Gothic Can anything do better than what Gothic had accomplished?

[Not.AI]

They should have just called it a spiritual sequel, not a remake. They can never hope to live up to what Gothic accomplished. Gothic was a landmark game for a different era. THQ should know this.

But there's NOTHING about Gothic's pillars of design that would be hard for a modern and competent studio to replicate... IF they were just willing to go there.
Even the technology that allowed seamless streaming of interiors and a whole world map (almost) without loading and used to be at least good now would be mundane to match.

The way a lot of these "successors" fail is by going in with the delusion that some of these cornerstones are "dated" and not appealing/user friendly enough, so shitting out abortions that have very little of the appeal of the original.

For example the "concept demo" was filled to the brim of invisible walls, arbitrary architectonic barriers you couldn't sneak below or climb above, "interactive prompts" that hardly made you interact, invulnerable NPCs you couldn't start a fight with "just because". An alarming sign that these devs just "didn't get it".

Especially when you consider that the high interactivity/reactivity and the full sense of immersion in the environment ("what you see is what you get") were defining aspects of the original.

Exactly. The invisible walls and cutscenes were the two biggest problems in that demo.

The other main problem was that "clever, apparently unintended" actions the player might do in any given circumstances seem to have been scripted out in many cases even though allowed by the raw mechanics. Instead of being "surprisingly rewarded" and more of these hidden affordances being scripted in the game than the mere mechanics would allow.

Spoiler

I would say that most studios over the last decade

(a) don't know how to have both tremendous reactivity of breadth and depth and feature film like storytelling and

(b) feel that feature film like storytelling is more prestigious ... even though most games earn and cost more money than most films these days ... those costs are spread over hundreds or thousands of artists ... over many years ... instead of a few people getting most of it ... over a few months ... which means less prestige in our "gimme now quick" culture

(c) try to make games like films, ignoring the game aspect as much as possible, linear within a shallowly reactive shell. Result being invisible walls and blocked player side creativity being commonly inserted.

Somebody might contentiously conjecture after twenty years that "The Gothic Style" design pillars are one of a few exactly optimal sets of basic SPRPG game design styles. Any variation means worse game except if it's a game having one of the few other optimal sets of pillars.

(i) I am separating story and game. (ii) I am further assuming from the player perspective that gameplay dominates story and cast of characters and lore in any overall game appreciation score. So a player can like characters and worldbuilding and story without necessarily liking a game as a game.

Has a Theory of Everything for Games already been well known for twenty years but not recognized?

 

[Lord of Riva]

your post is hard to follow, still the freeform approach of G1 was something great, could be emulated (as is proven by Archolos) and is never emulated for no apparent reason.