Editor's wibble - I'd hoped to have a full Wot I Think of Risen 3: Titan Lords, Piranha Bytes' latest openish world RPG by now, but sadly code has been incompatible with my PC. I have been able to play it in short bursts on a laptop with lousy integrated graphics, but there was only so much low-detail 20FPS play I could stand before needing a lie down. However, I am ready to tell of my earliest adventures in its world of pirates, monsters and magic, as The Risen Report returns.
I'm a pirate. I'm on a boat. There's a fight. I'm on the shore. A beach. An island. A quest for lost treasure. A sister.
]]>Risen 1 was 50% dark, strange brilliance and 50% a frustrating descent into grindy nothingness. Diarising that first, fascinating, cruel, strange half was one of my favourite experiences on RPS. Conversely, playing Risen 2 was one of the most deflating, despite it being about pirates and featuring a pet monkey. If you've got pirates and monkeys in your game and you still mess it up, you really have gone wrong.
Now Risen 3 looms, and returning devs Piranha Bytes (they of the original Gothic games) are trying ever so hard to convince us that fans of brutal, gritty, wide-ranging fantasy RPGs are getting what they want this time around. Their 11 minute sermon about how Risen 3: Titan Lords will Do It Right even kicks off with an F. Scott Fitzgerald bon mot: "don't forget who you are and where you came from". I.e. "look, honestly, we're basically making a Gothic game again."
]]>Hark! There, off on that obscure isle surrounded by countless biting piranhas, a new Risen has arisen! The Gothic spiritual successor series has previously dazzled with its ambition just as much as it's disappointed with technical troubles, tedious conversations, and bland helpings of fillery gruel. If you want to understand the series' charm, I highly recommend Alec's diaries of the first game, as they're captivating reads and also there are kittens. Risen 3: Titan Lords, meanwhile, will once again spirit players away to a new setting full of opposing factions and infinitely explorable nooks and crannies. Details below.
]]>Piranha Bytes' spiritual, Pirates of the Caribbeany Gothic sequel Risen 2: Dark Waters made its somewhat deflating presence known last month, but if one man's one thousand words on wot he thought about it aren't enough to cement your buying decision one way or another you can sample a demo now.
]]>Risen 2, Piranha Bytes' sequel to semi-great RPG Risen (spiritual sequel to the Gothic games) arrived a couple of weeks back, and I've been sinking hours of my time into it on and off since then. It puts you in the shiny-buckled boots of a neophyte pirate as he attempts to save the world from evil sea gods. Yeah, it's Pirates of the Caribbean: the roleplaying game. But does it offer the freeform, amoral delights of its predecessor, or the flabby tedium of three of the four PotC films? Tickle my pegleg to find out.
]]>That is not, of course, to say that Risen 2: Dark Waters snatches away your hard-won victories or pits you against a giant, 20-story-tall physical manifestation of the public's waning interest in pirates. Rather, the patch-eyed, peg-legged sea scoundrels have been known to use any means necessary to win a fight. Kicking below the belt, bringing guns to a swordfight, being Orlando Bloom, etc. But can such a varied arsenal stand up against seemingly unprovoked jaguar attacks? Risen 2's latest dev diary aims to answer that burning question and many more. Also, it strongly hints at attack parrots, which is something I didn't know I wanted until it turned out that I wanted it more than anything in this sad mortal world.
]]>I'd love to be a pirate. Not a real one because I don't think I'd enjoy murdering strangers to make ends meet, but I can certainly see myself drinking rum on a tropical island. Essentially I want to go on holiday somewhere warm and tranquil, and despite the mythical sea beasties, slavery and violence, Risen 2 is set in the kind of island paradise where a man could spend an eternity watching clouds lazily drifting across the sky, galleons sharply cutting through the calmness of the waters and lead shot efficiently puncturing the rear of a rear admiral. Judging by the video below, people are going to expect me to do more than bask in the sun though. Shame.
