Craft a sword through a realistic mini-game, then beg someone to teach you how to swing it before everything goes sideways and you have to sell it just to afford a meal—Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an incredibly captivating experience. Aside from the first KCD, no modern game offers anything close to this particular blend of role-playing and immersive sim mechanics.
However, nearly two decades before Warhorse released its first title, another European studio produced an RPG that captured a lot of the same magic Kingdom Come: Deliverance does, though it didn’t sell nearly as well. That studio was Piranha Bytes, and that game was Gothic, an RPG so far ahead of its time that it’s still worth revisiting 25 years later.
Gothic was a pioneer of immersive ARPGs
Most action RPGs reward your progress with stat boosts. Whether they are assigned automatically or you get to pick them, each level-up tends to end with you increasing your attack, defense, HP, and/or some attribute. This is a tried and true approach because fundamentally, numbers go up make monkey brain happy.
In 2001, Gothic put a unique twist on this formula by wrapping it in many layers of realistic mechanics. It had you start as a scrub who couldn’t do anything. Pick up a one-handed sword and watch in confusion as your clueless character holds it with two hands. Try wielding it and despair in the face of the most pathetic excuse for a swing you’ve ever seen. Proceed to get deleted by anyone who looks at you funny because you’re pretty bad at this whole sword thing.
As with most ARPGs, Gothic lets you get better at combat by leveling. But rather than just making damage numbers go up, each level nets you Learning Points that can be spent on improving your weapon technique or raising attributes required for equipping better gear.
LPs aren’t enough, though, because you can only learn from teachers, who require payment. And with currency being scarce, expect to spend many hours in stressful poverty until you learn some basic combos, get non-terrible gear, and start holding your own in a real fight.
This immersive approach to combat progression extends to other aspects of Gothic. If you want to forge a sword, first you need to learn how, procure some steel, heat it up in a forge, bang it on an anvil, and then cool it in a water bucket. If you’re taking up hunting, you’ll need to find someone who can teach you how to collect trophies from each type of animal you’re after in order to make the most of your hard-earned kills.
What makes all of this hassle worth it is the feeling of accomplishment that Gothic offers once you get going, which is second to none. After running in fear from a single wolf in Chapter 1, mowing down an orc platoon in Chapter 5 is a cathartic experience. Doubly so since you can appreciate your improvement in not just the damage you deal and take, but the very way your character moves and swings.
Even a quarter of a century later, few RPGs deliver such a gratifying power fantasy the way Gothic does. However, the Kingdom Come: Deliverance games definitely fit the bill, while also managing to improve on Piranha Bytes’ design philosophy.
How KCD2 inherits Gothic’s design philosophy
“For KCD1, we indeed took some inspiration in The Witcher, Skyrim, and also Gothic,” Warhorse PR Manager Tobias Stolz-Zwilling tells me over email. While he notes that “inspirations changed” for KCD2—which drew from different games, like RDR2—what clearly hasn’t changed is that Warhorse’s latest RPG still inherits the core tenant of Gothic’s combat progression: evolving movesets.
After Henry gets Metroided at the start of KCD2, he needs to re-learn how to fight. This, above all, involves finding teachers to show him how to perform new attacks and combos. Every melee weapon class has its own moves to unlock, some of which are absolute game-changers.
An obvious example is the Master Strike, which lets you punish every attack and defeat opponents in a death-by-thousand-cuts sort of way.
Like Gothic, KCD1 and KCD2 feature engaging crafting. Creating something requires interacting with your environment instead of just opening your inventory and sleepwalking through an ingredient selection menu.
Another similarity lies in how Warhorse and Piranha Bytes combine world design with hand-crafted level scaling. Enemies in any given location become more dangerous only if you progress through the main quest. This makes many areas effectively impossible to tackle at the beginning, but also provides you with a great indicator of how much you’ve improved over time, based on how quickly you deal with opponents that used to trouble you.
Both Gothic and KCD2 create immersive, lived-in worlds. NPCs have schedules, react to what you’re doing, and change their opinions of you based on your actions. You never feel like you’re playing in a sandbox surrounded by quest givers and points of interest, but trying to survive in a harsh world that will continue to exist once you croak.
Where KCD2 evolves beyond Gothic
While KCD2 takes some design lessons from Gothic, it also puts its own spin on them. Stolz-Zwilling’s mention of Skyrim as an inspiration is obvious in the way you can improve by simply doing things. You won’t magically learn new combos, but keep using a sword and you’ll eventually start swinging it harder and faster all on your own. Spend enough stamina doing whatever and your stamina reserves will grow.
Skill teachers are still important in KCD2, but mainly to complement progress instead of being a mandatory stop after every level-up. Unlike Gothic’s Nameless Hero, Henry can learn a bunch of skills on his own, and the concept of Learning Points doesn’t exist—KCD2 teachers just need currency.
Another key difference concerns weapon stat requirements. Both games have them, but only Gothic imposes them as hard limits. You can still use weapons you don’t have the stats for in KCD2, you’ll just be terrible. On the bright side, your related attributes will level faster if you keep challenging yourself this way, making for an even more immersive experience.
