Björn Pankratz (game developer) playing guitar with his wife.

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they don't even let you know what your characters name is

That doesn't count, because not knowing your characters name is a well known running gag of the Gothic series.

Piranha Bytes main problem (in my opinion) is that people expect them to make huge open world RPG games with todays graphics standards and a bazillion of NPCs and quests and whatnot but they only have ~20 people and a tiny fraction of the budget for example Bethesda has.
So they need to crunch and cut corners whereever they can and outsource tons of stuff (like the animations and most environment assets for example) and in the end they still only suceed in making a mediocre game riddled with bugs because they just can't stem such a project with the manpower and budget they have available.
It's sad, really, because the people there are really talented (One of them taught me almost everything I know about 3D modeling). Sometimes I wish we could go back to the times of Gothic 1, were it was still possible to make big games with a small team because you didn't have to pour most of your time and money into making the graphics look acceptable to the mainstream crowd. (I mean technical wise, not aesthetically).