Bang on to who?
I prefer PB's exploration over Beth by a slight margin. In PB games, rare plants are hand-placed. Shoot, they exist! Which is not the case in Beth games. Second, hard to reach spots generally contain hand-placed loot, which to me tilts the scale to PB as that makes exploration more rewarding for my tastes.
That said, PB needs to improve chest contents. Even the first 3 Gothics did not have great chest loot, although ELEX also stands to fix that by hand-placing every bit of loot, including chests.
Magic is close, too. Morrowind obviously had great magic, spell creation and the like, but PB also has some really unique spells that would fit right in in a TES game. I especially like ice magic that freezes enemies solid, or fire raining from the skies. And the transformation stuff is just great. Risen 1 also had Levitation and other weird stuff, like joke spells that make people treat you nicer. So while it's close, and TES has more micro-variety from spell to spell, I like the uniqueness overall of the PB magic and the macro-uniqueness of their system, so I take them over Beth in that case, too.
Scope, well, Beth wins there, I guess. Even though Gothic 3 was what, 2/3 the size of Skyrim or something? ELEX stands to be the same size of Skyrim yet with the hand-placed world that PB is crafting. So I'll give Beth that one, for now.
Oh, and progression is no contest. PB all the way. Slow, steady, feeling of serious growth, starting from nothing and becoming Godlike later, in a natural way. Beth has too many weird things like shopkeepers starting to sell better and better gear as you level up. And PB has trainers, that make the progression more immersive than just selecting from a chart or getting automatic bonuses at certain skill levels (Oblivion).
Now THAT, is bang on.
