I think Gothic 3 was actually quite a solid game with the community patches. That said, the official state of the game is simply insulting to this day, because after the catastrophe of a release it had the developer and publisher parted ways and the game was never properly fixed by either of them.
This messy and very public divorce is also the main reason the Gothic series died, the publisher (Jowood) retained the rights and gave it to other developer studios which created games that more or less flopped (G3 expansion, Arcania). But what do you expect from a publisher that lets the game get fixed by fans instead of actually paying people for it. I mean at least they gave them access to the source, so that's something, but still...
Yeah I know the rough history, as for the playability with the community patches, I don't agree. It's still trash in my opinion, while 1 & 2 & NotR are still amazingly playable.
I bought the third game full price on release, and as a teenager back then it was a lot of money. I am still bitter to this day lol. The only thing I kinda liked was some of the story, and the graphics which while now kinda ugly, still create a pretty cozy atmosphere.
Well yeah, there is no beating 1 & 2, but it still holds up IMHO. Huge world with no loading screen in sight, passable story and side-quests. But what was really great about that game was the music. Combat was meh though, still a Gothic game after all.
I take it you didn't play ranged weapons then. :D They tried to modernise the combat and kind of made it worse, except ranged combat though. Free aim was just a lot better than target locking in earlier games. But melee in 3 wasn't really fun. That said, huge battles generally worked better in 3 and there were a lot more of them with a lot more NPCs involved, so that was kinda cool. Magic was also a bit more fun. But yeah, the game was overly ambitious in many ways and that hurt it a lot, even if you *disregard the clusterfuck of a release and its aftermath...