It's been announced that Deep Silver is the new publisher for Piranha's new game! Deep Silver, also worked as co-publisher for Gothic 3, and they are willing to work with Piranha Bytes for their new game. Let's hope for the better!

 "We are very happy about this collaboration with Piranha Bytes. The team possesses a lot of experience, maintains close relations to its community, has established a successful brand within Germany and beyond its borders and captivated countless players. We\'re very excited to be able to exclusively accompany Piranha Bytes' work," Koch Media\'s Managing Director Klemens Kundratitz comments on the forthcoming cooperation with the team.

 Links:

Deep Silver

A buggy question bothers the Gothic community since Piranha Bytes and JoWood parted ways: wich of these 2 companies has the rights over the Gothic franchise ?

Piranha Bytes, trough their art director Michael Rüve, brought forth a document that says the rights over the serie belongs to JoWood and that they have no rights to work on a Gothic game anymore. Also the brand "Gothic" is owned by JoWood, so Piranha Bytes have to think of another name for their new project.

As a response to Piranha's declaration regarding the rights, JoWood offered more detailed informations about this:

* JoWooD currently holds the exclusive usage rights for the "Gothic" brand. (1)
* After the failure of the negotiations with Pluto 13 only JoWooD is allowed to produce the game Gothic 4 with another development studio and publish it worldwide.
* Pluto 13 is not authorized to develop and release a Gothic game at the present time.
* JoWooD owns the exclusive worldwide publishing right for conversions of Gothic 3 or Gothic 4 to other platforms.
* JoWooD owns the exclusive worldwide publishing rights for Gothic 4 add-ons [plural; ed.]. Pluto 13 "will receive the first option" (*) to develop the add-on [singular; ed.] for JoWooD.
* "With regard to a possible Gothic 5 Pluto 13 potentially has certain rights." (**) "But at any rate JoWooD has at least a first option right (*) and a last option right (**) to publish this game worldwide , too." (2)

Furthermore JoWooD refused to comment on the Gothic 3 add-on.

Links:

Piranha Bytes document

JoWood statement

After the separation from Piranha Bytes, JoWood announced that they look for a studio that can work on Gothic 4. They said they want a team that has high standards regarding quality and bugfree coding abilities.

They also said they want to concentrate on the future console market, so let's wait and see wether this decision regarding Gothic 4 is the best !

Piranha Bytes decided to stop the collaboration with JoWood, so they will not work on the Gothic serie no more.

The reason for this break up is that they failed to reach an agrement on how to meet the demands of the community in adding new content to Gothic 3 while simultaneously developing an AddOn or future installments of the Gothic series.

An english demo for Gothic3 is now available. You can download the 1GB file at the following sources:

Extreme Players

Strategyinformer

Gamershell

Fileshack

Fangaming

It´s important to update your DirectX installation before starting the demo or the retail version.

Link to latest DirectX from Microsoft

Link to our board

On the official publisher site from Aspyr apperead an interview with executive producer Blaine Christine. Among other infos they talk about the improved US version of Gothic3 with all patches included.

So what kind of fixes and changes are we talking about?

Developer Piranha Bytes has made many improvements since the game first shipped in Europe. Melee combat with creatures has been tweaked so that wild boars will no longer dispatch the hero with ease and go on to ravage entire villages. For the spellcasters out there, many of the spells now scale in damage in relation to the Arcane Knowledge attribute, making spells such as Fireball useful all the way to the end of the game for extended face melting pleasure. These tweaks also make it easier to focus on magic even earlier in the game. Additionally, there have been many fixes to resolve minor issues found with some of the quests and game endings to ensure that players are properly rewarded for their efforts.

Read the rest of the interview at Aspyr

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Gamespot today published the following news: 

Aspyr today announced that Gothic would be shipping to North American retailers November 13, "ensuring that it lands on store shelves by November 20." Gothic 3 picks up the series saga, putting players in control of a nameless hero once more. This time, the hero's land is overrun with Orcs and it's up to the player to decide whether to throw in with the orcish hordes, rise up against them, or find some other resolution.

The game is rated T for Teen and will retail for $39.99.

Link to GameSpot-News

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