Despite the flaws, I had a wonderful time with Gothic 3 and the 1.74 community patch last summer, playing the Orc/Xardas path as a mage with some extra mods installed as well. Similarly as others have reported, I was unable to find a way to be rid of the notorious G3 stutter throughout the game, not that it bothered me particularly much, because I still finished it for the second time.
The overall tone of the game is slightly different to the original two games but I still found it to be a genuinely fun, lengthy and worthwhile experience. Nordmar was especially breath-taking this time around.
Although I've only tried Forsaken Gods the once, it was abominable and utterly alien to my Gothic 3 experience. I was quite disgusted to run into a game/plot stopping bug a few hours in and thus haven't been near it since.
Not to steer the discussion away from G3 too much, but has anyone tried the Enhanced patch for this awful stand alone expansion? Or is the argument that it simply cannot be fixed difficult to refute?