Gothic

aka: Gothic Classic, Gotika, Orpheus
Moby ID: 3785
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

With the orc hordes invading, the king needs a lot of magical ore to create enough weapons for his army. All the criminals are now sentenced to work in the ore mines till the end of their days. To prevent them from escaping, the king has a group of powerful wizards create a magical, impassable barrier. But the barrier grows out of control, capturing a large chunk of terrain within itself, and the wizards become imprisoned inside. In the confusion that follows, the prisoners kill the guards and take over the whole area within the barrier.

Many years later, the prisoner community has been divided into three camps: the Old Camp, where miners dig up ore and sell it to the king in exchange for goods from the outer world; the New Camp, where anarchy rules, and where the miners dig up ore in hope of blowing up the barrier with its magical power; and the Brotherhood, whose members worship a mysterious god called the Sleeper, hoping that he will release them. A new convict has been recently dropped into the prison, trying to find his place within the community, and knowing nothing about the pivotal role he will soon play in earth-shaking events.

Gothic is a third-person perspective 3D action role-playing game. The game is set within the Colony, the large area of land within the barrier. The player is free to explore most of the Colony from the beginning, though it may prove difficult, as the protagonist is initially very weak and most wildlife can kill him with one attack. Combat with melee weapons requires the player to input combinations of keys to execute various types of attack.

The player character must train to increase his attributes - Strength, Dexterity and Mana. As he vanquishes creatures and completes quests, he receives experience; with enough experience, he will gain a level, which not only increases his number of hit points (and thus lengthens his lifespan), but also gives him skill points. If the hero meets someone who is eager to teach him, the player will be able to spend skill points to increase attributes or learn completely new skills.

Skills include: the increasing ability to fight with various types of weapons; the ability to pick pockets and locks; and the ability to jump further and sneak. The protagonist can also learn to harvest furs, claws and other things from the animals he kills, and then sell them for money. Collecting plants and getting meat from defeated creatures can be very useful, since eating food heals the main character, or restores mana lost when casting spells. The game features a day and night cycle, character schedules, and interactivity with the game world: for example, the player can find a pan or a stove and roast raw meet to raise its healing qualities.

The player can choose to join any of the three camps, which influences most of the quests in the first part of the game. By focusing on particular skill sets, the player can turn the main character into a specialized melee fighter, archer, or mage. However, it is also possible to learn skills belonging to other classes at any time. Even if the player doesn't want the protagonist to learn mage skills, he can still find or buy scrolls and runes which allow the hero to cast various magic spells, e.g. toss fireballs at the enemies, teleport, turn himself into other creatures, and many more.

Spellings

  • Готика - Russian spelling
  • 哥特帝国 - Chinese spelling (simplified)
  • 救世英豪 - Chinese spelling (traditional)

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Credits (Windows version)

115 People (113 developers, 2 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 81% (based on 34 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 150 ratings with 8 reviews)

My best RPG experience so far

The Good
I am a natural strategy games lover and to me RPG games come in a second term as well as other genres.

Anyway, you cannot play strategy for ages, sometimes comes the need for a change so I discovered this title and decided to try it… Man I get lucky, what a great game, the best RPG I played since “Legends of Valor” (a today unknown oldie RPG). Let’s see…

1) The storyline: Designed with great dedication by the creators and as a player, I appreciate that. As you discover the way the story develops, you want to keep playing more and more and start being afraid that the time when you finish the game will come.

2) The world: You play it, as you wish, no limits, while you play the different quests you can stop whenever you want to explore or even start more non-related quests.

3) The creatures: Well, I can’t describe them since it will take to much space but I can say that the variety and characteristics of each of them are well developed and since you can use spells to turn into a creature and use their faculties you will need to learn about them, not just kill them.

4) The Guilds: The player can join one of three camps (The Old Camp, The New Camp or The Swamp Camp) and in order to succeed he must pass a series of quests that eventually will help to reach better ranks on each Guild. Be aware that once you get the admission to a camp, you can’t join the other ones.

5) The Interface: Perfect, intuitive, marvelous. Once you get used to it you will miss it when playing other RPG games.

6) The Fight and Movement System: Outstanding, another big point, very intuitive and very realistic, it take some time to get used as well.

7) The NPCs: Each one with his own personality and behavior, you will learn about them and feel identification with them. Even the tutors and merchants are well developed.

8) The Inventory: Maybe unreal but there is not limit on weight, in my opinion that’s good. The inventory is divided into 7 categories (Weapons, Armor, Potions, Spells, Writings, Food, Miscellaneous) helping a lot on the items management and usage.

9) At last, The Quests: There are not stupid quests on this game and as consequence each one have a smart solution, sometimes you feel that it is impossible to get a quest solved but by smart think you always can take the correct steps. Sometimes you will need to talk to an specific NPC character or use a specific spell to beat a creature but the point is that isn’t just as other games where you guess and get lucky or unlucky, in this game if you think, you always find the solution.

The Bad
1) There is not autosave or quicksave, therefore you have to remember to save every 10 mins if you don’t want to replay the game or if u get killed or made a mistake.

2) Minor bugs, most related to 3D Graphics System that eventually will lead to some crashing, but not a great deal.

3) Bad programming on the NPCs fighting movement, sometimes a player can exploit this to kill stronger enemies. Anyway, this fact doesn’t affect the overall game experience.

4) It took to me 50 hours to reach the end, I am not used to many rpgs as I said before but I think that it was short.

The Bottom Line
Is hard to me to express how much I like this game, I will not recommend it, I will just ask for… Please, play it and have fun. In the while, I am starting to look ahead for Gothic 2.

