Whenever The Witcher‘s developers at CD Projekt Red are asked about their inspiration, one game pops up without fail: Gothic, a cult classic released in 2001. Put two European, open-world, medieval fantasy RPGs featuring a monster-slaying hero next to each other, and there are bound to be some similarities, but as Geralt’s team has often stressed, the bond between these games is much deeper than that.
While the gritty, dreary Gothic would therefore be the perfect game recommendation for Witcher fans, the fact that it predates The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt by 14 years puts a damper on the fun. Geralt’s own Wild Hunt shenanigans are hardly recent, but the Nameless Hero’s adventures are fast approaching their 25th birthday, which makes it hard to enter Gothic‘s penal colony with the enthusiasm it deserves (trust me, I’ve tried). It is wonderful news, then, that publisher THQ Nordic announced a Gothic Remake release date. After six years of development, Gothic Remake is set to arrive on June 5, 2026.
You may already know that Gothic and The Witcher games were created in neighboring countries, namely Germany and Poland, but you may not know that CD Projekt Red (known as CD Projekt at the time) took care of Gothic‘s Polish translation. The universal worship of Gothic among The Witcher 3 developers may have something to do with that history — and the fact that the Polish version of Gothic became a huge hit, which, according to this Steam thread, may be due to a combination of good reviews, low prices, and great dubbing. There’s a reason why THQ Nordic’s video about Gothic Remake‘s Polish voiceover got six times as many views as the one about the English voiceover. As producer and voice director Jacub Rezmer states in the video, “This is a remake above all remakes. [Gothic] is the most Polish of non-Polish games.” They even got some of the old voice actors to reprise their roles.
Though the final products show plenty of surface-level differences, Gothic and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt share a similar approach to storytelling, exploration, and worldbuilding — a fact previously established in a Polish YouTube documentary. Both games, as The Witcher 3‘s lead quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz and game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz explained in an interview with PC Gamer, offer seemingly limitless freedom of movement that is nonetheless bound to the main storyline, the player’s leveling progress, and exploration progress.
For example, The Witcher 3 mimics Gothic‘s conservative approach to fast travel. There are only a few teleport stones in Gothic‘s late-game, while you can’t fast-travel at all in the early game. Michal Madej, chief designer for The Witcher 3, mentioned in an interview with IGN that he wanted to place similar limits on fast travel. Although Geralt’s open world is far too big to rely on Roach alone, Geralt can only teleport between signposts — and only after he’s discovered them. The same interview makes a comparison with The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion (released in 2006), which handles fast travel vastly differently; in the land of Cyrodiil, you can instantly travel to any major city — no signposts required.
In the same interview, Madej said he didn’t like the loose connection between Oblivion‘s main story and other quests. As he puts it: “[Oblivion] was not story-driven. There is no single story to finish the game. It was quite short. In Gothic, if you finish the main story, you probably visited all the places in the game, so this is the difference.” Sure, there are many optional places for Geralt to explore in The Witcher 3, but if you simply follow the main quest, you’ll travel to every main location.
Travel, in both The Witcher 3 and Gothic, isn’t just obstructed by limited fast travel; it’s dangerous, too. As Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz said in an interview with Gamespot, it was important to mimic Gothic‘s approach to level-scaling by avoiding it (though it must be said that The Witcher 3 does come with the option to enable enemy upscaling). Rather than make enemies stronger to match the player’s increasing strength, Gothic‘s protagonist is mercilessly slaughtered by high-level monsters until he out-levels them. Although Geralt is a bit more adept at slaying foes right from the start of his adventure, he won’t have an easy time with any bears, vampires, or archgriffins encountered in the early game either. In both The Witcher 3 and Gothic, leveling up must be accompanied by a sense of satisfaction and the opportunity to visit areas that were previously deemed too dangerous.
Beware that the Gothic Remake won’t be an exact copy of the game that inspired The Witcher games. Not only does it aim to improve the outdated graphics and clunky movement system, but it also adds new quests and expands upon existing ones. That last part is important, as the original Gothic suffered from plot holes and unfinished storylines. That said, the developers (some of whom were on Gothic‘s original development team) promise to stay as faithful as possible to the essence of Gothic — and by extension, to the essence of Geralt’s world. Perhaps it’ll make the wait for The Witcher 4 a bit easier.
