I'm just wondering if anyone has had the chance to play Forsaken Gods yet.
I was thinking about buying it a few days ago but I thought I'd get some extra opinions first.
I did not mind Gothic 3 so much as some others, though I do readily admitt that it is a different game from the original two.
If any one has any opinion I would appreciate it.

Oh please, PLEASE don't remind me. The game was even worse than the third; they managed to introduce even more bugs, copy paste the old world without removing some of the old relics/artefacts. The dialogue took a twist along with the hero (who became grimdark and all serious). The pacing was ridiculous (the best weapons were found 15 minutes in to the game, in a chest). The monsters were broken as ever, and the last 'boss' was seriously the easiest the series has ever seen.
And worse yet? The developers and Jowood blamed the fans for being too pushy about the release. Unbelievable. They blamed us.
Oh, and just for laughs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeCtwJ59eFc

Now THAT's quality voice acting!! WOOF!

I was turned off as soon as I heard you couldn't go to Nordmar or Varant. Varant was by far the best part of G3.

Wow, just when I thought it couldn't get any worse.....Wow.

Believe me when I say that this release was, and is a total disaster. Don't buy this game because all you would be doing is supporting Jowood's continuous greed.

Sounds too bad to be true, but if it is a JoWooD title it is all too easy to believe.

Jowood should be changed to Edwood.....

Thanks guys/girls....point taken.....danger averted.

To anybody whose had the misfortune of playing this:
Does it at the very least have multiple factions/ending paths like G3 or is it pretty much linear?

Haha, oh man. There's only one ending and it's incredibly bad. It manages to make the Nameless Hero a person he never was.

I actually liked Gothic 3 despite its flaws (and boy did it have flaws) but everything I've seen/heard about Forsaken Gods sounds like they intentionally removed everything that was even remotely good about G3 and just left all the flaws.
From what I've seen from videos the only good thing that remains is the excellent soundtrack.

This. The music is still excellent.
The rest is an aberration. Well, that's what you get for outsourcing the entire game development to a rookie indian developer I suppose. The incessant broken quest triggers that in the end ruined G3 more for me than the performance hitches are still all around. All the NPCs do is stand around and spout gibberish, when you're walking through any settlement all you hear are the same 5-6 "I saw a mudcrab yesterday"-type lines all around you. The performance is still hitchy despite it being a dated game engine by now. The clipping bugs you run into rival those of unpatched Daggerfall (getting stuck in walls, doors, cows, on branches, whatever).
Just like G3 it also crashes at will.
It's just a really shoddy game. Avoid at all costs. If you see it at the top of a bargain bin, rebury it at the bottom then walk away.

The worst thing about Forsaken Gods is how it screws up the plot of the series by totally changing the personality of the Nameless Hero. He goes from being a cynical antihero who just wants to put things back to the way they were and get on with living a normal life to a short-tempered control freak.
FORSAKEN GODS SPOILERS BELOW (wow, this forum system needs a spoiler tag...)
Forsaken Gods picks up from where the "Xardas" ending of Gothic 3 left off. Despite the amiable manner in which that ending played out, the opening cutscene says that the Nameless Hero gets into a violent argument with Xardas over how to bring peace to the land and strongly implies that he kills Xardas. During the course of the game he sets about uniting the factions into a kingdom--by force, if necessary--and by the time of the ending cutscene he has set himself up as its self-proclaimed king, at which point he chooses a name for himself.
These dramatic and illogical changes aren't Trine's fault, however; Forsaken Gods was specifically designed to lead into the events of the confusingly-named Arcania: A Gothic Tale (aka Gothic 4) where the once-Nameless Hero is an antagonist who invades the homeland of a new, also unnamed protagonist in order to annex it to his kingdom.