Alkimia Interactive and THQ’s Gothic remake launched over the weekend, and many are the complaints that the RPG’s revised lockpicking system is far too hard. I know, right – tricky lockpicking in a game set in a giant prison! Please excuse me while I lift both hands from the keyboard and strenuously knead my face into a shocked expression.
In fairness, nu-Gothic‘s locks are a different breed. This isn’t the usual process of rotating both analog sticks toward a light-up pie segment. It’s a Herculean wrangle with sliding gates, each with seven holes and a pop-out pin. You have to line up all the gates with the pin in the middle hole. The trouble is, when you slide one gate it often slides one or more of the others. If you keep sliding a gate past the first or seventh hole, you’ll bust your picks.
Gothic at large is a game in which you start off desperately incompetent, a no-name hoodlum chucked into a big dirty quarry. At the risk of excusing frustrating design as some kind of artistic statement, having an abysmal time to begin with is sort of the point. Still, a non-zero quantity of people would like the devs to patch the lockpicking, to the point that Alkimia have acknowledged the reaction and suggested that people maybe try upgrading their lockpicking skill.
“We are monitoring the sentiment about lockpicking which seems very mixed,” they write on Steam in a brief post about launch bugs. “We cannot stress enough how much easier this gets when you start adding skill points into it.”
Part of the upset over the lockpicking is owing to the fact that the original Gothic’s system was on the simple side – you basically had to guess your way through a chain of left or right arrow inputs, listening for the clickety-clacks. You could also argue that players are falling foul of the game’s disinclination to gate the trickier locks – in theory, I think, any lock can be picked without any levelling, which makes it tempting to reserve points for sexier skills like Rune Magic.
One other thing that occurs to me is that lockpicking in RPGs tends to be regarded as a necessary chore, intrinsic to stealth playstyles but not necessarily valued as such, which is why fancier systems aren’t necessarily more endearing.
I mean, nobody really likes picking locks in videogames, do they? It’s the treasure we want, and possibly also the thrill of almost getting caught. Nobody does it for the satisfaction of besting a bunch of cogs and springs. But then again, what if somebody seriously designed an RPG around the understanding and appreciation of different makes of lock? Perhaps if lockpicking weren’t a “minigame” but an evolving and storied practice within the gameworld, you’d get fewer hectic demands for nerfs in Steam reviews.
On which note: if you’re struggling with Gothic’s locks yourself, my final very helpful suggestion would be to hone your burgling talents with a trip to the Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, Dim Bulb’s wholesome archive of pickables from videogames throughout history – you can find a version of it for free on Itch.io. The original Gothic is one of the exhibits.
