Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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”.

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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.
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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 is some time in 2012.

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.
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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.)
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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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