ArcaniA: GothiC 4 DemO AvailablE NoW

The relaunch of the Gothic series, ArcaniA: Gothic 4, is out in about three weeks. Created by German team Spellbound, after former developers Piranha Bytes split acrimoniously from publishers JoWood in 2007, it's an attempt to continue the hardcore fantasy series in a way more optionally accessible to newcomers. (E.g. you can still play it like a loony, or you can switch on the comforts of a compass, etc). A demo has been released to give you a taste of all this.

The demo is an enormous 1.7GB - the sort of size I always think answers the question: "Why do magazines still have coverdiscs?" However, the erstwhile GamersHell has recently started beta testing torrenting their demos, and you can take a crack at that here. Currently it has 252 seeds, so it's not enormously fast. But this post alone may fix that.

GamersHell also warns that the installer may throw up an error regarding the PhysX installer, but apparently it will carry on installing successfully regardless.

Meanwhile, it should be noted that the original Gothic developers are making a sequel to Risen, announced last month at GamesCom. Which is especially good news for Alec, who spent a lot of time with Risen, as chronicled in his excellent pieces here.

We'll offer you some impressions of the demo once it's finished downloading, some time in 2019.