Maybe it's because I activated the alternate balancing option, but yeah 5 minutes of continuous fighting, with orcs that constantly stunlock you, that I had to run away 2-3 times to be able to drink a potion and then dive back into the fray. Also, with lag between hitting my keys/mouse-buttons and the nameless hero swinging.

It's just attrocious compared to the combat system in G1/2. It's basically a race at who can stunlock the other first.

I had no issue with the slow starts in the previous games, but even if they wanted a more action packed one, they could've had an intro area to let you get your bearings, remember how the controls work, how drawing your sword works, since apparently I forgot.

Oh yeah, the bane of my existence. :D

In my opinion the combat system is just badly implemented, all around. Yes you can manage it later on, if you're overpowered, but it shouldn't be like that. You should be able to do the opposite: be lower level and be able to take on higher level enemies just because of your player skill. Like it was in G1/2. Such fantastic games they were. It's just sad to compare.

At least Piranha Bytes didn't go under and managed to work on new titles. That's really impressive. It's not often that you see the publisher go under, and the developer ultimately getting back their IP.

Maybe I just have to accept the game is likely forever soured for me. Maybe it's also due to my history with the game. I was employed as a game tester for about 3 months, working on Gothic 3, during my university years. And seeing the state of it all and that most things never got fixed. It was so depressing.

The only way I ever managed to advance a little more into the game was abandoning melee combat completely, and focusing on ranged. But even though ranged compat is pretty decently implemented compared to melee, I'm just not a fan of ranged combat. I like to get in their face and smack'em.

This is making me want to try the game out again :)

I need to continue my Witcher 3 run first.

Combat in Gothic 3 is actually quite complex. Someone pointed it out to me in my Gothic 3 playthrough on my old YouTube channel, when i was trying to button mash thru combat. There's quite a few moves u can do and manually can make it a lot more fluid. I went the path of the bow anyway but if u try to button mash you're probably in for a bad time. At least that's how it was explained to me by a diehard Gothic 3 fan.