Written by: João Silva <br>Gothic 1 Remake, released by Alkimia Interactive on June 5, 2026 under THQ Nordic, sold half a million copies in its first week despite a mixed critical reception — and a good chunk of the frustration reported by people coming in cold, without knowledge of the 2001 original, traces back to one specific cause: the game gives almost no guidance on how to distribute your early attribute points, and a badly planned character in the first ten hours becomes a problem that drags on well into the mid-game. ## The training system that decides everything before your first real fight Unlike most modern RPGs, you don't just level up an attribute by gaining experience. Every point of Strength, Dexterity, or Mana has to be bought with Learning Points (LP) directly from a trainer, and the price is deceptively low: 1 LP for a single point, or 5 LP for the five-point bundle most trainers offer. That sounds trivial until you realize LP is also the currency used to unlock skills — and burning it all on attributes too early leaves you broke when the first skill that actually matters shows up. Strength solves the game's most immediate problem: melee damage, and the minimum requirement to wield heavier weapons that sit in your inventory unusable early on, out of reach even though you already own them. Dexterity does the equivalent job for ranged weapons, but it has a side effect that's easy to miss: it also factors into your success rate when pickpocketing, checked against the target NPC's own skill. Mana, meanwhile, doesn't regenerate on its own and only becomes relevant once you learn Rune Magic — putting points into it before that is a point wasted. A reasonable starting target, one most veterans recommend hitting before branching the build out, is landing around 20 points in your chosen main attribute before touching anything secondary. That usually takes three to five trips to the right trainer, depending on how much ore and gold you've scraped together exploring the Valley of Mines. **Step 1 — sort out melee combat before anything else.** As soon as you reach the New Camp, find the One-Handed Weapons trainer. Most of the game's decent early weapons fall into that category, and without the training your basic attacks miss the target at an exasperating rate. There's no point pumping Strength if your swings are still hitting air. **Step 2 — invest in Acrobatics as soon as you can afford it.** The skill is taught by Buster, located in the upper section of the New Camp's residential cave, and costs 10 LP plus 60 units of ore — expensive for the stage you're at, but it cuts fall damage and improves mobility on uneven terrain, which is basically the whole map. A lot of people skip this skill thinking it's cosmetic. It isn't. **Step 3 — grab the miner's rag before you start exploring in earnest.** It's not a full set of armor, but it offers genuine fire resistance and is a real upgrade over the clothes you start in. Skipping it because "it's just a rag" is a common mistake from people coming out of RPGs where flashy equipment equals good equipment. **Step 4 — only then consider Rune Magic, and only as a supplement.** The skill is taught once, by masters like Torrez in the Old Camp, after completing the "Price of Magic" quest — and costs just 5 LP, which makes it tempting way too early. The problem isn't the learning cost, it's the Mana: with 2 maximum Mana at the start, you cast one spell and spend the rest of the fight waiting for it to come back. Learn the skill, sure, because it's cheap and unlocks the Healing Rune as a safety net — but don't try to become a mage in Chapter 1. ## The detail almost every rushed guide leaves out There's a dialogue sequence with the NPC Horatio, in the New Camp, that grants a permanent Strength bonus if you steer the conversation the right way — and it's easy to miss because nothing on screen flags that conversation as different from the fifty other ones you'll have around the Colony. The game's HUD is deliberately minimal, showing only health and mana during exploration, so Alkimia clearly wanted players paying attention to dialogue on their own — a design choice that goes straight back to the 2001 original, when that visual crutch didn't exist and nobody complained about it. In my assessment, this is where the remake gets it right by preserving Piranha Bytes' original philosophy: the game doesn't punish you for building wrong, it punishes you for not paying attention to the world. Anyone who treats Gothic 1 Remake like a generic waypoint-marker RPG is going to burn their Learning Points the wrong way through roughly Chapter 2, and only then realize they need to mentally restart their strategy — the system never warns you, it just lets you feel the consequence. It's also worth noting that the Fire Mage specialization, available once you join the Old Camp, allows training up to the 6th Magic Circle — too high a ceiling to be thinking about right out of the gate. Anyone who eventually wants a hybrid build is better off saving that decision for after Strength and One-Handed are stable. If thirty hours in you're still complaining the Colony is unfair to people who show up not knowing anything, maybe the problem was never the game's balancing.