My name is Jochen Hamma, I'm the Producer of Gothic 4 - Genesis at Spellbound. My career in the games industry started 18 years ago, after 5 years in the car manufacturer supplier's industry. Since 1989 I'm mostly working on RPG-Games (approximately 10-15 of them). I started in Quality Assurance, moving over to storyboarding, design, some programming and finally project management and producing. Today my biggest personal interests are Game and Interface Design - within projects, mostly I'm hired to oversee production and project management. My personal entry to the RPG and Fantasy genre were Pen & Paper Games (started to play in 1984) and Tolkien's Fantasy Novels.

Spellbound was established in 1994 by Armin Gessert - a few months later, Jean-Marc Haessig joined the company. Both are still here and serve as CEO and Creative Director of Spellbound. In 1995 the company has started to cooperate with another developer (attic Entertainment Software GmbH) - working on an RPG game called Realms of Arkania - Shadows over Riva. At that time, I had been producer of the title at attic and that's how Armin and I met the first time. After Shadows over Riva, Spellbound has been involved in the creation of around 20 titles in a variety of different genres (RPG, Action, Strategy, Tactics, and Simulation). The most well known probably are Airline Tycoon, Robin Hood and their old western games like the Desperados series or it's most recent project Helldorado.

JoWooD were looking for a team from continental Europe, preferably Germany. I think they were as well looking for a team with both RPG experience and proven expertise on platforms other than PC. In my opinion, these issues combined with an experienced, internationally stuffed development team, helped to close the deal for both parties. To really get the decisive factors, you would have to ask JoWooD.

For sure, I did enjoy the Gothic series a lot. I have played all three of them - and many of my team mates have as well. The music and aesthetics of G3 are clearly the best in the series so far - from the story and dialogue side, I'd personally prefer G2 as a reference. As for the fight system and for the interface - the three games had different advantages / disadvantages. In a nutshell: we aim for changes within the fight system and some changes in the interface area. As for the visuals, acoustics and story elements, the prequels can be considered very good blueprints - but need to be improved as we want to be competitive at the point of release and I think the market is to change a lot in the next years.

We are happy to working based on the most successful German RPG universe arising from digital media. If you work based on a universe established by another team - you have to be aware of the effort, love and dedication given to create this universe. The Gothic Universe will be treated with a lot of respect by Spellbound. We plan to take all actions possible to keeping the story, the setting and all the other aspects of Gothic 4 consistent with the universe as much as possible.

As for RPG-Experience: People from the team at Spellbound or me have been involved in the creation of many RPGs (around 15 as far as I know). You may have heard of the Realms of Arkania series - myself being involved. It sold several million units and was able to collect a variety of awards. So if you look both at the numbers of games we were involved in as well as into critical acclaims collected - the team does bring some credit to the table.

We are creating the story line at the moment but we want to stay very close to the story of the Gothic games so far. As for the geographical setting, our design is ready. We aim to addressing the main requests of the community - asking for dungeons, a bigger city while maintaining the typical Gothic style of big landscape areas.

We have not yet made any announcements. We will however not write our own engine technology - and rather use proven middleware technology (Unreal, Gamebryo, Trinigy). I'm sure our final decision will be announced in the next months to come.

To us, gameplay is the most important thing. As both story and atmosphere support the mid and long term motivation of the player they are incredibly important to the success of the Gothic series. However in my opinion - without the very cool look and the benchmarks set by the music scores in Gothic - the overall success would not have been possible.

In regard of the weak points - probably every player has his very own opinion. Personally I'd agree with both the press and the community statements. Gothic 3 mainly suffered from technical problems. These need to be addressed and some changes will be made in regard of the fight system and of the interface.

Yes - of course we are. On a developer level - we have some good personal contact with some of their lead people for years. Given this level of good personal contact you may safely assume we are talking to each other.

Kai Rosenkranz is unique - he is a great composer. Kai has carefully developed the Gothic music style over the first three games. It will be a tough task for us to find a musician with similar skills. Whatever composer we elect - he will have to make sure to follow the original music style and carefully develop it further. Let me give you more details here as soon as the composer and style decisions are taken and the first results of such decisions are available.

