Oh kingdom come. In theory I would have highly enjoyed the last one. But I only managed 5 hours or so. It’s just too “realistic” for my taste somehow.

Oh yeah for sure. Personally I quite liked its experience of travelling in it. That's a kind of realism that I enjoy, because the cost (in terms of time) of travel made me think about whether I want to travel.

But its combat system was certainly really polarising. The Souls comparison is a really good one, I think. Usually in an RPG, your chances of success depend mostly on your character's stats. But KCD's combat is more like a soulslike or an action game than an RPG. It's more about your skill as a player than about your character's skills or gear. And it's designed to be extremely punishing if you've got multiple opponents. Which is realistic, but not usually very fun.

But…Gothic isn’t a big open world. It’s like the size of bg3’s tutorial

To be honest, I find some gamers' obsession with the land area of open world games rather tedious. I remember the same criticism being levied at KCD during its Kickstarter, saying things like "oh, that's less than a quarter the size of Skyrim" or whatever it was. I don't really care. The density of things to do within the area is much more important. And even more important than that is the verisimilitude of the world. That quests feel interconnected in believable (not forced) ways, that questgivers feel like the quests they're giving are things they would actually care about and that would actually matter, given the worldbuilding and story. That's all stuff that, from what I've heard about it, it sounds like Gothic does really well. Idgaf if Skyrim or BG3 have a larger land area.