Interview mit Kevaad Abdool - Produzent von Gothic 3: Götterdämmerung

PC Games: When did you start working on this project?\

Abdool: We actually began doing preproduction before the official starting date for the project. Many of us here had heard of the Gothic series and played the games but there was still a substantial amount of research required. The official starting date was February 2008.

PC Games: Why, do you think, have you been entrusted with G3 instead of a German/Austrian developer?

Abdool: Gothic is a very established franchise. It has very clear boundaries on what additions the series will adapt well to. We have spent a lot of time doing research on fan sites and forums, also with JoWooD, discussing Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods. In the end we all had a clear vision of what was expecting and our studio has the means of providing it. Despite being in India, we guys have had a lot of experience prior with working at companies such as EA, 2K Sports, Microsoft etc. and we have a big multicultural staff from many countries such as USA, UK, Germany, Russia, Romania , France, Italy, Japan etc.

PC Games: What projects/games have you produced in the past?

Abdool: We have produced India's most anticipated game "Streets of Mumbai”. We are also currently working on 3 unannounced next-gen projects for International Publishers using the top technology such as Unreal Engine 3 for XBOX360 and PS3. The team has experience working at many EA, Take-Two franchises.

PC Games: How much freedom do you have during development? Are you 'in charge' or are you programming based on concepts from the Germany and Austria?

Abdool: Well literally, we've had full freedom over the game. But we understand that Gothic is an established franchise and fans have clear expectations for what they want to see in the game. As mentioned before we spent a lot of time early on in the project defining our goals and setting our boundaries. It was very important to match the style which the franchise has already established. We have worked day and night with German writers and producers to ensure that the Gothic fans get what they want.

PC Games: Are you in contact with the original development team of Gothic 3?

Abdool: We were never in direct contact with the original Gothic 3 team but we did receive all of the documentation that was created for the project. Essentially the most difficult phase of production was the beginning. There wasn't a lot of documentation on the programming and as you can imagine the program is fairly large and complex. It's a steep learning curve when you first start out, but once our technical minds understood the system it was easy for us to make changes.

PC Games: Did you know the Gothic series before you started working on this project?

Abdool: I played a lot of Gothic 2 and 3 before this project. It was very exciting for to have the opportunity to created the changes which I envisioned while playing Gothic 3. Even before the project started I had many thing in my mind which I wanted to upgrade. Once the project began, well a little before, I spent a lot of time reading through Gothic message boards and fans to get an idea of what everyone else had in mind. I'm happy to say that most of the ideas I had other people also agreed, so I think people will be very happy with the changes we have made.

PC Games: What changes to the code and art did you have do make?

Abdool: Gothic 3 was a great game, but it had the potentially to be much more. Unfortunately it had technical issues which hindered its performance. Several patches were released to help fix its various problems, but many of these lie deep within the foundations of the game. We spent a lot of time making improvements to the engine code trying to squeeze as much performance as we could. We have also done some work on the character creation process. We extended the artificial intelligence system to take into account more variables. This gave us more control over how we want characters to behave.

The visual quality of Gothic 3 was very good for its time, but we want to give fans the opportunity to experience Gothic with modern day graphics. This extended to both art and code changes, the two go hand in hand. Our graphic programmer worked on improving and extending all of the existing effect in the game, along with some new additions. The game now features 64bit High Dynamic Range Lighting (HDR) with bloom, Volumetric Fog, Heat Haze, specular lighting with fresnel approximation, global rim lighting, parameterized rim lighting and sub surface scattering for realistic skin rendering. We have also added fallback shaders for our effect so even on low end machine you should see a graphical improvements. We also implement an improved character creation system on the back end to take advantage of the new technologies we added. We ran all of the existing characters through this process and all of the new ones.

PC Games: Are you responsible for bug fixing/QA as well?

Abdool: We do have an in-house testing team here. They stay up-to-date with the builds the programmers are creating to try and spot any major issue from progressing to future builds. JoWooD also provided a large testing team. We worked very closely with this team and the producers at JoWood to evaluate the gameplay, story, characters, missions/quests, and of course any functionality issues which were encountered. This product has also been the top priority for JoWooD as well and they have spent a lot of money and time in working with us and making it the best possible G3 AO.

PC Games: Many fans are asking themselves: How do you scale down the game world? I mean: Are there fences or walls in front of the desert now? Or any new natural barriers like rocks or trees?

Abdool: Yes, the barriers are made up mostly of netuar elements. These were added seemless and the game world still maintains a realistic visual quality.

PC Games: Besides new quests and an expanded storyline - what are the key features of the game?

Abdool: As I mentioned before we spent a lot of time evaluating what people wanted. The key features in expansion are: new characters, new weapons, upgraded combat system, new graphics effect ( as I mentioned earlier), and upgraded performance. We did spend some time adding some new quest types to reduce the monotonous feeling you get when playing Gothic 3. We have also added some new abilities to create more options in developing your character. We have added some very intricate systems for calculating damage, stamina, and health losses while in combat. These primarily use character and weapon attributes as inputs, so now players can evolve a character in a way which suits his playing style. And with all our graphical improvements and new story and quest elements you get to experience all this in a great looking game.