The fight system will be the area which is to see the biggest changes compared to G3. I can only comment on the controls of the fight system - once it's fully implemented. In general - as we want to keep far distance weapons - some pointing device may be necessary. That's why at the moment, I'm not sure if the interface on PC can be keyboard only.

As you know, the magic systems have changed from Gothic I to Gothic II to Gothic III. The setting of Gothic 4 - Genesis allows to introduce some new elements of magic while keeping the most interesting parts of the old system at the same time.

I mentioned already a larger city and a new fight system. As for the heroes' capabilities, you can expect some new spells and changes to the skill system.

You will be able to interact with many of the NPCs well known from the prequels.

We can not guarantee to see all of your suggestions happening in Gothic 4 - Genesis. But what I can tell you: Our design document has a special section - dedicated to the community suggestions.

As you can see from other Spellbound games - we do have games with Riding features already. Technically all problems are solved. From a Gameplay point of view - it's mainly a question of map and fight design. A game properly designed for a riding hero must be much bigger than a game designed for a walking/running one. Furthermore if you want to provide a good combat system for both riding/flying and non riding/flying combat - you have to schedule many months of development for this feature. We have not yet decided what to do here.

We can't say anything about that yet.

The first game assets are under development, but I don't think any ingame content will be shown in the next weeks to come. We have started to develop Gothic 4 Genesis in August 2007.

Again - JoWooD is the party to address this question. But I may be able to giving an answer here in the near future. We plan to reserve much more time from our development team for forum communication starting from October 07.

We aim to release a patch at some point in the future, if all the technical problems can be solved. We may need some hints from Piranha Bytes to make it happen fast. Furthermore, the Community has started to work on a variety of bug fixes and problems and we hope to join our forces with their power to getting a good result as soon as possible.

Piranha Bytes is a highly skilled, motivated and experienced team. They have created an incredibly successful RPG series - increasing the fan base from release to release. As an RPG fan I'm really looking forward to their next title a lot. I think they are capable again to create a game surpassing the standards of their already very good first three games.

All the manufacturing decisions are made on the JoWooD's side. I'm sure JoWooD will be announcing details significantly prior to the release of the game.

Any of Spellbounds games published in close cooperation with international publishers in the last couple of years has been mastered and released in several languages at the same time. We do have the tools and workflows established to allow for 5-10 language releases simultaneously. The final release date will be set by JoWooD and it's publishing partners.

In fact, Spellbound currently only has 25 team members internally. However, we typically add another 20-50 freelance developers on top of that during the production period. During the creation of the big titles in the past, we had up to 50 or 60 developers working on one title simultaneously - that's going to happen for Gothic 4 - Genesis again. Our model is very similar to the Hollywood studio model. If a Hollywood studio creates a new film, they start with a small amount of employees and add many freelancers to that team to create a film in 3-24 months - however long it takes.

As for bug fixing, the last major games released by Spellbound came without any patches or with just one patch. I hope our expertise developed in these areas will work for Gothic 4 Genesis as well.

Next best RPG of the year: I was lucky enough to being involved in the creation of one "Best RPG of the Year"-title already (Realms of Arkania - Star Trail)– acclaimed by both a variety of US and European magazines. It's a great experience and everybody who had it once probably aims for a second time...

Me, yes I can. I hope the other team members do as well. The Spellbound people have a high level of talent and motivation. If everything goes well then combining such talent should result in a very good game.

Yes for sure. I went through the design document a couple of minutes ago and ... if I remember correctly - some of the issues addressed on your website and mentioned within question 15 seem to be mentioned there...

So even if we do not disclose too much detail in the next weeks to come - please go ahead posting suggestions. Even later in the project we reserve some time for changes based on community suggestions. The team is really looking forward to making some of them come true.

Thanks for the good luck - that's always a nice partner to have. As for the support - even if we will not be able to implement every single suggestion - it's our utter credo to build Gothic 4 to the liking of the community!

Jochen Hamma, Executive Producer