@soulgrindr Gothic, or at least Gothic 3, has a precursor to the system in Mount&Blade, in that clicky-clicky gets you killed fast, and instead you need to read your opponent, and use such tactics as circling, stabbing, lunging, and quick and long slices and parries and so forth to fight. Each weapon type also has a very distinctive 'style' and feel to it, so for instance I am (in my own humble opinion ;) a darn good swordsman, but I utterly fail with two-handed weapons.
And thank you for the advice, folks - looks like I'll be picking up Gothic in a couple of weeks then! I'm not going for Risen, though, Gothic 3's hard enough on my computer, Risen would make it curl up in a corner and cry for its motherboard.

I wouldn't say special. Compare to other rpgs? It's not really possible. But you can compare it with the same subgenre of RPGs. With Fable. (Nothing else comes to my mind).
You just don't clickclickclick to attack, but i you can thrust forward (more efficient/effective with better weapon skill) or slash left/right and block with few buttons (left mouse + wasd). And when you're fencing with human enemy - and you are trully good with controls - you can beat much stronger oponent. And it looks nice. Kinda.
Edit: And of course - What hamsta says.

I must admit, with the community patch, the combat in Gothic 3 is actually quite interesting, although without it it's just get the first hit and you can just cheese them death. Sort of sad that even with all the community patches, the performance on my system is still full of hitching and pausing. Kind of funny in a way that Risen runs and looks better on my pc than a fully CP'ed Gothic 3.

I wish someone would take the combat from Mount&Blade and put it in a decent fantasy RPG. I'd be hauling out my wallet on release day (which would be only the third time I'd bought a newly released game).
I don't wish to hate on M&B, it's an extremely well done game, but it's also...extremely dull, apart from the enjoyable melee combat.

I also picked up Gothic 3 from the D2D sale (hope next week is good for me as well, I picked up Gothic 3, the Cthuthlu game, and STALKER: Clear Sky), but since I am kinda of an OCD completionist with media, I will most likely play 1 then 2 before 3. I have 2 from the sale here a couple weeks ago and I will just pony up for the 1st some time soon.
On a side note, thanks for mentioning a community patch ... the one for the first STALKER game made that game great, so I hope the one for Gothic 3 will do the same.

It's fantastic - I believe World of Gothic has the latest English version. You're looking for 1.73. You probably want Alternative AI on (prevents the wacky beast instakills, in vanilla Gothic3 they have NO delay between attacks so they can kill you instantly, and the AAI also makes melee viable and entertaining) but I play with Alternative Balancing off, to keep it closer to the original game.
EDIT: The patch also modifies the game engine to prevent the horrible, horrible memory leak issues from the original. Come to think of it, we should technically get Gothic 3 for free and have to buy the patch, since Gothic 3's like the homegrown fan game and the patch is the professional finishing touches. Heh heh.

Hi. I just installed Gothic 3 too and I have a question.
If I can run Gothic 3 on pretty much max (with the usual stuttering, lol), would I be able to play Risen? Thanks.

Community patches or fan made patches can save the "life" of a game. ( for example Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines )

Upgrade sometime. It's worth it. :)

Maybe, maybe not. You'd have to give us your system specifications. Or you could just download the demo and see. Be sure to fiddle with graphical settings if it doesn't run or run well.

In my experience Risen actually ran better than Gothic 3 on my computer. Basically Gothic 3 was horribly unoptimized, while with Risen they really tightened up the coding and it tends to run quite smoothly as a result. But to remove any guesswork, you can download the demo here to see how well it runs on your system.

Risen runs better than Gothic 3. I was able to easily max Risen with a high frame rate and whatnot while I could only get Gothic 3 stable on medium-ish settings.
If you want to double-check you can grab the RIsen demo from the official site or your favourite gaming site. The demo is built from the final game code so perfectly represents the performance of the full game.

Good to hear. I got Gothic 3 (the first time) and Oblivion at almost the same time, and was really confused when I could run Oblivion at medium and couldn't run Gothic 3 at all. I might look into Risen, but I'm frankly more interested in the first Gothic right now.
:D

Best to play in order. Hope you enjoy. If you have any trouble with the controls let us know (they put a lot of people off, but you learn to love them). Be sure to enable the alt. controls, and remember left mouse + w/a/s/d are used to perform actions.

Thanks, that's actually a useful tip! I hate it when you play a game, finally start to get used to terrible controls, then realize there's an alternative (and much better) control scheme. I'm thinking of Advent Rising at the moment, heh. When I switched from keyboard to gamepad that game became awesome.