starters we don’t have access to the code and although it has been some years it’s still not possible in Gothic 3 modding to add new animations. But even if it would be possible, we wouldn’t have the resources to do it. The motion capturing alone couldn’t be financed. So all in all I wouldn’t expect positive changes to the combat system. Maybe someday someone is able to change small parts of it but the feeling as such will most likely not change.