Don't Think You Can Get Away With Murder in Gothic Remake - NPC's will Remember

Gothic earned its RPG innovator status partly by making violence non-lethal by default. An early quest has a fellow prisoner recruit you to help mug his enemies. It's a trap. After a few blows your hit points drain and you hit the ground, where they rob you. A sliver of health returns and you can either limp away or keep swinging until you get knocked down again.

In Gothic, wilderness beasts will kill and eat you. Humans won't. Melee attacks default to non-lethal damage, and only after you've downed someone can you finish them off. If you do, it matters. Even among the miners, renegades, and swamp cultists of the penal colony, murder crosses a line.

The remake works the same way, game director Reinhard Pollice explains. "For the humans, that's definitely the case," he says, "and it's connected to a crime system. Obviously, if somebody would see that, word would get out in the whole faction—that you're kind of a rude guy who is attacking people. And then at some point, people won't talk to you."

You can restore your status like in the original, but the damage is done. It's a whole world of Clementines, and they will remember that. Especially if you started it. "If you knock them down, you can steal stuff from them," Pollice says, "but that will always be marked as a stolen item because it's not yours. In order to have a good relationship with that guy you knocked down, you might have to return it."

Animals don't participate in the crime system—no Skyrim chickens snitching to guards—but they have behaviors. The remake expands on the original's aggro-and-kiting mechanics by letting you use food to manipulate wolves, molerats, and other creatures.

"I can place food as a bait," says Pollice, "and then they would obviously go for the piece of meat. Through that, I can involve them in a situation where they would fight against other creatures. Not every creature fights against everyone, there's a kind of relationship system and also on top of that, the prey-and-predator system."

Don't expect to take down a harpy with an army of meatbugs. Still, Gothic Remake continues the tradition of letting you solve problems creatively.

"I think Gothic is an immersive RPG," Pollice says, "so every feature leads to offering a type of immersion that you would probably not get that same way in any other type of RPG. There's features that give you the possibility to solve situations in a different way."

Gothic Remake is also committed to the original's immersive world, to the point of not having a minimap. Exactly the kind of detail old heads will appreciate when Gothic Remake arrives on June 5, via Steam and GOG.