I've only played GOG version of Gothic so I suppose I can't say.
But yeah I can highly recommend it.

If you like the Gothic games--even a little--you owe it to yourself to check out Risen. I am already looking forward to Piranha Bytes' next project (hopefully something else set in Risen's world).

Yeah I noticed they're working on somethin. I hope they work on Gothic/Risen stuff til the end of time. :)

Bough the game recently, It's a blast like the first Gothic, gameplay is smooth, the atmosphere on the island is very impressive, bugs aren't very noticeable (even if they still exist) and there's no official patches (there's only a hotfix for older Nvida cards)...
If you're a Nvida user and have performances drops in some areas and sacrificed a lot of graphic options in order to have a fluid game then you should revert back to geforce 178.24 drivers and use nHancer32 2.4.5 in order to bring some advanced anti-aliasing, the game works better with these older drivers.

JoWooD somehow got the rights to Gothic when they split with PB, and work on the latest Gothic game (Arcania: A Gothic Tale) is being done by Spellbound. So I doubt we'll be seeing PB work on anything with the Gothic name, although I do very much hope they continue to carry on the spirit of the Gothic series with a sequel or two to Risen (and the ending to Risen certainly left plenty of room for sequels).

the only thing Ive had to do is summon a moth to complete a quest... other then that its been a great experience. The atmosphere is what hooked me, and the music is just wonderful...
After Risen Im going to snag the GOG editions of Gothic 1,2...

Have you not played them before? You should really play in order.

You will enjoy these games. The first two are keyboard only interface. I have all three retail box versions and they all install and run just fine on AMD 64 Vista Ultimate Box.