Yeah, I get what you mean, Oblivion’s entire world seems generic and bland compared to Skyrim.
Gothic 3 is the closest thing to Skyrim after Oblivion. Thing is, it’s also very different from the first 2 games and if you’re like me, you won’t be able to play the 3rd without playing the first 2 and the first 2 aren’t that similar to Skyrim, although they’re still great games. Admittedly, those are my favorite RPGs so I’m probably a little biased . Still, I’ll at least try to be objective in my short summations.
The simpler choice would be to just go with Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning, I doubt you can go wrong with it honestly. The main story is meh but the sidequests can be sort-of-interesting, nothing special. What the game truly is about is incredibly good-looking and dynamic combat and a sweet armor and weapons forging and enchanting system. Aside from combat but directly related to it, the best part of the game is that you can, at any time and a little cost in gold, change your character class. Yes, you heard me. You can play until f.e. level 10 as a warrior and then go to a fate-weaver (IIRC) and they’ll make you a blank slate again and you’ll be allowed to reassign all your points however you want them to and become a mage or an assassin. And yeah, another great thing, there are also mixed classes between the 3 main ones so you have warrior assassins, warrior mages and mage assassins. I wish more games implemented that, choosing a class is the hardest thing in every game for me and this way I got to try all classes in one playthrough for a tiny fee. Also what keeps the game from being monotonous is that every region is visually different and has some region specific enemies. All in all definitely a game I consider worth playing.
Now for Gothic 3. First of all, it’s more like Skyrim in the sense that you’re free to explore the world in whichever order you want without having to follow the main quest. The world in KoAR is a little generic, in Gothic 3 every inch of its beautiful detailed world is handcrafted. Second, even though it came out in the Oblivion era its graphics are on par with vanilla Skyrim, that coupled with a previously mentioned handcrafted world and a beautiful soundtrack makes the atmosphere and therefore the gaming experience extremely enjoyable. But honestly, I can’t see anybody truly enjoying the 3rd game without knowing the story behind it from the previous 2 games.
If you look for the reviews of the game, you’ll notice 2 things mentioned to ruin the game and the reason it scored mediocre: 1) bugs, 2) combat. I’ll be honest - vanilla Gothic 3 is out of question. You’ll only end up frustrating yourself cause of crashes and probably be unable to pass the game due to bugs. HOWEVER, the game has a fanbase which worked for years to fix the game, and they did an EXCELLENT job at it with an almost 2 gig large patch that fixes everything AND improves certain things without changing the original game.
What wasn’t fixed though was the kind of lame melee combat, but I got used to it. The game is otherwise too immersive and interesting to be thrown away because of mediocre melee combat. Ranged combat is very decent though.
In conclusion, I suggest you to look at videos on YouTube and decide for yourself. I don’t think you can go wrong either way.