What's wrong with Gothic 3 and Forsaken Gods?
Given Gothic tried to compete with Bethseda and wound up committing many of the same sins, forcing the series to go belly up, bit of an overview.
The original Gothic was released in 2001, actually beating Morrowind's release by a year and doing a lot of things Morrowind would have to be modded by fans to do, like having enemies that were actually smart, full scheduling of NPCs to eat, sleep, and do things IRL people would, and actually making level progression make you feel like you were not hitting god mode until the very end of the game (and even then stupidity would kill you fast). It had horrible controls (mouse control was a last second after thought), was buggy, and it's modding capability is janky, to say the least, but in many respects was technically better at many things Morrowind could not do without mods.
Gothic II is a refined version of Gothic I, using a polished version of the engine Gothic I did in a world about as large as Morrowind's stock world, basically filing off any rough edges from the original, and if you had to ask people who wanted an actual challenge and practically half of Germany's hardcore RPG fanbase (Gothic was the shit, in the good way, then) what they considered damn good, it would be Gothic II, especially with an expansion called Night of The Raven Gothic fans consider the high water mark of the franchise even today.
Bethseda, however, went the other route, going for style over substance, with Oblivion releasing 2006 with a fancy ass world that had all the depth of a kiddy pool, but it DID look and feel far less technically clunky than Gothic, and thus the Gothic creators (partially due to pressure from their publishers) shoved Gothic III out the door to compete later in the year, and it was a pretty, massive world that was technically demanding like Oblivion, just one that was even more unpolished because it basically shipped as an unfinished beta that needed six more months of refinement before it SHOULD have shipped.
If this is giving anyone horrible Bethseda flashbacks, it gets worse.
Gothic III required a massive (almost 2.0GB, and this game was about the same size as Oblivion when installed, so that's pretty damn huge) fan patch which basically fixed the game to the point it SHOULD have released as, and even got some mods that added even more flesh to the skeleton, but by this point Oblivion had stolen it's lunch money, meaning no one save hardcore Gothic fans gave a shit, and that was confined to a niche audience compared to Bethseda's games.
Forsaken Gods was the even worse standalone expansion, which they whored out to some no name third world company to develop who knew fuck all about the game engine, lore, or what the hell they were doing but were told to shit out a game in under a year, and the result made New Vegas at LAUNCH look like a stable, fully functioning product with no flaws.
The resulting product had a story that made the dumbest Fallout retcons look like genius, had engine issues that made Fallout 76 look like a five star product, and even after the fans valiantly produced another huge patch like the one Gothic III had that made it TECHNICALLY competent, the underlying story and voice acting was utter shit and that was unfixable.
But the Gothic creators, apparently unwilling to learn to not run headlong into the same dumbassery Bethseda did, then made Gothic 4 aka Arcania, which, like Fallout 4, was a massively dumbed down game with astronomical system requirements with performance issues out the ass because it was optimized poorly with a story that left a terrible taste in everyone's mouth, though at least it was marginally (by a pitiful degree) better than Forsaken Gods, but was such a POS anyway it murdered the remaining fanbase and shit on the corpse.
tl;dr: Game company that tried competing with Bethseda made even worse mistakes that foreshadowed the dumpster fire Bethseda would turn their own games into.