]]>Putting aside everything else that Risen 2's RPG heritage might suggest, I have to say I appreciate the efforts made with that fantasy pirate theme. It's occasionally silly, but certainly harder-edged than your Pirates Of The Caribbean fare. There's something reassuring about this continued focus on jungle islands and salty sea-dogs, particularly after the shipwreck promises of the original Risen. The world the Pirhana Bytes team have crafted is both vivid and atmospheric.
Needless to say, I've been sacrificing precious hours of my life to a preview version of it, so I urge you to read on to find out more about its buried treasures.
]]>Not everyone inhabiting Risen 2's archipelago will be a pirate, although all players will start that way. But what is a pirate without an authoritarian regime to cock a snook at? The Inquisition, now in a world without magic, are "organised very strictly", which is why they have short haircuts and "walk around in goosestep". Crikey. They're just asking for a carefree buccaneer to rob their precious things. Then there are "the natives", with their shaman, warriors and hunters. Many of them have been enslaved and forced to work on plantations. As for the pirates? They're "drunk most of the time".
]]>This six-minute "making of" trailer for Risen 2 (below) is definitely worth a look. It shows off some of the environments in detail, but more importantly the developers take their chance to talk about some of the decisions that went into to making the archipelago world. A bunch of factors are at play in making Risen 2 the game it is going to be, not least of which is the implementation of a terrain engine, which was opposed to the usual handcrafted worlds that Pirhana Bytes had worked on. It's looking impressive, though.
The video does make the peculiar decision of mixing translated voice-overs with subtitles, which is a little awkward, but then perhaps that's just me. Anyway, it has added 43.7% to my anticipation of the game, which was already fairly high after the moderately excellent Risen.
]]>Speaking with Strategy Informer, Deep Silver (publisher of Risen 2) Daniel Oberlerchner said: "I can tell you that we are going to have the optimum experience across all platforms, and they are going to be different experiences. There IS a technology gap. Some studios say they are going to have the same quality across all platforms, which is to say you take the weakest platform - the Xbox 360 - and you have the same crappy textures for the Playstation 3 and the PC." He went on: "It was just a couple of weeks ago there was a PC game that was... *laugh* well, I don't really want to go into details, but our decision is that we want to have a really hi-res experience on the PC. There is no reason why we should create hi-res textures, then just make them blurry for a console version, then put everything back on the PC again - it doesn't make any sense."
]]>Risen 2: Dark Waters! Will it be shit? We just don't know. We do know that the first Risen was a pleasantly free-form RPG that had tons of potential and that this one is looking piratical. Now there are some new screenshots, showcasing the game's new firearms and also the fact that giant enemy crabs can be kicked onto their backs so you can get at their weakspots. That's innovation, right there. Poor crabs.
]]>It is tradition within the walls of Castle Shotgun to frown upon CGI trailers with a big bushel of frowns, but the trailer for Risen 2: Dark Waters has a number of frown-dissolving elements. 1) Pirates. 2) It's quite pretty. 3) Voodoo. 4) Firearms. 5) It means we're getting another Risen game, and it features pirates, firearms, and voodoo. All these things are backed up by the announcement from Deep Silver and Piranha Bytes, who say that the game will take place across a number of distinct islands, as your character seeks to persuade pirates to help him battle sea-monsters. The game will also apparently feature "dirty-tricks" in combat, which is either in keeping with the pirate theme, or worrying scatalogical. Either way, I'm on board.
Trailer below decks, etc. (Sigh.)
]]>Also on the comeback trail this week is Piranha Byte's RPG Risen. Piranha were the chaps behind the Gothic series, but having lost the license in a disagreement with former publishers JoWood went off to make a spiritual sequel instead. While JoWood's Gothic 4 was about as much fun as eating mildly poisonous cardboard shoes, Risen was 50% a genuinely brilliant game (and 50% a slightly tedious one) - here's my series of diaries on it, in which you can see my early surliness quickly become excitement. Risen 2 sounds like they're determined to fully go for it, rather than lurk in an awkward middleground between past successes and future ambition. Pirates! Guns!
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