Risen 2: Dark Waters Preview and Interviews

There hasn’t been much in the way of news for Piranha Bytes’ open world action-RPG Risen 2: Dark Waters recently, but luckily for us “not much” doesn’t mean “nothing”, as GamingLives has put together an article with a preview of the title and an interview with Deep Silver’s brand manager Daniel Oberlerchner (courtesy of the last E3):

As well as the impacting the graphics and style of the game’s aesthetics, the pirate theme has massively affected gameplay by introducing a dual wield system whereby you will no longer be restricted to typical RPG combat with a sword and shield. Instead, we now have the option of utilising what would normally be the shield hand for enhanced defensive tactics, such as throwing sand or salt in the eyes of the enemy. The option has also been added for additional ranged combat moves with muskets, pistols and other firearms, as well as throwing powder kegs, all while still retaining a sword or cutlass for melee damage.

It’s clear from the outset that Risen 2 isn’t merely touching on the nautical theme and shoe-horning in an eye patch for good measure, in the hopes that the audience will be convinced that it’s a pirate based adventure; this is the pirate lifestyle through and through. But what good is a pirate without a ship? Thankfully, Piranha Bytes have had the foresight to not only provide you with the rank of captain, but also your own ship, along with a crew that you can fully interact with and who will be affected by your allegiances with the various factions. One interesting point of note is that the crew shouldn’t be confused with your run of the mill role playing NPCs, as these can be given orders to accompany you on shore leave to take advantage of their specific skill set, be they range fighter, melee fighter or healer.

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With the first game, it wasn’t possible to just level up and spend skill points. you had to visit a trainer and spend gold with them, so if you didn’t have enough gold you couldn’t advance your skills, and you also had to find the trainers first will this stay with Risen 2 where you have to visit a trainer and spend gold to change your skill tree?

Yes, but what we don’t really have is a skill tree where you’ll just click an icon that’s not going to happen, because we believe that when you take skills out of the skill tree and place them as characters in the gaming world then you’re building up an emotional connection to those characters. So it’s very different when you level up and just click ‘˜yes I want to have this skill’ rather than when you have to go to the master and maybe the master isn’t ready to teach you because you’re not ready; it’s a hierarchy and perhaps you’re just an underdog so you have to work your way up to be worthy of being taught. So when you level up and have to visit a master who will see if you are ready to teach, that’s more personal than clicking a talent tree button.

Russian video game website GameStar offers us an English translation of another interview, this time with Piranha Bytes’ project director Björn Pankratz:

Please say some words about the storytelling. Will there be a non-linearity and how many endings are you going to make in this game?

Being able to solve a mission in different ways has been a focus in Risen 2 as it has been a focus to every Piranha Bytes game, and for Risen 2 we wanted to take this even further. So this time we made sure, that every important situation can be solved in several ways. For example the hero has to get past a guard. He can either bribe, fight or pick-pocket him in order to get the key he needs. And that’s only half of the options the player will have, but we cannot speak about these yet. So you see, there is a lot more information coming up in the following months.

Will the dialogue system be changed?

We don’t change a working system, but we improve it. This time the hero will have more distinctive answers that will help to shape his character.

And what about monsters? Are we going to see any unknown representatives of the fauna and what features are they going to have?

All monsters have been reworked, and many new ones have been created. When we decided to make a pirate game we didn’t want to just re-dress the game, but really adapt the world and the mechanics to it. So expect a lot of monsters from the ocean’s abyss in the game. We’ve also invested a lot of time to create special attack patterns and behaviours for each monster, based on their background story and living environment.