Just completed Gothic and thought I'd jot down some of my impressions. ...
I am glad you completed it, and overall enjoyed it. However, and yes, I am a bit biased since Gothic 1 is one of my all time favorites, I think 4/5 is way too low for what I consider to be one of the greatest RPGs ever made.
I think Gothic must have been a strong influence on Morrowind, or what do you guys think?
No, I don't think so. They came out too close together, and also in all the ways that Gothic shines, Morrowind was terrible. However, you are on the right track. Gothic had a lot of influence on Oblivion, though as far as I know, Bethesda never acknowledged it, and moreover, botched all the great ideas it took from Gothic:
NPC Behavior: this was amazing in Gothic, a true continuation of U7:TBG, but in Morrowind, NPCs were just cardboard cut-outs. In Oblivion, Bethesda copies the Gothic approach and implemented RadiantAI™. However, I would disagree with you, and claim that Gothic NPC behavior was miles better than Oblivion's. The schedules in Oblivion were very dull and simplistic, NPCs would just stand in one place during the day, or walk around randomly, and go to sleep at night. In Gothic, they had realistic looking schedules (probably more hand scripted), where they'd sit, walk around in a realistic manner, cook, fix up their hourses, piss, etc. It just looked like RL compared to Oblivion's automatons. I know, sometimes Oblivion NPCs did weird shit due to the AI, but it was so rare and weird, that it never really impacted my game in a meaningful way other than "wtf is that guy doing". In Gothic it was all logical and real.
Combat: Again, it's hard to appreciate how great Gothic combat was for the time. This was an era of spam clicking on aRPGs, either straight up spam clicking (Morrowind, Arx Fatalis), or slightly nuanced spam-clicking (Daggerfall, UUW). Gothic had a timed block (parry), combos, directional attacks, and animations improving with skill gain. The first three are the foundation of today's aRPGs (Dark Souls, Witcher 3, Dragon's Dogma, KCD, etc), and the last still hasn't been reproduced as far as I know. Oblivion tried to copy the ideas behind Gothic combat (blocking, combos, more action-y combat), but completely messed up in the typical Bethesda way (for example, timed block became hold up block, why would you do that?).
Also, compeltely disagree about the exploration being weak. Are you sure you spent time on it? The first two Gothic games have a tremendous amount of hand placed stuff to find in out of the way places.