Overview

Gothic 1 Remake is an upcoming action role-playing game developed by Alkimia Interactive and published by THQ Nordic. It is a ground-up rebuild of the original 2001 Gothic, rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5 while preserving the story, structure, and tone of the source material. The game releases on June 5, 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (Steam).

Setting

The game takes place on the island of Khorinis, inside a massive penal colony known as the Valley of Mines. The colony is sealed by a magical Barrier originally raised by twelve mages on the orders of King Rhobar II, who desperately needs magical ore to forge weapons against the invading Orcs. The player takes the role of the Nameless Hero, a convict thrown into the Colony for an unspecified crime and tasked with delivering a sealed letter to the High Magicians of Fire. What begins as a simple errand pulls the Hero into the power struggle between the Colony's three rival camps and the looming threat of an ancient evil beneath the earth.

Core Features

• Unreal Engine 5.4 rebuild. The project was moved from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5.4 during development, and backports the PSO precaching system from UE 5.7 to reduce shader-compilation stutter.

• Expanded world. Alkimia has stated the game world is roughly 10 to 30 percent larger than the 2001 original, filling in areas the first team had planned but could not fully develop.

• Living NPC routines. NPC behaviour is driven by motion-capture recordings split into categorised sequences, so characters follow believable daily schedules of working, sleeping, eating, and socialising inside the Colony.

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

• Reworked combat. A modernised combat system keeps the deliberate, tactical pace of the original while adding a lock-on camera, parry and riposte, dodge cancels, and three tiers of weapon-skill progression. See Combat System.

• New traversal. Free climbing and underwater diving are new systems that did not exist in the 2001 original.

• Melee, ranged, and arcane magic. Players can lean into any of three combat pillars, with a dedicated magic path built around runes and scrolls. See Magic and Runes.

• A full Orcish language. Alkimia worked with a professional linguist to design a full Orcish language. The Hero can learn it as a progression path, which opens new dialogue and quests with Orc NPCs.

• Preserved story. The three-camp structure, the major characters, and the core narrative arc from the 2001 Gothic are preserved, with new quests and deeper dialogue layered in. Alkimia has described roughly 30 hours of additional camp-specific content on top of the original campaign.

Music

The soundtrack is composed by Kai Rosenkranz, the composer of the 2001 original, who is reinterpreting his earlier themes and writing new material for the expanded world. The audio middleware in use is FMOD.

Release Information

Demo

A free demo titled Nyras Prologue is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. The demo features a separate protagonist, Nyras, rather than the Nameless Hero, and is intended as a self-contained glimpse at the Colony rather than the opening of the main campaign.

Editions

See the Editions and Pre-Order Bonuses article for Standard and Collector's Edition contents and platform-specific pre-order extras.