Warhorse’s RPG also improves on the crafting aspect of Gothic. Blacksmithing is even more realistic, giving you full control of which part of steel you’re heating up in a forge and hammering on an anvil instead of just having you sit through a few animations that cannot fail. KCD2 alchemy is just as immersive, whereas it barely existed in Gothic and was just a menu-based activity with guaranteed results in Gothic 2.
While eating and sleeping were important to survive through the Gothic early game, KCD2 embraces them in a true immersive sim fashion. Stay awake long enough and Henry will begin zoning out mid-combat, or forget to eat and you’ll eventually starve to death. Meanwhile, Gothic just treats these activities as an optional way of recovery.
Why aren’t there more games like Gothic and KCD?
Before Warhorse released Kingdom Come: Deliverance in 2018, the only studio doing anything resembling the Gothic games was Piranha Bytes itself. Its 2009 RPG Risen is the closest thing to a spiritual successor, though all of the studio’s later works shared a lot of the same DNA.
Unfortunately, Piranha Bytes eventually fell victim to cost-cutting efforts at Embracer, which owns both its parent company and Warhorse. Scrambling to save some money, Embracer shut down Piranha Bytes in June 2024, ending its 27-year run. With that, the only developer besides Warhorse still dedicated to crafting punishing RPGs with this specific type of immersive combat progression was gone.
Gothic games were never mainstream
As for why more studios aren’t taking inspiration from Gothic, the obvious answer is that hardcore RPG-immersive sim hybrids in a medieval/fantasy setting have been a tiny niche up until recently. The first game to buck this trend was Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which sold 8 million copies as of late 2024.
Find more statistics at Statista
KCD2‘s current momentum is even more promising, with the game surpassing two million sales in just 13 days. For comparison, the combined Steam sales of all eight Piranha Bytes games ever made are estimated to be between 4.2 and 8 million. Some of its later titles were also released on consoles, but to no avail. By all accounts, both of Warhorse’s games are already more successful than anything Piranha Bytes ever did.
Two million copies in under two weeks! A toast to you all for making #KCD2 a triumph! 🥳 pic.twitter.com/Swe7sL4lgc
— Warhorse Studios (@WarhorseStudios) February 17, 2025
The sales discrepancy between the two studios is a result of their vastly different approaches to distribution and marketing, which stem from budget limitations. Gothic was initially released only in Germany and took seven months to reach other EU markets in October 2001, finally arriving in the U.S. a month later. The game’s non-German versions had little marketing and ultimately failed to achieve international success.
In contrast, the first KCD was marketed for four years before release, beginning with a viral Kickstarter campaign that raised around $1.4 million from over 35,000 backers. Its total budget was around $16 million, marketing costs included. The sequel was even better-funded, with Warhorse estimating its expenses at around $35–40 million.
While Piranha Bytes finances aren’t public, the budget for its final and most ambitious project can be deduced. In 2017, Creative Europe Media awarded the equivalent of $157,000 in public funding to ELEX 2, describing that as a 9% co-funding contribution. This suggests the game’s total budget was around $1.74 million—a fraction of KCD2’s costs, but still more than whatever Gothic had.
All that said, even years after Warhorse demonstrated that combining immersive sims with ARPGs has mainstream potential, other devs aren’t exactly falling over themselves to try to do what the KCD games did. This brings us to the second potential reason why there aren’t more games of this sort: They are hard to make.
Gothic- and KCD2-style games are difficult to develop
If you’re developing a game with combat, you need attack animations. If you want to include lots of weapons, you need lots of animations, at least one for each weapon category. All of these movesets need to be created, tested, and inform (read: complicate) your enemy balancing.
However, if your game also includes a system where combat proficiency improves through animations, your workload increases exponentially. Every weapon type now needs animations not just for basic attacks, but also for advanced techniques, counters, and maybe even contextual moves, like Henry’s Master Strike.
Since you can’t control exactly when the player will learn these animations, your enemies need to be able to react properly to all of them, requiring additional animations and AI behaviors that account for varying skill and progression levels.
That’s a pretty big headache to make something that, let’s be real, no one asked for. And since no open-world RPG ever shipped without compromises, something as niche as a multi-tier combat animation system would be among the first things on the chopping block for the vast majority of such projects.
Unless, of course, they were built around this idea. This was the case with Warhorse and Piranha Bytes, who saw these mechanics as not just features, but the very foundation of what they thought immersive role-playing should be.
All of that’s to say: If you loved KCD1/2 and are craving more, Gothic might be the only thing to scratch that itch. It’s clunky in different ways and has potato graphics that require some getting used to, but the experience is still as unique and rewarding as ever. Gothic 2 improves on it a lot and has even spawned one of the best total conversion mods ever made—The Chronicles of Myrtana: Archolos.
Aside from PC, the first two Gothic games are also available for the Switch with modernized gamepad controls. Most fans of the series prefer not to talk about what came after Gothic 2. That said, a remake of the first game has been in the works (without Piranha Bytes) since late 2019 and is finally nearing completion, so fingers crossed it captures some of the original’s magic.
With Gothic’s remake on the way and KCD2 proving that immersive RPGs can still thrive, maybe—just maybe—more developers will take a chance on this uniquely unforgiving style of game design.
