Xicat grabs Gothic, demo released

Third person role-playing game Gothic has been available in its native Germany for several months now, but frustratingly the rest of the world has yet to see it. An English language demo version which we were sent by developers Piranha Bytes way back in July showed that the game had a lot of promise, but there was still no sign of it being released outside of Germany. Then a few weeks ago JoWood signed a publishing deal with Germany's Phenomedia which seemed to pave the way for a Europe-wide release for the game, only for somebody to suddenly realise last week that Egmont Interactive still held the worldwide distribution rights for Gothic, even though it had been sitting on them for most of the year. It began to look as if the game would never be released overseas, although JoWood were confident that a forthcoming sequel would be published by them.

And so we are happy to announce (for the second time this month) that an international publisher has at last been found for Gothic. Step forward Xicat, who will be distributing the title in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Korea and several European territories including England, France, Italy, Benelux and Scandinavia. Fears that the wrangling amongst the various companies would further delay the overseas release have been allayed, with Xicat telling us that the current plan is to have Gothic on shelves in the UK on Friday 16th November. It's been a long time coming, but at last it looks like the wait may almost be over.

In the meantime, the English language demo of the game which we played three months ago is finally available to the public now that the publishing situation has been worked out. Weighing in at a hefty 270Mb, it features the opening section of the game and should give you a taste of what to expect come November. The demo is currently available from the following sites -

download from BonusWeb (Czech)

download from FilePlanet (USA)

download from WorldOnline (Czech)