Alkimia Interactive

Alkimia Interactive is the game studio developing Gothic 1 Remake for THQ Nordic. The studio is based in Barcelona, Spain, and was set up specifically to work on the remake after THQ Nordic acquired the Gothic intellectual property.

Remake Mandate

The team's stated goal is to rebuild the original 2001 Gothic in Unreal Engine 5 while preserving the source material's story, structure, and feel. That means keeping the three-camp faction structure and the major cast, modernising combat, physics, and animation, and expanding the world by roughly 10 to 30 percent in overall size. Alkimia has also described roughly 30 hours of additional camp-specific quest content added on top of the original campaign.

Team

Alkimia reported roughly 45 staff working on the remake in 2023, growing to around 50 or more by 2024. A portion of Piranha Bytes' original Gothic team joined Alkimia for the project, including the original composer Kai Rosenkranz plus a former dialogue writer and a former programmer, which gives the remake a direct thread back to the 2001 game in the specific craft disciplines most responsible for the original's feel.

Engine Switch

During development, Alkimia switched the project from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5.4. The studio has since adopted the PSO precaching system introduced in UE 5.7 to address the kind of shader-compilation stutter that has hurt other UE5 releases. The public Nyras Prologue demo has been revised since its original release to reflect the engine and combat changes the studio has made over time.

Production Pipelines

• Motion-capture routines. NPC daily behaviour is driven by mocap recordings split into categorised sequences so characters work, sleep, eat, and fight to survive on believable schedules.

• Deep-learning face morphs. Around 600 unique NPC faces were generated through a deep-learning morphing pipeline to give the Colony a dense, non-repeating population.

• Custom Orcish language. Alkimia partnered with a professional linguist to build a full Orcish language the player can learn over the course of the game.

• FMOD audio middleware. Kai Rosenkranz's reworked soundtrack is implemented through FMOD.