I've only played the first two, and the first one is my personal favorite. Gothic 2 is somewhat difficult to evaluate. Objectively it is a good sequel in the "moar of everything" style, but personally I found it incredibly uninspired and I had to force myself to finish it.
The first Gothic is one of the best RPGs I've played in the last 5 years (yeah, late to the party), but it did have rather glaring flaws such as the rudimentary combat system, underwhelming loot and itemization, the way armor and thus your survivability is tied to plot progression, and the fact that there's very few secrets on the map that aren't tied to a quest. I was hoping that Gothic 2 would improve on that, but in what has since then become PB tradition, it just copy-pasted most of the previous game without fixing any of the flaws but introducing a few new ones:
tl;dr If you played Gothic 1 before 2, the latter is a mind-numbing by-the-numbers affair.
The first Gothic is one of the best RPGs I've played in the last 5 years (yeah, late to the party), but it did have rather glaring flaws such as the rudimentary combat system, underwhelming loot and itemization, the way armor and thus your survivability is tied to plot progression, and the fact that there's very few secrets on the map that aren't tied to a quest. I was hoping that Gothic 2 would improve on that, but in what has since then become PB tradition, it just copy-pasted most of the previous game without fixing any of the flaws but introducing a few new ones:
- exploration has less verticality
- the new inventory system is a pain
- there's serious pacing issues with a hundred quests thrown at you in the first city while later chapters introduce only half a dozen or so
- the (tediously generic) story gets shoved in your face with the very first frame
- exploring the main island is pretty boring because there's nothing new to see compared to the first Gothic (example: you come across a dark cave near the light tower, think to yourself "hmm, probably a shadowbeast in there", and yup, there it is)
- the same goes for combat, which is still the same and doesn't require learning any new strategies (the most egregious case being the first fight against the troll; it's meant to be a grand cinematic moment and gets promptly deflated when you realize that the good old speed potion + circle-strafing technique still works like a charm)
- since you can now damage enemies irrespective of your level and equipment, many enemies turn from unbeatable horrors into a tedious but easy grind; for example, killing a single orc only requires decent dodging skills and lots of patience
- exacerbating the previous point: NOTR HP bloat
- NOTR's new character system doesn't add anything except that you're now forced to specialize till the very end of the game, but since that's exactly how I played the first Gothic it had no impact on my playing style
- retarded implementation of skill point tablets incentivizes hoarding them until the later chapters
- no meatbug sequence breaking
tl;dr If you played Gothic 1 before 2, the latter is a mind-numbing by-the-numbers affair.