Gothic

[Googolplex]

Hmm... I played a lot of games which are by far more annoying in the controls than Gothic. For example The Witcher 1 and Silent Hill series. All of them are excellent games, but with horrible controls. I wouldn't say that the controls of Gothic are so bad. In contrary, they are very easy when you know how. And I like the decent style more than a modern action crap where you have just to click on the mouse to kill a boss. Gothic shouldn't played with mouse, you have to press "ctrl" for action and then "arrow up" for a frontal hit, or left/right for a side hit. What is difficult there?
Also with the interaction; just press ctrl plus one of the arrow keys.

That it's hard to fight against a horde of monsters is true. But I like that. Gothic is not a hack n slay like Diablo where it's designed to kill monsters by a click on the mouse standing around you. The world of Gothic is dangerous, you shouldn't even go into the forest without an armor and most of "monsters" which are just animals in my opinion and no monsters, are not placed into the world to get the player XP-points. It's just the players choice what to do.

The crafting system was criticized. I just can say that it's probably the best of all RPGs. You can't just combine or manufacture items in the inventory. You need to find a grinding stone to sharpen a sword or an alchemy station to make a potion when you have the ingredients and the skill. You have to interact with the world and not just click on a "button".

I know that people think very different about that, probably some dislike it because Gothic is other than conventional RPGs. But exactly this is the reason why I love it as more. I think that Gothic is a prime exemplare and a game which is designed perfectly. There isn't even a character-choice like it's usual from other RPGs. You are who you are and you are part of a story where it's not possible to change or create your own character face. I'm very proud that Gothic is going a decent way.

That new beginners will just need some time to become familiar, is normal and I also said that I needed time too. But in general Gothic is very simple and well made in the controls. I prefer the combat system more than any other where you have just mouse clicking. Gothic was made to be decent and this is why the combat system is blocky. I can say the same to Penumbra Overture. There is a sense of heavy controls, you should know to swing the hammer isn't very easy for newcomers. But this is a signal that a game is not made to fight something primarly.

Anyway, I would like to play the third installment, but I've heard it is so bugged that it isn't worth the trouble. Is this true?

As the game was released in 2006, it was bugged like an alpha version. There were a lot of critical bugs like corrupted save files, crashes and memory lags. The game was released as it was not ready.
But after 6 years of hard work there were a lot of patches released to make the game playable:

1.04 = Release version
1.07 = Patch#1
1.08 = Patch#2
1.09 = Patch#3
1.12 = Patch#4 (latest official patch by Piranha Bytes)

Version 1.12 fixed a lot of bugs, but the game was still almost unplayable. This was the reason why some of talented users decided to found the Community Patch Team "MadVulture" to polish the game.

1.00-1.40 = First community patches in addition to version 1.12
1.52 = Community patch which makes the game finally playable and removed DVD check.
1.60 = Further community patch and financed by the publisher
1.70-1.73 = Further community patches called "Enhanced Edition"
1.74 = Most popular community patch
1.75.14 = Latest Community patch

Since version 1.74 there are almost all bugs in the game fixed, new content added, a lot of optimizations and improvements, new balancing, better KI, and much more. The changelog includes a list of thousands of entries! The Gothic 3 "Enhanced Edition" is almost a completely remastered game compared to the original release. Actually it is hard to find a bug. You just need to install the latest patch, it includes all previous patches and is compatible to every version of the game.

Scroll the changelog here to see how many improvements has been added by the community.