Risen - 2nd Mood Clip

Dhruin

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Piranha Bytes and Deep Silver have released the second official "mood clip" for Risen. Here's their brief blurb:
Enjoy the second mood clip with impressions from the world of Risen, the upcoming epic roleplaying game from Deep Silver and Piranha Bytes. Visit the harbor city in bright sunlight.
More information.
 
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Graphically lacking IMO. LOTRO looks better. Hopefully the gameplay will make that irrelevant.
 
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Presumably it's much the same engine as G3 - given that still doesn't run all that well on current hardware, perhaps they're keepnig the poly count down for performance reasons?
 
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Presumably it's much the same engine as G3 - given that still doesn't run all that well on current hardware, perhaps they're keepnig the poly count down for performance reasons?

Have you tried LOTRO? Seamless world, beautiful graphics (with DX10). No object popping like we saw in this clip. Not exactly a spring chicken either. There is really no excuse for it.
 
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Presumably it's much the same engine as G3 - given that still doesn't run all that well on current hardware, perhaps they're keepnig the poly count down for performance reasons?

Different engine. G3 is JoWooD's property. Official word is that absolutely nothing from G3 made it into Risen.
 
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It does look surprisingly well... identical to other Gothics :)

Yes, I'm familiar with LOTRO. It does look nice. But they don't have access to/experience with that engine do they? They know what they know.

Lotro doesn't have as dense an art direction now I come to think of it... if you think of that wood where Tom Bombadil lives, west of Bree, it has nothing like the richness of a densely vegetated Gothic area... say around Okara or somewhere.

I agree G3 was poorly optimised. I finshed my CP 1,7 playthrough last night though:)
 
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...perhaps they're keepnig the poly count down for performance reasons?

Certainly. This one needs to run on the Xbox 360. PB won't be doing the port themselves but they need to make sure to stay within certain limits as far as the engine is concerned.

I still think it looks pretty damn good though.

What I'm more concerned about is their (once again) erratic, unorganized behavior. I remember very well when it became clear that they had fucked up Gothic 3 and when the first apologetic posts came flying in that they said they analyzed what went wrong and that they came to the conclusion that it would have been wiser to finish the core game systems (like the combat system) at an early stage of development.
Well, no shit, but yet here we are, some two years later with the game still a good ways but not too far from release and we're now told that the combat system that was publicly demo'ed at the RPC is just a "placeholder" because the real combat system ain't finished yet. Say what?

That's the kind of stuff that really worries me. They're not very good at keeping word. They originally led us to believe that there would be a large G3 patch (from them, not the community patch team) that would turn water into wine. That never happened. They promised they learned from their mistakes and would finish the core systems first for their next game. That didn't happen obviously.

That kind of stuff makes me a little nervous. I really hope that they got their act together but there are quite a lot of more or less subtle hints and signs (in addition to the above) that things might not be quite as rosey as they would like to admit.
But we will only know when the game is released, of course. Until then everything is admittedly just pure fear-mongering on my part :) .
 
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The xvid version looks a bit better and more fluid than the stream. The link was originally posted by Deep Silver in the WoG forum.
 
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Yes, I'm familiar with LOTRO. It does look nice. But they don't have access to/experience with that engine do they? They know what they know.

Yup. However I'm pretty sure if they had multithreaded G3 they could have streamed the art assets without affecting the main game loop thread. That would have eliminated the pause problem. Complex issue, but dumbing down the graphics to 2005 is pretty disappointing. But I'm just whining, all that really matters is the gameplay.
 
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Well, no shit, but yet here we are, some two years later with the game still a good ways but not too far from release and we're now told that the combat system that was publicly demo'ed at the RPC is just a "placeholder" because the real combat system ain't finished yet. Say what?
It's hardly their fault if you're not up to date. ;)

Who is doing the part, btw? I read something but can't remember.
 
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The xvid version looks a bit better and more fluid than the stream. The link was originally posted by Deep Silver in the WoG forum.

Thanks for that download, certainly worth grabbing. But sweet Jebus talk about a HUUUUGE step backward graphically though. Looks like Fable, low poly with higher res textures. The LOD object popping is really bad. Textures are soft. Models are really low poly. :(
 
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It's hardly their fault if you're not up to date. ;)

Hehe, yes, that seems to be the standard flip-flopper's excuse :) .

Who is doing the part, btw? I read something but can't remember.

You mean the combat part? I seem to remember that Mike [Hoge] was usually mentioned whenever the combat system came up as a topic in forum discussions or in the mags.
 
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Sorry, typo. I meant the port.
 
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This is an unfinished game so probably isn't optimised yet so the graphics could be better on release.
 
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It's their 4th attempt at more or less the same thing... to say there's technical optimsation to come is probably optimistic IMO. It's worth noting that G3 only looks good out to the LOD line as well. It would be nice if that were pushed further out. This quality of art right out to the horizon would be good...
 
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Well I played G3 with a pretty modded ini file to push out the far clipping plane, as well as the low poly mesh replacements in the far clipping plane.

Everything in Risen looks low poly, which amazes me considering all the object popping you see in the video. Why bother swapping LOD meshes when the objects are so low poly to begin with? Either they wrote a very unoptimized engine or they really fear the xBox360. I can understand them being gun shy after G3.
 
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Couldn't care less whether these graphics match LotRO. Just sayin'.

^This.

Plus if the gameplay is good it could look like Gothic 2 for all I care. Great plot and fun gameplay is all I want. If I want a pretty game I'll pop in F3 or Oblivion.
 
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If you want to know final optimization of the engine comes almost at the end of the development process. Most games that show videos use a pre-setup area that was specifically optimised to show a video but this is probably not since the videos they have shown are in a major city and it doesn't look like a mock up of one area. With that in mind most games on release would look the same or worse then promotional videos and screenshots. (since they use a pre-setup space it is usually pretty small so they can enhance the graphics more so release could be worse since they need to lower the graphics since there is more data to process.

Alistair: Read above since it was already mentioned that they needed to create a new engine since Jowood owns all of Gothic 3. That means creating a new engine or adapting middleware and then optimizing said engine as the creation of the game goes forward. As more is added to the game the engine will need more optimizing since whenever you add anything new there are always problems associated with it that need to be fixed.

PS. Most of the optimization would be at the end since full optimization at every step is a big waste of time. The optimizing they do during development would only be to keep it working and while they are working on the game they don't need ultra high end graphics since they are not there to play the game but to work on it and as long as everything is there that means everything works. Towards the end of development they will optimize it and make sure everyithing alright at the high end spectrum of graphics.
 
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