Gothic 1 centers on surviving an isolated penal colony, making unstable alliances and navigating three rival factions. For a single-player role-playing game with weapons, spells and a world shaped by daily routines, the displayed offer is one factor in deciding whether its premise appeals to you: ≈ $7.55 at Kinguin. Its Steam player response adds context, with 91%% positive from 13,207 reviews.Compare the offer with Steam's current PC price of $19.99 when deciding where to buy Gothic 1.
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated daily
Historical Low~ $2.492023-08Current Low Across Stores~ $19.99Steamvs. Historical Low+703%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
Gothic 1 throws you into the penal colony of Khorinis, sealed behind a magical barrier. To survive and eventually escape, you must navigate a world split among rival factions and form shifting alliances.On Steam for PC, the game has a 91%% positive rating from 13,207 reviews.
Credits
Composer
Kai Rosenkranz
Developer
Piranha Bytes
Publisher
THQ Nordic
Voice
Christian Wewerka · Bodo Henkel
Steam player reviews
91%positiveVery Positive13,207 Steam reviews
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$2.492023-08-12 · SSteamBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.
Language support
Language
Interface
Subtitles
Audio
English
Yes
Yes
Yes
German
Yes
Yes
Yes
Spanish
Yes
Yes
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Show 5 more languages
Language
Interface
Subtitles
Audio
Polish
Yes
Yes
Yes
French
Yes
Yes
—
Italian
Yes
Yes
—
Czech
Yes
Yes
—
Russian
Yes
Yes
Yes
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-19
02Before you buy
Single-player
The Steam PC version is a single-player role-playing game. Its world is described as living, with people working, sleeping, eating and fighting to survive.
Languages
Steam language data lists English, German, French, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Simplified Chinese interface support; some languages have subtitles rather than full audio.
03Frequently asked questions
Where does Gothic 1 take place?
The story takes place in Khorinis prison colony, enclosed by a magical barrier. You must survive there and form alliances.
What role do the factions play?
Three rival factions divide the colony, forcing the king to negotiate with them for ore.
What combat options are described?
The description mentions a wide variety of weapons and spells for your character.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviews
Selected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
Still one of the best RPGs ever made with great quests and immersion.
If you want it to run in all resolutions, Windows 7/8/10 and 60 fps use the Gothic System Pack. You dont need other workarounds.
http://forum.worldofplayers.de/forum/threads/1340357-Release-Gothic-%C2%BD-%C2%97-SystemPack-%28ENG-DEU%29Show moreShow less
12.7 hours at review1,267 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
As a long-time fan of Gothic, I must leave a negative review. Gothic 1 is an amazing game, don't take me wrong. But suddenly doubling the price after 20 years in order to make a nice looking discount is a fraudulent business practice. Never buy at 20 EUR. Shame on THQ!Show moreShow less
89.1 hours at review260 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Gothic 1 is absolutely brutal.
You are nothing
You are worhless
You are just a bag of meat to puch some ore from
Until, you learn how to gain some ore.
Gain some respect.
Gain some skills.
Yes this game has its issues with controls and little bugs, but hey, there was no "patching" or other stupid thing back then.
This game has the ultimate character progression that really makes me have strong feelings even after 10 years later writing this review.Show moreShow less
17.9 hours at review1,069 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I love series, I love old Gothic, thx for this to Piranha Bytes.
Now, best part, after increasing price almost 2x, go F yourself THQ with your community manager who responded on the price increase 'you had 20 years to buy it'.Show moreShow less
0.4 hours at review234 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
I lost my childhood hereShow moreShow less
8.5 hours at review683 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Steam, for ****'s sake.... This is like the 5th game I bought from you that doesn't work.
People, listen to me, DO NOT BUY OLD GAMES FROM STEAM! Youll just throw your money away. I'll sure as hell never buy another old game from steam.
Steam, GET YOUR S*** TOGETHER!Show moreShow less
0.1 hours at review76 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
How to launch game in Windows 7
-install Gothic
-find Gothic.exe
(C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\common\Gothic\system)
-right click --> Properties --> Compatibility
-check box "Run this program in compatibility mode for:"
-choose Windows XP
-press OK
-play as usual
Great game, you should try it!Show moreShow less
1.2 hours at review680 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
This was my first time playing Gothic, so I have no preconceptions of it from the early 2000's.
