How Baroque painting and Walt Disney became the main inspiration for Gothic Remake

When THQ Nordic shouted to the world in 2020 that Gothic would return, fans of the RPG series around the world erupted in jubilation. The first two installments left a lasting impression on the RPG fans of the early 2000s. But since then a lot has happened, many other games have taken the lead and if you look back, you quickly realise that Gothic really needs to enter the 21st century. And now it's really close.

No, unfortunately, we don't have any details about its release yet, but we do have an excellent visual and artistic perspective of what we can expect, thanks to Daniel Candil, Art Director at Alkimia Interactive, the studio responsible for Gothic Remake. The developer was kind enough to face the Gamereactor microphones after his panel at Gamelab, where we talked about the European art inspiration, the creation of its setting and also how this "secret" THQ Nordic studio based in Spain works. You can find all this in full below.

Although Spanish Baroque is a very rich and broad artistic genre, the inspiration Candil and his team were looking for in the new Gothic has a much more European approach. Especially in the use of light. "The way Baroque artists paint light," Candil began, "the way they understand, they understood light as a way of creating and conveying atmosphere and expression and darkness, this kind of naturalistic, realistic approach to the world, and it's something that we think fits perfectly in Gothic."

The lighting effects seen in the trailers look like almost nothing else currently on the market, and that's also because the team quickly moved the project from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 and took a risk.

"I've been an art director in this industry for a long time, and if you ask me 10 years ago, 5 years ago, to have a real-time global lighting solution, it seemed, that worked right out of the box, it seems like magic to me, you know, it's like a magical dream come true."

"So when we saw that Lumen worked, we said, we have to try it, because maybe this is a way to convey the kind of light that we want to work in the game, and I think it's been an amazing experience trying to understand how Unreal works, how this new realistic approach to lighting systems works, and the way we can tweak it and tweak it and play with it, it's been an amazing experience."

Interestingly, the other source of inspiration for this dark and brooding RPG credits a creative we didn't have at the top of the list: Walt Disney. Specifically, his vision for creating an immersive experience in his theme parks.

"More than Walt Disney, which yes, it's about theme design," Candil qualified. "They created this kind of theme design when they were creating and trying to convey the first theme park idea, and they discovered that they could tell stories using the environments, they could tell stories using the buildings, the floor, the decor, the colours, the weather, the light, right?
It's about letting the environment tell a story to the visitor, so when we approach this open world game, at the end, you're creating a free space, an open space, where the player can roam, can decide where to go, and it's important to create a system, to have a system, something systematised, that helps us tell stories using colour, using shapes, using visual noise, using composition, so in this part, specifically in this part, going back to the thematic design and what John Hench was doing with Disney in the 1950s, this thing they call the art of the show, trying to understand and read about what they did, and how they incorporated this visual theory into what they do in real space in our game, it's been an interesting process, and yes, it's something we wouldn't normally expect."

And although Alkimia Interactive is part of THQ Nordic, they've been working on Gothic Remake for nearly five years in Barcelona. A project that the whole team is emotionally involved in, even before they join the studio.

"Every time new people join us the first thing we ask them to do is to play the original Gothic and Gothic 2. And once they've beaten you, once they find out that the first scavenger, the first meat book, can kill you, and you actually are, and it's like, 'hey, the first monster, the first birdie, is killing me', and then we'll say, 'okay, welcome to the colony, this is Gothic, I mean, you understand the experience, right? You're hired'."

Hopefully we'll know more details about Gothic Remake before the end of the year. We already had the chance to try it out at Gamescom, so the first half of 2025 seems like a wide enough window to expect it there.