Piranha Bytes Tuesdays
Well, the big news for fans of Piranha Bytes games this week was clearly the release of version 1.75 of the Gothic 3 Community Patch. Oh, and Risen 2 came out for PC.
I kid, I kid…well, about the aforementioned big news. Not that patches for one of the less-popular Gothic games aren’t cool and all, but…c’mon, Risen 2 did in fact come out (to the surprise of some), complete with a couple of pieces of launch day DLC. I guess that phenomenon is here to stay!
Reviews of the game have been…mixed. GameBanshee, for example, praised the way the game tried to set up each of its disparate islands as a kind of ‘Risen unto itself’, with new self-contained quests and secrets to unlock in each place. However, they — like many other reviews — caution that the game seems to have a number of performance problems, and character animations get singled out by a couple of reviews as a major negative element of the game. Critics also seem divided as to whether the pirate fiction of the game works.
One commentator, however, decided to mark the release of Risen 2 by looking back at its prequel and wondering at whether Risen might just be one of the best RPGs released in recent years. Some here might just agree; feel free to offer your thoughts in the comments.
Well after a couple of hours, I’m a tad mixed about Risen 2 to say the least.
The good points is that it does manage to keep what you’d expect from a PB game. So it has the “Gothic/Risen” DNA.
The downside is that it’s close to a technical disaster or rather a graphical disaster.
Charaters and NPCs have never been PB’s strongest point, mais here this tends to be just downright ugly from a graphical standpoint. It feels they tried some sort of stylisation that leans toward Cell Shading, but the result is very mixed to say the least. And the animations are just downright terrible.
Frankly Risen looked better than this.
But the worst here is how dialogues are presented. Basically after each sentence, the camera “jump” to another position and it’s just very poorly done and irritating. Frankly if you can’t do “cinematic” dialogues : don’t bother and stick to your usual fixed cameras.
(I’ll note one good point though: you have a companion with you and she talks during dialogue and that works well. Perhaps they’ll put a party system down the road!)
Environment looks rather good, altough the lush jungle bit well.. is mixed I think. And also there is some terrible clipping and pop up like I haven’t seen in a game in ten years. There are time sthis just gets downright ridiculous and it looks like ou see trees nad bushes growing and shrinking in real time in front of you. Gah.
Seriously this is just lame. Risen was polished. Not so much here really. And while the game performs adequately it’s nothingto write home about in term of framerate and it really should just run better.
(To compare to Risen’s bastard cousin : Arcania both LOOKED *and* PERFORMED better)
Sword fight is rather bad as well… It feels like a big step backward. Risen felt like it had finally managed to nail this faster version of G1/2’s combat. Here it feels like Gothic 3’s clickfest is back. Meh.
Not all these complains doesn’t mean the game ain’t fun… mais they do waste things a bit. Let’s just hope they patch it fast.
That being I also say I have trouble with the universe and pirate setting. It’s good in itself. But as I feared it just doesn’t feel like Risen at ALL. Yeah Risen had some piratey stuff, but the world felt mostly like the kind of medieval fantasy Gothic offered… here it feels you’re in some kind of Renaissance era with all the stuff you get from a POTC movie. That’s just not the same universe anymore. The fact that the hero doesn’t have the same look (though at least he doesn’t look like Wenworth Miller anymore) or voice doesn’t help either.
I’m not dismissing the game at that point of course, but it feels PB has sorta dropped the ball.