Demo Review: Gothic

I stumbled across this demo by a German developer. Until seeing this demo I had never heard of this game, this is unusual because I do this for a living (by this I mean writing about games etc.) and I am usually on top of all of the upcoming new games. I had never even heard of the developer, Piranha Bytes. Given that we come to the demo of Gothic.

Gothic is a role-playing game, a genre that doesn’t really excite me, my bias is out there. The first thing to note is that the demo is huge, monstrous in fact. It clocks in at nearly 250 megabytes, so that even with DSL it took a while to grab this puppy – never again shall I go back to dial-up Internet service! If at all possible switch, you’ll thank me. So the 250 meg download might scare off a few people, be afraid because this game requires a monster system to run. The Readme goes as follows: 128 MB RAM, 16 MB Video Card, Pentium 400 (and compatible), 1 GB Hard Disk space. Someone was smoking something when they dreamt up those specs! I have a PIII system, 256 MB RAM and a 64-MB video card and I had problems. The game played like a slide show and was more unstable than old man with Parkinson’s disease on a high wire!

What was Piranha Bytes thinking? They are releasing what I consider an alpha level game on an unsuspecting public that is expecting a fully playable game! The fact is the game is almost unplayable and needs much more time in beta before releasing a demo.

If you are surfing the net and come across this demo and think it looks interesting, think again. Gothic is not ready for prime time. I could spend some time talking about the game, it’s graphics and story. I will say this about the graphics; they are OK but appear to be about 2 years. Graphics like that should not require a 64-MB video card. Even the recently released Max Payne and its entire visual splendor doesn’t require such a video card.

Stay away from Gothic until a 2nd demo is released. It should be optimized for better performance on most systems and should be at least a late beta rather than an alpha release. Be afraid of Gothic, be very afraid!

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