I recently finished playing Risen 3 (R3) and thought I post some impressions about my experience here for anyone who might be interested.
I’m a long-time fan of Piranha Bytes (PB). I’ve played all the Gothic Games and all the Risen games. To give you an idea of gameplay I’ve enjoyed a lot in the past, my favorite PB series is the Gothic series and my favorite game from them is Gothic 2 Night of the Raven (G2).
Overall, I enjoyed R3. I felt I got my money’s worth and that the game delivered a decent Gothic-like experience – which is a particular style of RPG I enjoy quite a lot. That said, the remainder of what I’ll write here are my criticisms (in the spirit of hopefully improved PB games in the future) as at this point there are plenty of reviews and user comments on the game to get a better idea of the whole game proper.
What comes next is my unrestrained ramblings which may contain spoilers so you’ve been warned.
Setting
The Risen series uses a pirate backdrop to tell its stories. This was less prevalent in Risen 1, became front and center in Risen 2, and then took a few steps back in Risen 3. I personally prefer the kind of fantasy setting Gothic 2 provided but never minded the pirate elements found in G2. That the Risen series chose to make the pirate setting a main theme is a decision I would have voted against in favor of a full blown G2-like setting. But R3 does manage to have quite a lot of locales and gameplay that give that G2 vibe so I did appreciate that.
Start of Game & Tutorial Island
Like Gothic 3, Risen 3 begins the game in the middle of a battle. Like anyone else, I can cope my way through this, but I don’t at all enjoy this approach. I can’t imagine that most people would like this kind of thing as you don’t really know the controls and the whole experience is kind of jarring. Secondly, unbeknownst to you, you are controlling a leveled character with notably better weapons and armor which will soon be replaced by an unleveled character and basic equipment after you have finished the tutorial island. As a new player, you are unlikely to be aware of any of this as you take in a brand new world, brand new game mechanics, and brand new UI. The result of all this is a sort of jarring and uneven feeling to the start to the game. I can imagine people making it part way through (or even all the way through) this start, getting the wrong impression about the game, and giving it up, which is tragic because the game actually offers up a lot of fun.
User Interface
The UI is pretty much the same as from R2. I personally don’t like it all that much and prefer a UI catered to mouse and keyboard capabilities of a PC. I also prefer an overlay UI that comes up over the game world proper. When you bring up the R3 UI, the game world disappears and is replaced by a full screen UI. This is another jarring mechanism which breaks immersion. The UI itself is laid out decent enough. But I don’t like the list style inventory and I think it would have been helpful to have more inventory filtering options as there are a huge number of items to acquire in this game. Also, when you use in game assets such as a treasure chest, forge, or alchemy table, the same kind of thing happens where the game world disappears and is replaced by a full-screen UI – totally immersion breaking.
Melee Combat
I chose to use melee combat as my main way of killing bad guys. Melee combat is frustrating and I don’t recommend it as your primary offensive over the course of the entire game. There are so many things to melee combat that drove me nuts I don’t really know where to start. There was the stupidly fast attack animations of monsters that could stun lock you over and over. There was the overly simplistic click-roll-click-roll bore-fest of combat. If there was a ledge anywhere within 5 square miles of where you were fighting a monster, you could be 100% sure that when you landed that final blow, the monster was going fling off of that ledge, forcing you to back track if you wanted to loot it. In fact, by midway into the game my fighting tactics always incorporated maneuvering enemies so that they wouldn’t fling off the edge of some cliff. I had varying success but it was annoying whenever it happened and it happened way too often. Eventually I joined the Demon Hunters and was able to incorporate magic into my fighting which made fighting monsters less annoying. But they still fell off ledges at every opportunity. Lastly, it makes no sense for groups of monsters to stand down while you fight one of them. Then again, had the developers made it where groups of monsters attack at once, that would have been annoying too. The only solution I can think of would have been a complete re-thinking of how combat works.