It's a corny, epic adventure in a game with an original setting (prison colony surrounded by a one-way magic barrier) with different factions to join and some different ways to play it regardless of how it coalesces down the road in most aspects. There's a lot of rough touches to admire about it, from how weapon animations change as you get better training, to the variety-over-quantity nature of quests, to the ways you get to interact with a game world full of convicts.
However, all while trying to see what the game had to offer, I gritted my toleration through:
• The Access Violation error which makes this game unplayable without third-party fixes. IT LITERALLY PREVENTS YOU FROM PLAYING THE GAME.
• The Access Violation errors that can still occur anyway even with third-party fixes. It happened to me twice at the final battle.
• A complete omittance of apostrophes. Probably a format error.
• Horrible pathfinding. Followers and enemies alike get regularly stuck on corners, stairways, and tunnels. It happened a lot, particulaly in the Orc Cemetary with Baal Lukor, the ruined monastery with Gorn, and on the road to the Free Mine with Gorn again where he magically disappeared, probably from falling through the world. Enemies in the Orc Temple constantly got stuck on pillars and wall corners which made otherwise difficult encounters laughably easy.
• Some ladders being near impossible to climb. When you climb to the top your character won't stand on solid ground, so he simply falls back to the bottom unless you use Acrobatics to quickly somersault forward mid-air. Works sometimes, not always. Fortunately no important ladders are bugged.
• A column in the monastery ruins area which you're supposed to push over a chasm gap but it's set to fall in the wrong direction, so you have to use Acrobatics or a velocity potion to cross the gap.
• Being killed by a follower. Gorn in the Free Mine still has his "Guard AI," which means if I attack any of the Old Camp npc's that we were there to kill he'd consider that "assault" and attack me. So you have to tell him to wait by the entrance if you want to get anything done.
• Summoned followers attacking each other. Golems refused to play nice with my skeleton army. To be fair, they attack literally everything unprovoked, including neutral npc's.
• Getting locked into dialogue with an npc approaching to talk to me, but their pathfinding preventing them from reaching me so I have to reboot the game. This happened in the Orc Cemetary with Baal Lukor and in the Orc Temple with one of the shamans.
.. and the list goes on, a menagerie of little bugs and glitches which tested my enjoyment versus the annoyance on a routine frequency. The real question is, do I know anyone who'd put up with all this? Probably not.
I couldn't recommend it to anyone except those who have predispositions toward older games and the prevalent roughness that goes hand-in-hand with them.Show moreShow less
59.4 hours at review40 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
- When I was washed ashore, one of the guys punched me in the face!
- They do that to all the newcomers. They call it "Standing Godfather".
This short and absurd dialogue exchanged between our nameless hero and a shadow - an agent of the old camp - basically summarizes the tone of the whole Gothic series, starting with this first installation: ruthless, cruel and challenging. Its dog eat dog world from the moment you start your game, and it won't get any easier for quite some time. Nevertheless, coming out in 2001, Gothic is one of the first open world single player RPGs where you get to choose your own progress; roaming around, choosing quests and eventually deal with one primary problem that would very much define your whole story. With this game, Piranha Bytes set the baseline for all Open World RPGs that will be eventually advanced by The Elder Scroll series and many other wondrous RPGs, changing the market expectation of a computer RPG forever.
With the opening cinematic, we are informed that there has been an ongoing war between humans and orcs for ages now, and the King Rhobar II desperately needed magical ore to finance the war. Thus, he ordered a mining colony populated with prisoners to be established by all criminals, bandits and cutthroats of the land. 10 of the most powerful mages put a magical barrier over the colony. Yet, something has gone wrong. The barrier extended beyond the intended limits; trapping all and any that were present around at the time. The barrier was harmless for the one coming into the colony from the outside, yet it was impenetrable from the inside. None would be able to leave alive... Taking advantage from this mishap, the prisoners revolted and killed all guardsmen, seizing the control of the colony. Desperate for the ore, the King came to an agreement with brigands exchanging all kinds of earthly goods for the ore needed and still keeping to send in new prisoners for the work force.
