Closest thing to Gothic 1 is Risen 1. It is also good until the very last chapter, which becomes a charade of everything that made the game good.
Elex is good, but in my opinion too big for its own good. I got tired of the walking simulator parts and abandoned it midway. Unlike G1/2, where it's not walking but exploring, Elex has you span kilometers of empty, boring lands with nothing but a trashmob here and there, and Ubisoft-style sidequests occasionally. I'm not saying it's a bad game, it's just a very bad world. Even the hubs, when you compare them to Old Camp, New Camp or the Swamp, Khorinis or the Bandit camp, or the Pirates cove in NotR, are empty, band, boring and uninteresting. If they are interesting, it's mostly in shock value, and then you run around it and it has very little of interest.
The world just looks like it was made for an MMORPG. Like they tried to pitch a SWTOR-like with a great "singleplayer" story and then either it wasn't accepted or they realized they can't make a game of that scale. The difference is, SWTOR kept me going thanks to the fact that I could play it with my friends, see the different c&c back-to-back, and experience it together. In Elex, I just ended up getting bored of it. To explain; the traveling was so boring I wanted to have a TV show playing on the second screen and even then it was practically unbearable boredom. But the actual storyparts wanted me to pause the show and really pay attention. So if you can stomach the bad parts, I'm sure you'll have fun with it - there's a good game hiding behind about 60 percent of useless faux-content.