Huh, I loved the Gothic series and never heard about Risen until a few days ago when I bought Risen 2. Overall having fun with it but I would not recommend it to anyone except die hard Gothic fans, especially considering Gothic itself will not appeal to most players and Risen seems to have gotten rid of some neat parts of Gothic... like murder, being able to play an instrument, smoke swamp weed and other immersive stuff like that.
Combat too seems like a downgrade and combat has always been a very finicky part of Gothic.
But despite that I'll probably check out Risen 3 once it gets deep discounts.