dailyradar.com 05/2000 01.05.2000 Gothic Interview 1 May 2000 at dailyradar.com In the Beginning Information on the upcoming 3D action-RPG Gothic has been relatively difficult for US gamers to find -- until now. The game is in development at German-based Piranha Bytes and will be published for PC in the States by Octagon Entertainment this summer. The plot is nothing too revolutionary -- players must escape from a mysterious prison world on which they have been unfairly marooned. But features such as the enemy AI and the self-governing world in which the game is set could help it to stand out from the ever-increasing multitude of competitors. Daily Radar caught up with Piranha Bytes' 3D game designer and level modeler Tom Putzki to see if Gothic can move out of the past to become a present-day powerhouse. Daily Radar: Give us an idea of the basic premise behind Gothic and its gameplay. Tom Putzki: It's a 3D fantasy setting -- from the so-called Lara Croft, third-person view -- so you can see your main character all the time, because the camera is positioned behind your character. It's an action role-playing game, so it's not as epic as games like, perhaps, Ultima and Final Fantasy. We have more action, although, of course, you've got an ongoing storyline, and that's what a role-playing game really needs. It's not like Diablo -- I don't want to say anything against Diablo as I played it for nights and nights and weekends and weekends. But I wouldn't call that a role-playing game. DR: What type of gamer are you targeting with Gothic? TP: Accessibility and ease of interface are really two of our main features. We've tried to design a game for the mainstream gamer, not only for the hardcore gamer. We've tried to appeal to the hardcore role-playing gamer with our depth of game and storyline, but we also want the casual gamer to be interested. Someone who is used to Tomb Raider or something like that. So the whole game can be played by using just 10 keys. It's a very simple keyboard-controlled user interface, but if you prefer you can play it using a gamepad. DR: Have you always wanted Gothic to be seen from the third-person point of view? Did you ever debate making it first person like so many other popular games these days? TP: We had the discussion in house of course, because several of our fellow company members love first-person games such as Quake, but one very important thing onGothic is the optical and visual feedback for everything you do in the game. This is why it is so important all the time to see your character. You get optical feedback for everything you're doing in the game, you can see the behavior of the NPCs, you can see what armor they wear, and by this you can see how strong they are, because if you're a weak guy, you can't wear a full plate armor. So, you can see it on the NPCs and they can see it on your own character. You can also see the weapons you have equipped on your character; you can see cloaks and armor and the stuff you wear. At the beginning of the game, when your skills are not trained, you're not good at all. You'll take a sword, and you'll hit with this sword like a beginner would hit with a baseball bat. Later on, when you're trained in sword fighting, and you get your combat skills and so on, you will handle the sword like a ninja or something like that. We've got different motion captures, as we're using motion capturing for animation of the characters. We got different motion captures for every skill and talent you've got in Gothic -- so sword fighting has four different skill levels, for example, and with every level, you'll see different motion captures. Your character is becoming better and better all the time, and you see how he becomes better. DR: One way you seem to have deviated from the typical RPG stereotype lies in the fact that there's no requirement for statistics or character generation. Will every Gothic gamer begin with the same character? TP: All players will start with the same character. You are thrown into the prison, and you are kind of not guilty, but you're thrown in there and so you have to live with that. Every gamer starts with the same character. Another relevant point here comes with our desire to appeal to the casual gamer -- you don't have to do anything before you start playing the game -- you just have to push one button, and then you can play. In the first two hours, players are offered a kind of living guideline. NPCs are present when the player is thrown into the prison, and they will tell you your first information to get to a certain place where there are some weak monsters, which have some weapons. You try to defeat them, and once you've got your first success and your first weapon, you're not unarmed anymore. Monsters have the AI to pick up the weapons that they find, of course, by the way, so not everything you leave on the ground will be there when you return if it gets into another creature or person's sight range. The Plot, AI, and NPCs DR: So you start off there, and you're given some information on where to pick up some weapons? TP: Yes, and first you get a very easy and simple mission, perhaps escorting someone from one camp to another camp. This is how we show the player the different camps. When he's in one camp, a resident will come to him and tell him how great this camp will be and how evil the other camp is, and so the player is beginning to learn and know about the world, about the different gangs and the different camps and the dynamics between them. DR: Is the game's plot linear or free-roaming? TP: For the player, it's both. Of course we have got one final goal, which is to escape from this prison world by breaking down the magical barrier which surrounds the prison. It's like a big circle around the prison, and to destroy this magic barrier the player has to defeat one big enemy at the end and so on and so on. But how the player comes to this enemy -- this belongs, of course, to the player. DR: Tell us about the AI of the NPCs. Will the fact that characters can have quite an involvement in the game, even when they're not directly onscreen, help to improve the quality of the gameplay? TP: Yes, of course. We developed the quality of the engine of the game, but we know that we won't be able to compare with a great big shooter engine from Epic or from id Software. We won't do that because we aren't doing a shooter. So our thinking was, "What will be the future of our game and the future of our engine? What has our engine got to be capable of?" So the AI was a very important point. We are trying to create a living world, a world which exists without the player being in it, so each of our 250 human NPCs has its own daily and nightly