Would it be fair to say that in terms of sales and expectations so far Gothic has not fared as well as you'd hoped, particularly outside of Germany? The UK and USA market are ones you wish to crack so how will this be achieved with Gothic 3?

Kai: In contrast to the German market, the Gothic series could admittedly not grow beyond the 'sleeper hit' status in the UK/US. When Gothic 2 hit stores in the USA, it was already more than one year old and could hardly compete with visually impressive state-of-the-art-titles. Due to the poor marketing and the significant trouble we had with our distribution partners, only a small group of players knew the game existed at all, whereas in Germany we have a loyal and devoted fan community. They enthusiastically spread the word about the game and thus make up for the little marketing budget. Even though the Gothic series is still not exactly widely known and popular in the US/UK, the international fan community keeps growing. We support this development as much as we can. Gothic compilations such as the 'Collectors edition' (which contains all the previous Gothic products) will be available worldwide before the third part's release. Apart from that, the mere product quality will rise considerably and thus enable the game to compete with the international market.

Negative feedback from the fans has centered around the fact that the games interface and controls have been somewhat clunky. So how will this be changed/rectified for Gothic 3?

Stefan: I can promise there will be a lot of changes for the interface and the controls. The interface of Gothic 1 and Gothic 2 focused for a console version. But as we all know we never released a console version of the game. We made a lot of control improvements from the 1st to the 2nd part of the game. For part 3 we will again make the controls much easier. So we will have a drag and drop inventory (inventory was one of the most criticized things from G1 and G2).