Difficulty Level
Risen 3 is too easy. I started on medium difficulty then quickly advanced to the hardest difficulty setting. But still, the game is just way too easy. Remember the trolls from Gothic 2? When you happened by one early on and foolishly decided to fight it only to be handed your hat? That kind of thing does not happen in R3. This has a devastating consequence for many of the resources the game offers – namely making them pointless. There are all kinds of skills you can learn from alchemy to forging to spell making. I never engaged any of them because I was never compelled to. So finding that rare herb or the hilt part of a sword becomes anti-climactic because you’re pretty much breezing through combat anyway. And the occasional times when I did have trouble, I’d just recruit Bones or Patty and problem solved. This was probably the most disappointing aspect of Risen 3 for me. The game never scared me or punished me to the point of looking into the game’s resources to eek out whatever edge I could lend myself. I just sort of rolled through each area no matter if they were populated by a shadow lord or a crab.
Boss fights
The good news on the few boss fights in R3 is that they don’t replace your carefully crafted character abilities with some cheesy boss-fighting mechanic a-la Risen 1. Well, one boss fight does employee a cheesy mechanic, but it was at least only one boss. The bad news, if you’re melee, is that the boss fights are annoying and take forever, but never really threaten your ability to survive the encounter – not even close actually. The spider boss on Kila took me about 15 boring minutes and I never came close to dying. It was pretty much the same experience with the end-game boss. Just a process of dealing with annoying re-spawns while slowly hacking away at the boss’s HP.
Final Thoughts
So after having re-read what I just wrote, it sounds like R3 is a dud of a game. But you’d be wrong. I still enjoyed the game quite a lot and if you are a fan of past PB games you don’t want to miss out on this one. The strengths of this game are character customization, exploration (PB always makes interesting landscapes and lots of Easter eggs to find), and NPC conversations – all done superbly. So many times I was amazed at how I’d go back to talk to some obscure NPC to see if they’d react to some quest I’d done and sure enough, they did! I’m a sucker for that kind of detail. Outside the context of G1/G2, R3 is a solid game and dense with content. I just keep longing for that G2 experience where you have all the strengths previously mentioned but also just crazy hard where you have to really eek out every resource you can in order to progress.
I’m a long-time fan of Piranha Bytes (PB). I’ve played all the Gothic Games and all the Risen games. To give you an idea of gameplay I’ve enjoyed a lot in the past, my favorite PB series is the Gothic series and my favorite game from them is Gothic 2 Night of the Raven (G2).
Overall, I enjoyed R3. I felt I got my money’s worth and that the game delivered a decent Gothic-like experience – which is a particular style of RPG I enjoy quite a lot. That said, the remainder of what I’ll write here are my criticisms (in the spirit of hopefully improved PB games in the future) as at this point there are plenty of reviews and user comments on the game to get a better idea of the whole game proper.
What comes next is my unrestrained ramblings which may contain spoilers so you’ve been warned.
Setting
The Risen series uses a pirate backdrop to tell its stories. This was less prevalent in Risen 1, became front and center in Risen 2, and then took a few steps back in Risen 3. I personally prefer the kind of fantasy setting Gothic 2 provided but never minded the pirate elements found in G2. That the Risen series chose to make the pirate setting a main theme is a decision I would have voted against in favor of a full blown G2-like setting. But R3 does manage to have quite a lot of locales and gameplay that give that G2 vibe so I did appreciate that.
Start of Game & Tutorial Island
Like Gothic 3, Risen 3 begins the game in the middle of a battle. Like anyone else, I can cope my way through this, but I don’t at all enjoy this approach. I can’t imagine that most people would like this kind of thing as you don’t really know the controls and the whole experience is kind of jarring. Secondly, unbeknownst to you, you are controlling a leveled character with notably better weapons and armor which will soon be replaced by an unleveled character and basic equipment after you have finished the tutorial island. As a new player, you are unlikely to be aware of any of this as you take in a brand new world, brand new game mechanics, and brand new UI. The result of all this is a sort of jarring and uneven feeling to the start to the game. I can imagine people making it part way through (or even all the way through) this start, getting the wrong impression about the game, and giving it up, which is tragic because the game actually offers up a lot of fun.
