Way up there on the list of reasons Gothic is remembered as an RPG innovator is that it didn't default to lethality. In an early quest a fellow prisoner in the penal colony recruits you to help mug his enemies. It turns out to be a trap, and suddenly you're the one being attacked. After a few blows your hit points drop away and you end up prone on the ground, where they take whatever they like from your pockets. A dribble of health returns and you can get up and limp away, or start swinging and get knocked down again until you learn your lesson.
In Gothic, while beasts in the wilderness will kill and eat you given a chance, humans will happily let you live. Melee attacks default to non-lethal, and only when you've knocked someone down do you have the option to finish them off. If you do, it's a big deal. Even among the rough-and-tumble miners, renegades, and drug-addled swamp cultists of the penal colony, murder is considered a bit of a no-no.
That'll be true in the remake as well, game director Reinhard Pollice explains. "For the humans, that's definitely the case," he says, "and it's connected to a crime system. Obviously, if somebody would see that, word would get out in the whol...
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