The people’s choice, indeed.

Well, 43,111 people participated in a little extensive survey THQ was taking and the verdict is in: We’re getting a Gothic remake at some point, just not this year. PC and next-gen consoles are the targets here, so it seems at least the game will have a very similar visual fidelity across anything it’s eventually released on.

If you have Google Drive, you can see and download the results of the survey here in PDF form (it’s a whopping 21 pages):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uNuvngHrTZ3AVpNEdoXS-E8rKlwVdhlX/view

Here’s the press release as well, below the jump.

After unambiguous feedback, THQ Nordic will head into full production on the Gothic Remake
Next step is to set up a Barcelona based studio and head into main production

Barcelona, Spain / Vienna, Austria, February 19th, 2020: Just a little over two months after releasing a playable teaser for the Gothic Remake and asking the players for their feedback, the answer is clear: The fans are up for a new “old” Gothic game and the vast majority (read: 94.8%) was in favor to develop a remake of the iconic German RPG Gothic, originally released in 2001.

Over 180,000 players have played the playable teaser so far. On the evening (CET) of February 16 2020, THQ Nordic took the survey offline, and hereby publicly releases the raw data of the survey, as well as highlight graphs. With more than 43,000 answered surveys and over 9,000 (yes, really!) reviews on Steam and various discussions on all social media platforms, there is enough data to check.

Eager to check for yourself? As we want to start a transparent and open production with the community from the very start of the project, we are happy to offer you the results of our survey in a neat PDF file or – for the people who really want to dig into the raw data – the entire dataset with all 43,111 participants included.

Next Steps for the Gothic Remake

THQ Nordic will establish a new studio based in Barcelona, Spain, and will then assess what players liked and what they want to be different than in the playable teaser. One of the most common mentions was for example the demand for a grittier and less colorful world.

Here is an example of how this could be tweaked:

“We are up for the challenge to develop a full Gothic Remake which will stay as faithfully as possible to the original experience and transport the atmospheric world of Gothic into a high quality look and carefully modernizing certain gameplay mechanics.” says Reinhard Pollice Business and Product Development Director at THQ Nordic.

The full Gothic Remake will go into production and will be developed for PC and next gen consoles. There is no release window available yet, but it will not be coming in 2020.

We’ll see how development goes, but over 94% is a great number to start things off. I’m a development fiend of sorts, as in I like to see the process and results of hard work pay off, so I’m crossing my fingers that the dev team here manages to keep the spirit of the original game intact while opening up their game to as many players as possible, even the skeptics out there. The great thing to me is warts and all, that teaser was the right way to go as the resulting feedback shows there’s both high interest as well as a bit of needed hesitation as you scour the results.

So, the waiting begins anew as the game will need quite a bit of time to fully redo some aspects. It will no doubt be a while before this surfaces again, but based on what I’ve read in looking over the feedback, the new old game might surprise some of the skeptics. As usual, we shall see.

-GW