User Interface
The UI is pretty much the same as from R2. I personally don’t like it all that much and prefer a UI catered to mouse and keyboard capabilities of a PC. I also prefer an overlay UI that comes up over the game world proper. When you bring up the R3 UI, the game world disappears and is replaced by a full screen UI. This is another jarring mechanism which breaks immersion. The UI itself is laid out decent enough. But I don’t like the list style inventory and I think it would have been helpful to have more inventory filtering options as there are a huge number of items to acquire in this game. Also, when you use in game assets such as a treasure chest, forge, or alchemy table, the same kind of thing happens where the game world disappears and is replaced by a full-screen UI – totally immersion breaking.
Melee Combat
I chose to use melee combat as my main way of killing bad guys. Melee combat is frustrating and I don’t recommend it as your primary offensive over the course of the entire game. There are so many things to melee combat that drove me nuts I don’t really know where to start. There was the stupidly fast attack animations of monsters that could stun lock you over and over. There was the overly simplistic click-roll-click-roll bore-fest of combat. If there was a ledge anywhere within 5 square miles of where you were fighting a monster, you could be 100% sure that when you landed that final blow, the monster was going fling off of that ledge, forcing you to back track if you wanted to loot it. In fact, by midway into the game my fighting tactics always incorporated maneuvering enemies so that they wouldn’t fling off the edge of some cliff. I had varying success but it was annoying whenever it happened and it happened way too often. Eventually I joined the Demon Hunters and was able to incorporate magic into my fighting which made fighting monsters less annoying. But they still fell off ledges at every opportunity. Lastly, it makes no sense for groups of monsters to stand down while you fight one of them. Then again, had the developers made it where groups of monsters attack at once, that would have been annoying too. The only solution I can think of would have been a complete re-thinking of how combat works.
Difficulty Level
Risen 3 is too easy. I started on medium difficulty then quickly advanced to the hardest difficulty setting. But still, the game is just way too easy. Remember the trolls from Gothic 2? When you happened by one early on and foolishly decided to fight it only to be handed your hat? That kind of thing does not happen in R3. This has a devastating consequence for many of the resources the game offers – namely making them pointless. There are all kinds of skills you can learn from alchemy to forging to spell making. I never engaged any of them because I was never compelled to. So finding that rare herb or the hilt part of a sword becomes anti-climactic because you’re pretty much breezing through combat anyway. And the occasional times when I did have trouble, I’d just recruit Bones or Patty and problem solved. This was probably the most disappointing aspect of Risen 3 for me. The game never scared me or punished me to the point of looking into the game’s resources to eek out whatever edge I could lend myself. I just sort of rolled through each area no matter if they were populated by a shadow lord or a crab.
Boss fights
The good news on the few boss fights in R3 is that they don’t replace your carefully crafted character abilities with some cheesy boss-fighting mechanic a-la Risen 1. Well, one boss fight does employee a cheesy mechanic, but it was at least only one boss. The bad news, if you’re melee, is that the boss fights are annoying and take forever, but never really threaten your ability to survive the encounter – not even close actually. The spider boss on Kila took me about 15 boring minutes and I never came close to dying. It was pretty much the same experience with the end-game boss. Just a process of dealing with annoying re-spawns while slowly hacking away at the boss’s HP.
Final Thoughts
So after having re-read what I just wrote, it sounds like R3 is a dud of a game. But you’d be wrong. I still enjoyed the game quite a lot and if you are a fan of past PB games you don’t want to miss out on this one. The strengths of this game are character customization, exploration (PB always makes interesting landscapes and lots of Easter eggs to find), and NPC conversations – all done superbly. So many times I was amazed at how I’d go back to talk to some obscure NPC to see if they’d react to some quest I’d done and sure enough, they did! I’m a sucker for that kind of detail. Outside the context of G1/G2, R3 is a solid game and dense with content. I just keep longing for that G2 experience where you have all the strengths previously mentioned but also just crazy hard where you have to really eek out every resource you can in order to progress.