I *loved* Gothic 1 and Gothic 2 and didn't like Gothic 3 much at all. The biggest reason for this is their attempt to give the player "choice" - but really, the choice pretty much always amounts to "Have Team Red conquer the city, or have Team Blue keep the city." Go to another city, and it's "Have Team Blue conquer the city, or have Team Red keep the city." It's technically a choice, sure, and those choices have impact on the game world, but at the same time it's a fairly meaningless choice because neither Team Red nor Team Blue are very interesting. The brilliant characters that brought Gothic 1 & 2 to life are mostly missing here, replaced with a lot of flat, generic, uninteresting characters that you won't miss much no matter who conquers what city. (Even some of the characters who came over from Gothic 1 & 2 with you have lost a lot of their personality - Lee, for instance, was an embarrassment to previous versions of the character.) On the good side: The game's beautiful, and the world is beautiful. It's a great sandbox to wander around and explore - particularly the southern deserts were just visually stunning. The skills system is a little more sophisticated than Gothic 1 & 2 as well - more options for specializing in different things, dual-wielding, ranged combat, crafting, etc. It is, as others have mentioned, pretty buggy if you don't patch it (there are some great Youtube videos floating around from the pre-patch days of unkillable psycho pigs and other hilarious bugs) but the Community patch has pretty much fixed the technical aspects - alas it couldn't really fix the game's writing. But at the end of the day, what it comes down to is this: Do you want to take over a city, killing all the boring NPCs on one side and permanently filling it with generic NPCs from the other side? Or would you rather the NPCs weren't generic but were actually interesting, even if that meant you couldn't slaughter them all? If it's the former, the game's well worth getting - you won't find many other games like it. If it's the latter (as in my case) this game can still be worth getting if you want to just ignore the main quests and wander around, but don't expect it to live up to the greatness of the first two.
