Instead, we get Witcher 3 (not entirely terrible, but not scratching the Gothic itch either), and all those mostly soul-less Ubisoft-style open world rpgs.
That's a silly way of thinking. Of course a pre-Steam game won't have many Steam reviews. Hell, were it not for Archolos, I wouldn't have even known that it was on Steam at all. Aside from that, few people replay single player games after finishing them, even if they liked them. I remember liking Witcher 1 for example, yet I don't intend to ever play it again - why would I? I've already beaten it.
Risen 3 has the best joke of all PB games, though it's more of a performative joke rather than part of conversation.
I tried to play the Risen trilogy straight through. I like the first Risen and I can tolerate the 2nd one. PB chose to GASLIGHT their fans with prerelease "Gothic-like" screenshots and indicated that Risen 3 would be a return to form and move away from the pirate crap. Then, it was all pirate crap. They lied to get money from fans who PB mentally and emotionally abused and manipulated. I almost wrote them off for that, alone. Seeing small-boob Patty in Risen 1 and then the boulder-like fun bags on her in Risen 3, it ruined the suspension-of-disbelief for a game which was already ruined. I made it to the final act and just couldn't finish it. Elex was neat and can almost be forgiven because it was the first game in a new "trilogy," and they were trying different things. However, there is NO excuse for the steaming pile of digital crap that is Elex 2. Bjorn and Jenny can go straight to hell.
Eh, in Demonicon you could bang your booby sister regardless.
Risen 3: Tittys oh Lawds
Interestingly enough I think Spider is the one studio that mostly unconsciously ate a chunk of that Gothic pie. I have only really played Steelrising and Bound by Flame but even from those two their games feel very Gothic-like. They are not as focused on the small details or simulation aspects but they do have that strong sense of world building and design sensibility that the old Gothics had.
Spiders makes unapologetic KOTOR derivatives, they're not very "Gothic-like" with exception to the amount of tedious late-game backtracking.
Isn't Steel Rising a souls like?
I wouldn't.
This is a ridiculous claim - Archolos is a mod for a game that predates steam by several years, many of us installed it over our original CD version of the game. Plenty more I'm sure pirated it or used the GOG version. On Archolos's release their hosting for the non-steam mod installation files went down almost immediately because they had several hundred thousand more downloads than they were expecting. Even with all that, apparently 70-75% of their downloads were from Poland. So despite being one of the biggest and most successful mods ever made, being kurwa still seems to have hampered it a bit and limited its global appeal. If the mod had been fully designed and acted in English, German or Russian (the first because it's simply a bigger language with more reach, the latter two because those countries have bigger populations of gothic fans specifically) then presumably it could've done even better. There really is no upward limit for how well a competently-made open-world fantasy RPG could do - it's something people desperately want, and no one seems to be able to fucking make.
