I got bored and downloaded the demo, and after about 10 minutes decided to buy it. I wasn't used to the combat system, they had changed a lot of the voices, and I was having serious performance issues, but it still felt like Gothic.

With the patches, I've only experienced one bug of any severity (a handful of non-important stuff not moving to my inventory when I buy or grab it), and only a couple graphical glitches, which only result from a third person camera being maneuvered into a small area. And performance has drastically increased since the demo. Making a real save every few quick saves seems to help, as does restarting the game after several hours of play. I haven't had the game actually crash yet, though it has frozen up around five or six times since Saturday.

If you've played and liked the previous Gothics, it might take you a bit of time to get into, but almost everything that made me love Gothic 2 is back in this one, and the world is even bigger. There's still the massive wilderness to explore and the well designed and open-ended quest system, the little burnt out shacks or old slaughter sites that don't need dialogue or information to get across their own little story, and the slowly escalating combat system, meaning that while even at a high level you can't get careless with low level monsters, you also have a chance through careful planning and massive diligence to take down foes of much higher levels.

So far, I'm liking it even more than I liked Gothic 2, and a ton more than I liked Oblivion. A great deal of people on the net disagree with me, and I can understand why, but the cons stop short of being more than little annoyances for me, and the experience has so much more weight to it than in Oblivion, where the caves and ruins and forests periodically restore themselves after you've cut a bloody swathe, and the only mark you can leave on the world is through murder and the designers' decisions.

If you're unsure, download the demo, and picture it with better performance and stability.