At IGN Live today, THQ Nordic’s Reinhard Pollice was on hand to discuss the newly released remake of Gothic.
The original Gothic, or Gothic Classic as Pollice said they now referred to it, celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. Even before the remake, the original had been remastered, and Pollice said he felt the reason for Gothic’s longevity was “even by today’s standards, it’s still a very unique game with a lot of game mechanics that really hold up.” He also said he felt “It’s not the biggest open world, but I think it’s the most immersive and the most alive.”
As for what it’s like having the remake now available to the public, Pollice said “It’s super cool. We’re obviously watching the reception. It’s a big RPG, right? So we’re only seeing the first third of the game content and we’re seeing every house gamers discovering something cool or something we’ve hidden new ways of solving quest, cool ways of solving quests, new ways of interacting with the AI…”
In the original version, the NPCs had a then-impressive multistage daily routine they’d go through, including, Pollice humorously pointed out, “even going for a piss.” For the remake this has greatly been expanded upon, with the NPCs now more frequently reacting to changes around them. Plus, they expanded a routine to the creatures as well, with Pollice staying this all adds to “what kept [Gothic] alive, so immersive, so simulated, and so deep with what you can experience there.”
Pollice noted they never wanted the game to feel too bluntly direct or handholding and it was always about maintaining that immersion, remarking, “Everything that is happening in the game world, there’s a natural way to discover it and find clues. This is not a game with quest marker after quest marker. You really have to listen to the people, get the clues and then you kind of piece it together, and also develop a natural understanding of the places and the world itself.”
That approach can make Gothic quite difficult for some, and Pollice said there was a desire to make the remake more widely accessible. That being said, he always felt, “If the game needs tutorials, we’ve done something wrong. It should be explained in the dialogue.”
They ended up landing on a compromise that kept things more in-universe than a straightforward tutorial, with Pollice explaining “To give new players a little bit of a possibility to learn the mechanics, we added a tutorial book, but this is done in an immersive way where a character gives you a book.”
In general, Pollice believes there are plenty of players who like difficult games, stating, “They like a good challenge if it’s not unfair.” For the remake “We added a much easier difficulty level, which is still challenging.” As he explained, “You can customize your difficulty level so you have things like combat and exploration and they all have an effect on how you experience the game in the end.”
The Gothic Remake is now available.
Be sure to keep up with everything going on at IGN Live 2026. You can check the full schedule to see what else is coming up across games, movies, TV, streaming, and more.
