First time playing so I can't compare it to any previous DD submissions, but here are my overall thoughts. I haven't played Gothic 1 but being a europoor, almost everyone I know has played it and I watched enough content to have a general idea.
This game is clearly inspired by Gothic and maybe some Tomb Raider but it makes it it's own thing. The world and story are immersive and interesting. The tutorial temple section is cool, but it also feels like it was designed to be a temple and not a tutorial level - there's plenty of sections that aren't required to progress but are used for worldbuilding and serve as a gameplay tutorial. Specifically, the small dead end part of the tunnels with 2 maggots in it, where I just walked past without the maggots aggroing, which gives me hints of what to expect enemies to behave like. Things like that are cool and don't appear often in DD games since people have enough work on their plates making a linear game.
I ended up dying 4 or so times during my playthrough
-I jumped into the hole in the room before the key in the temple and clipped out of the map as I fell
-I walked up to a temple outside and a skeleton lizard beat me to death with a stick
-By some crashed boats, a couple of kobolds surrounded me next to some boxes and quickly clubbed me
I also encountered some bugs, but one (if this is a bug and not me being a brainlet) stuck out to me since it was annoying and difficult to replicate reliably:
Messing around with weapons, I can somehow get into a state where keyboard input does nothing - none of the key bindings will work, but I can move around normally. The console window is closed, so it's not like I'm typing in it. This bug first occurred to me as soon as I switched to the torch about 2minutes into playing, which left me really confused since I was trying to open my inventory to figure out how torches worked. It sort of fixed itself and occurred a few more times afterwards, but I was stuck for like 30 seconds mashing keys. Escape didn't work either- nothing would happen.
Another thing that was kinda buggy was how everything would stutter for 5 seconds or so when reloading the game from the start, but it would fade and things would work normally.
Either way, it was a lot of fun.
Final score: "You are dead :(" / 10