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Alkimia Interactive
May 12, 2026 at 12:23 AM
Remove embedded images that do not match the article subject (relevance cleanup)
Alkimia Interactive is the game studio developing Gothic 1 Remake for THQ Nordic. The studio was founded in Barcelona, Spain, in March 2021 specifically to rebuild the 2001 Gothic after THQ Nordic acquired the Gothic intellectual property and scrapped the earlier 2019 Gothic Playable Teaser.
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.
Reinhard Pollice is Studio Director and Lead Producer. Pollice previously worked on mods for Gothic I and Gothic II before joining Alkimia, and has been the most publicly visible spokesperson in hands-on previews, Gamescom interviews, and the Making Of video series. Alkimia reported roughly 45 staff working on the remake in 2023, growing to around 50 or more by 2024. The studio's induction policy is that every employee plays through the original 2001 Gothic before joining production, so the team has a shared reference point for what tone and pacing the remake is trying to preserve.
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. That direct continuity gives the remake a thread back to the 2001 game in the specific craft disciplines most responsible for the original's feel. Piranha Bytes itself closed in 2024; its staff did not work on the remake collectively.
Alkimia began development on Unreal Engine 4, then migrated to Unreal Engine 5, and has settled on Unreal Engine 5.4 as the production engine. 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, plus a custom Lightweight Actor Cache optimisation to keep the open world's many simultaneous Actors within performance budgets. The public Nyras Prologue demo has been revised since its February 2025 release to reflect the engine and combat changes the studio has made over time.
Motion-capture routines. NPC daily behaviour is driven by mocap recordings split into categorised sequences so characters work, sleep, eat, drink, play instruments, 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.
AngelScript scripting. Systems, AI, and quest logic are built on AngelScript. Alkimia has stated that the same scripting tools that drove the Gamescom 2025 press demo (itself built as a mod of the full game) will be exposed to the community for modding after launch.
Armour design partnership. Armour variations were designed in collaboration with Gate21 studio, and the tattoo-design work was done with an external consultant.
FMOD audio middleware. Kai Rosenkranz's reworked soundtrack is implemented through FMOD.
Alkimia has run a steady Making Of video series since 2024, covering the studio's philosophy for the remake, the Old vs. New decision process, the four-language Voice Cast and Localization pipeline, story and narrative design, and the world-building work. The studio also publishes regular Steam News posts on combat tuning, pre-order editions, and trailer drops. See Overview for the full dev diary list.
