Why is the Gothic franchise so popular amongst polish players?

[Ivci99]

I had been asking myself that same question since I started playing Gothic back in 2007, since I remember watching so many polish Gothic machinimas and not understanding a thing :P
I always thought It would be more popular amongst german players, since it is a german game after all.

Just a random question....had nothing better to do

[[AK] GaroK]

Polish Gothicpedia is also extremely detailed, being one of the most detailed polish wikis. We started (actually already done) doing articles on objects like roadsigns, which became a running joke on the wiki.

I guess it's a mixture things:

• Good dubbing.
  
• Widely distributed at a cheap price.
  
• Not that hard to run even back then.
  
• Not THAT hard to mod.
  
• Very flexible cheat mode which allows you to do A LOT, which spawned a lot of machinimas and funny videos, which snowballed into more popularity and even more videos, going strong to this day.
  
• The game is damn good even today.

There's even a joke that Gothic is a polish game (because it is).

[Conkwer]

Originally posted by Ivci99:

Why is the Gothic franchise so popular amongst polish players? I had been asking myself that same question since I started playing Gothic back in 2007

Hey, I live near the Poland and Gothic was one of the most popular game here too. Almost every friend played it back then. And every local journalist priced this game as "best of the best of the best" and compared every game with Gothic..

Thus, Gothic is popular not only among Polish players and not only this game specifically, I believe. This type of "action medieval fantasy" games are always popular in Germany, Poland, France, Russia and smaller countries nearby.. See Mount&Blade, Divinity, Pathfinder, NWN, Darkstone, etc. This games was popular enough too.

Diccuric (mod for Gothic1) was even officially translated and released as a game in ex-USSR.
Who are the authors of SystemPack, Union, Gothic 2: Returning? It's hard to tell nowadays, but they definitely can speak Russian.

When someone is mentioned Polish version of the game, "Mroczne Tajemnice" mod will come to mind, at the first place. Also, polish voiceover of Gothic1 is unexpectedly good.. Much better then the English one.
A good translation is a good reason to play this game and one of the reasons for its popularity, maybe.

Another reason that Gothic is popular because PC is the main gaming platform in this countries, I believe. This has historically happened.

[[AK] GaroK]

Originally posted by Conkwer:

Diccuric (mod for Gothic1) was even officially translated and released as a game here.
Who are the authors of SystemPack, Union, Gothic 2: Returning? It's hard to tell nowadays, but they definitely can speak Russian.

That's russia though, not poland.

[Conkwer]

Originally posted by GaroK:

That's russia though, not poland.

Yep. I mean, Poland is not special here. The game was extremely popular in other Eastern Europe countries as well. Maybe even more popular, then in Poland, who knows. Since most of the most important mods are in Russian (Returning, SystemPack, etc) and German (Odyssee, etc), aren't they? At least, until translated.

So it's only natural for me, that Gothic franchise is popular in Poland too. Not surprising at all..
There is an opinion that Poles hate "Russians", but they not that so different when its comes to gaming.

Also, if Gothic got a remake for Xbox 360 at the time, with proper gamepad support, then who knows.. maybe then the game would have been popular in USA as well.

But, without a doubt, Polish players love Gothic machinimas the most.
Most of them are humorous, as far as I remember.

[Aluvian Darkstar]

In a nutshell, it's more about disks distribution back in a day, plus dubbing. English dub is simply awful compared to original German, Poland and Russian.
Also, video game markets were not as abundant in Eastern Europe as in West. In Russia for example 90% of market belonged to pirates, very few select titles from abroad were officially localized. Since us Russians are mostly not proficient in foreign languages, it was a struggle to get a game with proper translations. Gothic series were ones of those localized titles, by several companies no less. So of course it became popular

[andrey.dragin]

The polish are great. They have the best Gothic wiki

[Ultaan aka REEJ]

Nobody really knows, but here's my 'but':

- The dubbing was done very well.
- The theme, locations, characters, and the general atmosphere felt very natural and kind of 'from around here'.
- Lastly, I remember that Gothic 1 eventually came out on CD's bundled to some gaming magazine, which made it VERY affordable and pretty much every gamer in the country had a copy at one point or another.

[Limulus]

When that game was released most of the games were published in Poland with big delay (year or so after worldwide release) and without polish dubbing or even localization. This was one of the first games that had full and professional dubbing. Btw there were local market with localizations made by amatours that were sold on marketplaces here. It was made mostly by russian guys and it was hilarious.
Also this game could be bought on CD added to some gaming press so pretty fast it was cheap and affordable (polish minimal wage during that times was about 200 euros/month).

[Andergast]

The developer Studio of Gothic were based in the steal and coal industry based Ruhr area in Germany. In the late 19th century a massiv immigration of polish workers took place there. Still nowadays a lot of people have polish based surnames. Maybe there was a lot of eastern european influence of the mentality of the people, so that people from eastern europe can very well get along with the atmosphere of the game and the mentality of the gothic charcters.