Windows · by Cabeza2000 (689) · 2004

A well-executed RPG with a great atmosphere

The Good
I was really surprised with how great this RPG is considering the mix of grumbling and merely moderate praise I'd heard from a number of people. The plot is compelling, and together with the setting creates a great atmosphere. The dialog is well-written (not too goofy or hammy), and the translation is the best of any non-English language game I've played. The mix of open-world level design and NPC schedules really brings the world alive. The graphics were sufficient for my tastes; once I had been playing enough to be sufficiently immersed in the game it never occurred to me that they were somehow dated.

Some of the specific complaints I had heard were regarding the game's combat and keyboard controls. Personally, I think the controls are the best in the series once you hook up a gamepad using a keyboard emulator such as JoyToKey. In comparison, the mouse controls in Gothic III (which admittedly I've only played a little of) seem a lot more cumbersome.

The plot goes something like this: You start out as a convict in a penal colony that has been sealed off from the outside world by a magical barrier. Trapped along with you are some of the mages who initially set up the barrier. Your goal in the game is to, together with one of the several factions you can join, assist the mages in bringing down the barrier and in the process (ostensibly) also regain your freedom. Along the way are some surprises including a dark (but not evil) mage, and a truly evil power vying for control over the world.

The Bad
One thing that disappointed me about this game is how linear it becomes toward the end. At this point you are no longer working for the factions you tried so hard initially to join. Instead, you are working for a sort of free agent with his own set of parallel interests. Faction standing no longer matters much and the main quest becomes a series of tasks to be completed in a fixed, linear order. Nevertheless, there's enough variety and new things happening to keep you playing onward to completion.

The Bottom Line
Definitely not a game to miss, and one of the best RPGs of the 2000s. With everything having been patched up by the community and its meager system requirements, there's no reason not to go out and play this game right now.

Windows · by SharkD (425) · 2010

A good RPG, worth the twenty dollar purchase.

The Good
Well, while I don't share some people's enthusiasm for the game, I enjoyed it. The game itself was fun. I think the plot and storyline was well thought out, and I enjoyed how your reputation proceeded you whenever you met someone new. The NPCs' reactions to your character, while sometimes utterly redundant, were a fairly good spice to throw into the mixture. I like the freedom aspect, and how your character can own and defend his own property.

The Bad
While I'm sure that this will be remedied in Gothic 2, I didn't like how you couldn't create your own character. A couple of cheats to change your character's voice pitch, and a fairly vast selection of weapons and armor were the only ways to customize him. I wasn't too impressed with the graphics, because they were a bit choppy. I have a 1.6 GHz Pentium 4, 256 MB of SDRAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce 2 Card, so I know that it wasn't my computer. In any case, the controls were a little tough to learn, but once you get used to them, they're not bad. Besides all that, the game itself is pretty good, though it's tough to level up and become more powerful, not to mention the time I had scoring money to buy new equipment.

The Bottom Line
I like this game. I realize I had more bad than good to say about it, but I really don't think it's a bad game. I would say it is definitely worth the twenty dollar purchase, and I don't think anyone will be disappointed when they play it. It does almost exactly what you would expect from a game of its genre.

Windows · by Aaron Jones (14) · 2003

[ View all 8 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
German title? SharkD (425) Jan 9, 2009

Trivia

Comic book

A comic book based on the game's lore was published in 2000, prior to the game's release. Titled simply Gothic, it depicts events in the prison colony shortly before the game protagonist's arrival. The comic is written by Thorsten Felden.

Development

Gothic was developed without an option for mouse control -- everything was keyboard-only. When editors of gaming mags were shown an early build, they complained about the cumbersome handling and sluggish controls. So the developer, Piranha Bytes, put in mouse control -- in the last month before going gold

Multiplayer

A multiplayer mode was in the works, but was cancelled in June 2000. The net code was already finished, but other problems (for example balanced quest rewards) were too big.

Music

In the beginning of chapter 2, the band In Extremo (a German band that mixes medieval music with elements of rock) gives a virtual performance in the old camp. Due to licensing issues, the performance is cut in some non-German versions and re-releases.

References

In the swamp camp the player can meet an insane NPC named "Baal Netbek". He is named and modelled after Joachim Nettelbeck who was a reviewer for the German magazine PC Player at the time. He even lent his voice to the character.

Version differences

The German and the US-American versions of Gothic are both censored but they are censored in different ways: In the German version there's less blood and in the US-American version there's no nudity.

Awards

  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 02/2002 - Best RPG in 2001
    • Issue 02/2002 - Best Game World in 2001

Information also contributed by Kaliban, Monkeyhead, Mobygamesisreanimated, JudgeDeadd, and Patrick Bregger

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Related Games

Gothic II
Released 2002 on Windows
Gothic 3
Released 2006 on Windows
Gothic II: Gold Edition
Released 2004 on Windows, 2023 on Nintendo Switch
Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods
Released 2008 on Windows
ArcaniA: Gothic 4
Released 2010 on Windows, Xbox 360
ArcaniA: Gothic 4 (Collector's Edition)
Released 2010 on Windows, Xbox 360
Gothic II: Night of the Raven
Released 2003 on Windows
Gothic Universe
Released 2007 on Windows
Gothic: Collector's Edition
Released 2005 on Windows

Related Sites +

  • Gothic I - Español
    This Language Pack is based on the Spanish Gothic I release by Egmont Interactive (1.08j). It contains the menu scripts, game scripts, subtitles, fonts, and three videos in Spanish.
  • Gothic@RPGDot
    Comprehensive Gothic Site for Gothic 1 and 2 including news, commentaries, designer diaries, screenshots and forums

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 3785
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Alexander Schaefer.

Nintendo Switch added by Plok.

Additional contributors: Kaliban, Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, Havoc Crow, Nico Bendlin, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, Plok, Evolyzer.

Game added April 13, 2001. Last modified March 26, 2024.