Risen

Piranha Bytes is best known for the Gothic RPG series, three games that are highly touted for their unique gameplay, large expansive worlds and unusual story. The Gothic series has received its share of criticism as well, for issues such as poor performance, clunky controls and a plethora of bugs. Due to publisher JoWood retaining the rights to the Gothic name after the two split up, Piranha Bytes latest title, Risen, will be seen by many as being the spiritual successor to the Gothic series. In reality Risen is more that a spiritual successor, it is Gothic 3, and is one of, if not the most, uninteresting and unoriginal RPG’s to date.

Story & Questing

Just as in the Gothic games, you play the role of the soft spoken, nameless hero. Only this time the game begins with Mr. Nameless as a stowaway aboard a ship that happens to get caught in a nasty storm and is eventually capsized and sank. The nameless one eventually awakens on a beach to find that he and a voluptuous maiden are the only two survivors from the sunken ship. At some point, nameless will find that something is amiss on the remote tropical island due to random temples springing up from the ground for no apparent reason.

Early on nameless will learn that there are two forces at odds on the island; the Inquisitor and his Warriors of the Order, and the bandits led by the charismatic Don Esteban. The choice of which faction nameless will join will largely depend on how the player wants to develop the character combat-wise. The bandits focus on swords, axes and archery; the Warriors of Order use staves and combat magic. There is a supposed third neutral faction, the Mages of the Volcano, where nameless can receive magic training, but it still requires joining the Monastery and being trained along side of the Warriors of Order.

You don’t necessarily join a faction right off the bat, instead you will be performing a series of quests that will gain you favor with that particular faction. Regardless, the quests will fall into one of two categories:  fedex or gathering. If nameless is not out killing something for someone, then nameless is out running about getting something from someone to give it to someone else. There are a few standouts, like the time I had to investigate and gather clues to solve a murder, but even that eventually became a chore to finish.

The questing is made all the more frustrating when trying to use the game’s limited quest journal. Quests listed in the journal are divided by category: World, Harbour City, Volcano Keep, Bandit Camp and All. There are also three maps that the player can view in the journal: World, Region and Quest, with clicking on a quest showing any dialog pertinent to it.  The frustration comes from the lack of information that is presented to the player. The game manual states that there are hints in the quest text and on the quest map that suggest what needs to be done next. The Quest map will provide the locations of the quest giver and the person or persons that you may need to talk to, but the quest journal will never update the quests until they are completed and the quest text is often vague and uninformative.

In one particular instance I was given the task of finding someone to relieve a person of his duty of shoveling pig manure at the Monastery. No names were given, which suggested that I was going to have to talk to everyone, but the quest map showed the location of three possible people who would take the job. All three gave the same response of “No Way”; there was no further conversation from either of them on how to convince them to do the job, and no information on how to proceed with the quest. Another time I was given the task to sneak into the Don’s house in Harbour City to retrieve a family heirloom. The quest text mentioned a secret room that can only be accessed by activating a switch found behind a picture on the wall. I then spent the next thirty minutes investigating each and every picture on the wall to the point where I just began clicking the left mouse button till one of the pictures finally activated the secret door (when a player looks at an item in game, the name of that item is displayed above it. I assumed the same would be true in this case…but it wasn’t). Nearly as bad is losing favor with the Bandit Camp for some unknown reason, as well as loosing the ability to make progress on any quests in order to gain the Don’s trust.

The pacing of the game is really affected by situations like these. There are some decent quests in Risen, but ultimately the player will spend more time going from point A to point B then they will doing anything constructive in the game. Of course there is the possibility of completing a quest before it has been given, such as the time I decided to gather grain that was on the ground, or the time I pick pocketed a guy and stole the nice looking armor plate he had him, only to see some quest information flash on my screen indicating that I had an item that was needed.

Combat

If there is one common complaint about the Gothic series, it would be its cumbersome fighting system and inability to handle group combat. Risen uses the same revamped control scheme that Gothic 3 introduced, the single button attack and defend model.

To attack with a melee weapon, fire a bow or crossbow, or to cast a spell, you press the left mouse button. If you have a melee weapon, or later when you have a shield, you can block and eventually parry incoming attacks by pressing the right mouse button. This simple and easy approach gives the combat an action RPG feel, but fails in its execution as it is anything but easy. The controls feel clunky and unresponsive due to slow animations, often resulting in over attacking, leaving the player open to counterattacks because nameless hasn’t finished with his swing animation. Risen also uses an auto-target instead of something useful like TAB targeting. It may not be noticeable when fighting against a single target, but does become a huge hassle when facing more than one opponent, often resulting in a quick reload.

When you draw your weapons, nameless will lock on to the nearest enemy, indicated by the name of the enemy appearing over their head. There is no button to switch targets; instead you move the mouse towards which ever enemy you want to fight. This becomes problematic when the enemies eventually bunch up in front of nameless, resulting in the player mistakenly targeting something behind the original target. Then there’s the problem of trying to defend against multiple enemies that have moved to either the side or behind the player, as well as enemies having an uncanny knack for interrupting attacks, something that leads to certain death if they are allowed to flank the player.

The game is also unforgiving difficulty throughout, not only because of the horrible combat, but also from Risen refusing to give the player information about potential enemies. Because of this reticence, a player will not know the difficulty of an enemy until he is engaged in combat. Again, this will result in more than a few quick reloads.

Skills

Risen is a skill-based RPG, so for every opponent you vanquish and every task that is completed successfully, the player is awarded experience. Once the player has gained a certain amount of experience, they will increase in level and gain a certain amount of Learning Points to spend on skills and attributes. The skills and attributes in Risen have been slimmed down and refined when compared to what was in Gothic 3.

The attributes are Strength, which is for melee combat; Dexterity, which is for ranged combat; Wisdom for understanding magic seals; Mana that controls how many spells can be cast; and Hit Points. There are also a fair number of skills broken into categories: Combat, Crystal Magic, Crafting, Rune Magic and Thievery. Due to the amount of skills available, the player will never be able to max them all out, so it’s best to max out a few of the combat skills in order to have some left over for the secondary skills such as those in the crafting and thievery set. Increasing attributes and skills takes Learning Points and gold, with training becoming more costly the higher the skill goes.  This will have the undesired effect of making the game feel like a grind at times. The player will spend countless hours fighting wolves, moths and gnomes not because they have to, but because they will need to harvest, scrounge and loot for as much stuff as possible just to make some gold.

Graphics & Sound

Visually, the island is beautiful and the day/night cycles are a nice touch. There are some nice green fields, dense forest brush, swamps and waterfalls, rundown dilapidated ruins, a monastery and Harbour Town - all look great and have a good amount of detail. Piranha Bytes has done a wonderful job with the design of the island; it may be small but there is a lot of real estate to cover. Playing during the game’s night cycle can be a bit of struggle though, due to the game being just too dark to see much with no options for increasing the brightness. It’s too bad that the rest of Risen looks subpar at best. Clothing, armor and weapons have very little detail; there are few character models so they repeat themselves; and character faces are flat and devoid of life. Probably the most impressive thing about Risen is that the game does feature full voiceovers for the NPCs, with most well delivered. There is background music in the game as well - it’s not great, but it’s nice to have and does an adequate job of setting the mood for the game.