routine. He has his own life, so he wakes up in the morning, and he goes to work, he goes eating, he goes fighting monsters, he takes care of his comrades and friends, and he's got his own enemies and foes and so on. DR: Will NPCs remember if your character attacks them? TP: Yes, they will remember them, and they will tell their friends, of course, so if you treat someone who is a member of a gang badly, and nearly everyone in the camp is a member of that gang, then not only this guy knows it, but also his gang comrades and members know it. That means you won't have to handle just one person; you will have to handle about 20 people! DR: In that situation, a lot of people would say that it's best to be kind to everyone. Will gamers be forced to take sides at all? TP: Yes, there is a functioning social system in this prison world on which Gothicis set. Since the setting is a prison world, nearly no one in the world is nice. It's similar to the film Escape From Manhattan with Kurt Russell. The first one, of course, not the second one -- the second one was no good! So in this scenario, everyone in the prison world is trying to survive. Many of them are members of several rival gangs. The player is thrown into this prison world, which exists if the player's in it or not, so the player has to react on how the world is functioning and not the other way round, not vice-versa. That's the setting. DR: It's not purely humans that exist on Gothic's prison world setting -- what sort of monsters have you included in the game? TP: We have several different ranges of monsters. We don't want to frustrate the player from the beginning with the ultimate enemy right away or anything like that. So the player's character, first of all, needs someone to train with. Then we try to create different monsters and monsters for special occasions. We've got Swamp Shark, for example. There's one big camp that's built on old trees and wooden planks completely in the swamp. So we needed a special monster for the swamp -- it's a kind of swamp shark. You have to cross the swamp, but of course you must be very careful. All of our monsters react to certain items and incidents, so perhaps you will have to kill a nice small monster like a goblin -- we call them gobbos -- take his body, and throw it into a secluded corner of the swamp. Swamp Sharks love the meat of gobbos, so you can put them to this place, then you can run to another place and go through the swamp. Of course several different species of the monsters are battling each other, so we've got relationships involving friends and foes between the monsters. Some monsters will work together, like the small goblins, which are pretty much no threat at all to the character, but which know that they may succeed if they try to attack in groups. They have group fighting tactics, or they try to lead the player to some other big comrade such as the troll, which is about four meters high. They try to lead the player to a place where the troll lives and they work together with trolls -- the player runs after this annoying little gobbo, and when the player runs around the corner there will be a very big enemy! DR: What other kinds of puzzle have you attempted to challenge gamers with? Is there anything new or are you using the standard Tomb Raider type of puzzles? TP: We tried to make the puzzles connect with the living world, so, for example, if you've got some treasure behind a door, the puzzle will not be how to open the door -- the puzzle will be how to get perhaps a monster to open the door for you, or how to get the monster away from the door, so that you can then open it and go through it. Multiplayer and the Future DR: What characteristics will be displayed onscreen as the player progresses through the game? How have you designed the user interface? TP: First of all, the icons we're currently using are dummy icons -- the final game will look different from the screens you see now. The red ones are for your health, the blue ones are for mana or magic, the grey ones are for the other type of magic -- which is psionic powers. Psionic powers are used by one of our gangs, which is a kind of sect; they all have no hair, and they all have tattoos and very strange ambitions and so on. But they also have very cool abilities and skills and some special kinds of magic, some psionic magic which is based on willpower and enables you to control different characters -- a little bit like Shiny's great game, Messiah. You can take over other bodies if your willpower is strong enough, so even if you're physically a weak guy, then you can take your willpower over a very big fighter and kill your enemies. Of course there will be a certain time limit as to how long you can control the other character. When you run out of psionic power you will lose the ability, of course, but you can refresh your mana throughout the game. DR: Will sound effects and music be dependent upon where the player is? I'm thinking in terms of environmental sound -- will it change according to what's happening? TP: This game lends itself perfectly to that sort of sound use. For every different location and for every different time of the day, we have different tunes. We have songs for the wilderness; we have songs for the different camps and so on. The sound changes if it's day, if it's dawn, if it's night, and we have different sounds, of course, if you're in a normal situation compared to if you're in a threatening situation, or a fighting situation, with yet more special sounds for when you've defeated your enemy. DR: What multiplayer modes are you planning on including in Gothic? Will it be playable on the Internet? TP: No, not the Internet. We don't think we've got a multiplayer version in this part of the game at all. Everyone told us, "Hey, why don't you make multiplay on Internet?" But we are trying to make a very good and interesting single-player game with high AI and depth of storyline, so that it is extremely re-playable. DR: What plans do you have for the future after Gothic is completed? TP: Of course there could be a sequel to Gothic -- we've got about 100 pages of ideas written down for a sequel, so that would be no problem. But of course it does depends on how successful Gothic will be. DR: At the moment you're only developing the game for PC, is that correct? TP: This is correct, but our publisher for Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Scandinavia -- Egmont Interactive -- has its own PlayStation development team in Scandinavia. We presented Gothic to them, and Gothic is programmed and built up, so that it will be easy to convert for PlayStation2. Of course a final decision and confirmation on this depends on our publisher.