This is the point our nameless hero - whose "name" or its instant of not being revealed in any circumstances is an ongoing gag for the series - a prisoner of unknown crime, is sent down to the colony, to deliver a message to the Arch Mage of the Circle of Fire. We are given the message, kicked down to the colony to meet some locals - and get smacked by them as a casual welcome... From this point onwards, it's gonna be a zero to hero scenario. Our relatively mundane character will become the one hero of the land through exploration, careful choice of allies and smarts enough not to do or say certain things in certain conditions.
I must say that the setting and the story are fairly creative about the idea of a society established by criminals. Anyone and everyone in the colony are convicts or at least shady enough people with their own agendas anyhow. Most NPCs you'll end up meeting are pretty much a**holes and they'll lie, cheat and change alliances easily. Characters have motives, depth, agendas and personalities. So, not trusting anyone becomes our main motto quite easily. Even though the game world is relatively small here, the setting itself - with 3 primary gods, orc/human wars, different lore and system of different camps, the nature of magic and runes, fiends of vile realms etc. - are imaginative and intriguing, yet sadly the storyline hasn't been thoroughly developed into its full potential in this first game. As the series progress, we'll become increasingly invested in both our character and the setting of the world - especially with Gothic II, which I'd consider a masterpiece RPG.
Animations and display are nothing miraculous considering the age of the game, yet they are really good for their time. We are even capable to observe some basic facial features, mimics and remarks of NPCs while they are making comments - which was altogether quite new and fascinating for its time. The game world is kinetic too, with NPCs having routines, sharing meals and attending mundane business when you are not interacting with them. Even mob monsters do sleep according to day/night cycle!
Let's talk about the sucky parts of the game anyhow. Controls from hell are the primary problem that many people would prefer to pass this game. Mouse is merely used to direct camera angle - like an action adventure and you are expected to arrange a handful of odd key combinations for everything. If you are to rearrange key bindings, you'll probably override some other management option and render everything much more complicated than before. So... it's either getting used to hellish controls or not playing this game. You'll be expected to use 2-3 key combinations just to pick an item from the ground! That is some meaningless chore, I won't lie. But if you get used to it, you won't be even aware that you are arranging the combination after some point.
Let's make our peace with one certain fact at this point: dying is a natural and common part of Gothic series. With this kind of gameplay difficulty and somewhat bug-ridden environment, you gotta be either a hardcore fan of the series or a bit masochistic to learn and have fun from getting your a** kicked in casual ways. Combined with hellish controls, combat becomes fairly hard and disorienting sometimes. You are expected to perform a series of combo attacks, blocks or dodges to face your enemies or else, anything coming your way might make an easy meal out of you. When you bear the controls finally, you'll notice that input detection bugging quite annoyingly sometime too. AI is somewhat imaginative too; maintaining different approaches of combat for different kinds of enemies and monsters. Some will downright charge, some will hunt in packs, others will dance around you and some others will try a couple of hit and run tactics on you.
The AI and the environment texture are fairly old and buggy, so I strongly recommend installing some mods before taking on this journey; and for that purpose I'd certainly recommend GOG version of the game rather than Steam version, considering its way more stable with less crashes or conflicts. Worst case scenario, you are able to use a series of cheat commands called the Marvin Mode - which was used by developers to test certain modification - to arrange nearly anything in the game. Many things in game are left semi-developed due to time management problems on Piranha Bytes' part so installing Dark Mysteries mod + Ironforge Patch would fill in the blanks left by developers and fixing most glitches perfectly if it doesn't cause any problems for your system.
This game - with its scenario, its environment and its humor will always find a way to surprise you both in good ways and bad ways. Even after stating all its problems - and casual ways to work around them, I strongly recommend playing this game as a part of computer RPG history at this point. It is not only nostalgia, it is a classic - alongside Gothic II.
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43.2 hours at review561 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
This game is amazing and without a doubt my favorite game of all time.
But with the scummy act of doubling the price of a game thats older then me i just can't recomend it.
just because they have fixed it on steam does not entitle them to more money the fact it was broken on steam for so long is an insult.Show moreShow less
83.3 hours at review36 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.
Kinguin. Its Steam player response adds context, with 91%% positive from 13,207 reviews. Compare the offer with Steam's current PC price of $19.99 when deciding where to buy Gothic 1.
