Risen 2: Dark Waters Q&A

RPGamer has put online another fan-powered Q&A, following the one they did in November, and this time they asked the questions directly to Piranha Byte’ project director Björn Pankratz. Here’s a snip:

Despite the open world design, dungeons in Risen mostly consisted of linear tunnels, which limited the usefulness of skills like sneaking and other non-combat options. How has this changed in Risen 2?
BP: While Risen 2 does feature many individually designed caves, the story’s main focus is definitely above ground. That way we want to avoid players spending too long on their own in a dungeon, like in chapter 4 of Risen, and make sure the story, puzzles, and combat are well-balanced in all the chapters.

After the huge sandbox world from Gothic 3, Risen was a return to the more focused, story-driven design seen in Gothic 1 and 2. Risen 2 appears to be much the same way. Would you ever consider making a game as large and open-ended as Gothic 3 again?
BP: We have always tried to learn from the experiences we made with our past games. We could imagine designing a world with a similar size to that of Gothic 3 again, and we almost did so for Risen 2. We believe that we can now tell a more captivating story by gathering the threads at certain points and adding twists. For that reason, we created an open world, but also implemented many more story elements this time.