A brief review of Gamespy's opinion yields the following:
Gothic 1 - 4.0 Stars - Reviewed By Craig Wessel
Gothic 2 - 2.0 Stars - Reviewed By Dan Bennett
Gothic 3 - 1.5 Stars - Reviewed By Allen Rausch
If you read each of the reviews, they all read very similarly. Yet Gothic 1 scores 4 stars while Gothic 2, far superior in every way to Gothic 1 scores 2 stars... and the fans of Gamespy score Gothic 2 with 5 stars.
A large portion of his review is taken up by a problem where his mouse isn't recognized during the game. And even by his own admission states that PB nor the official PB forums for G3 make any mention of this problem. And then he continues on pinning this problem on G3 without pausing to consider possibly that the problem maybe has to do with the computers he is playing on. A rational, objective person would at least consider the possibility that since nobody else in the world has mentioned this problem, it could be a problem with his machines. The Reviewer writes that the opening combat scenerio when you start G3 in the middle of combat is 'galactically stupid' and is symbolic of how bad the rest of the game is... I assert that so much space taken up writing about his mouse problem is symbolic that this reviewer is slightly biased in a negative way toward G3.
I can understand this reviewers complaints with the bugs, but he goes on to rail against the game pretty heavy handedly in ways it doesn't deserve. For instance, he makes it a point to complain about the interface which was one aspect of Gothic 3 I thought couldn't possibly be highlighted as being 'bad.'
He complains about the graphics, which as far as I could tell are just a little bit lesser to the graphics of Oblivion. Reading his rants against the game is almost a statement of how stupid I must be as a gamer to think the graphics are actually pretty nice. The Gothic 1 review calls Gothic 1's graphics 'nice' yet Gothic 3's art design is '...pretty atrocious' - I think that's a bit of an overstatement there, even when being subjective.
He makes a case that the game is idiotic for starting the player out in the middle of a combat situation. But then fails to make any mention at all that your character and any other NPCs that matter are pretty much immune to death during this encounter. Didn't Ultima VI, start out with a combat situation? And yet few would label Ultima VI as 'galactically stupid' - and in Ultima VI it was possible to die during this opening combat encounter unlike G3.
The reviewer's review of Oblivion makes complaints against Oblvion's interface and also makes lengthy comments about bugs found in Oblivion:
If there's a real deal-breaker within Oblivion, however, it's the bugs. Lots of 'em. The worst have been problems running the game at all using Nvidia's FX series of video cards, and random, unrepeatable crashes to the desktop. I've seen creatures sometimes float in mid-air and "pop" around rather than turning to attack. There were moments when NPCs got stuck on the landscape, NPC voices would completely change between lines, and quest flags didn't getting tripped. Programming text would sometimes pop up during conversations with NPCs saying things like "Subject Change." The game's animations cause characters to move, fight, and die like a poorly wired Animatronic exhibit at Disneyland. It does little for one's sense of immersion to have beautifully expressive faces when they're attached to bodies that jerk and start in ways no humanoid body ever would and occasionally fall through a wall and twitch while hung up on the world's geometry...
... But yet Oblivion receives 4 Stars. Hmmm....