Risen 3 Impressions after completing Risen 3

No, but you can easily see it being improved, along with actually using boats to get around perhaps.

So what would you change? Say you had a very limited budget to do one patch. What small changes would you make to improve the game?

I would add a difficulty level, where your stats and/or glory drift downward due to your lack of soul (why not) and let that act to soak up the game's surplus money or glory.

Alternatively, making some big plot points eat up money or glory would be easy. Say persuading the captains costs 10,000 glory, or outfitting each fleet costs 5 x 5,000 gold say.

Something along those lines.

If there were some combat tweak I could do without throwing balance off, maybe let you take a little damage while dodging, that might go in too.

How about you?

I've posted something on DS forum along those lines:
- Because of Angry Joe type players who struggle from the first minute with the game, sword dancer requirements (currently 50 melee and 50 dexterity) should be lowered.
- Because of us who are different type and find the combat too easy, toughness attribute impact on resistances should be at least halved.

More:
Clothes DLC bonuses should be halved.
Sea monsters should definetly be optional and not designed like an unvoidable random encounter. They should work as the Crow fleet.

Minor:
The third lockpicking mastery training should be removed or difficulty on some chests should go up.
You can attack almost any friendly, KO then loot. This should be redesigned in a way you challenge them on a duel so you can't surprise them. Oh and some of them die instead of being KOed which is a shame.
Pickpocketing is underused, there are perhaps total of 20 NPCs you can pickpocket.



Glory costs won't help as unlike other PB games in this one smallvalue mobs eventually respawn so anyone can still go grind (50/55 GP - wildchicken, nakedbigrats, spiders, termites).
Dodging vs health... Nah. Maybe stamina/cooldown for dodges like for running? So you just can't roll endlessly.

Hmmm, I'd have a 'loot all' option outdoors too. I basically use Jaffar most of the time as he walks around and picks up all the loot except plants. If the telekinesis spell could grab all items in a certain radius instead of one item at a time, that would be good too. I'd also patch in about 5 more teleporters/island.

I thought I had killed everything....no wonder. I wanted to get Jaffar and get rid of the tedious sea monster battle, so I went to sea, killed the monster, and came back to port. Wallah! More mobs.

crpgnut, why do I have a feeling Jaffar is your love interest?

I mean… All he does is lurking to grab your shiny dingy.

Well, it is kinda cute. Kinda like an Ewok and ET had a love child.

That is a strangely accurate description of Jaffar.

crpgnut said:

Hmmm, I'd have a 'loot all' option outdoors too. I basically use Jaffar most of the time as he walks around and picks up all the loot except plants. If the telekinesis spell could grab all items in a certain radius instead of one item at a time, that would be good too. I'd also patch in about 5 more teleporters/island.

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Maybe PB should just install an Awesome Button for you while they're at it.

LOL

A teleporter on CrabCoast near the temple ruins and another near Leonard on Kila wouldn't hurt. Apart from that I see no reason for more teleporters.
Vacuum everything nearby would be… Diablo. No, no and no. I don't want an exploration game turned into that.

I just finished it myself, I liked it a lot but by the end I was pretty tired of the combat. I think they really could have done with a few more monster types, especially on the final island - even there, there was nothing new, just more shadows. And I expected the areas that open up in Chapter 3 to have harder enemies, but it was more of the same again.

HiddenX said:

@Maylander - good review.

I'm only halfway through the game, but I agree to most things you said already.

PS:
The German voice overs are good.

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Question. In the English version a number of supporting characters have British accents. For some reason whenever we Americans want to display a character with class we typically throw in an English accent. How does that work in the German version? How would you define the accents of the supporting characters in Risen 3?

Is it a world wide phenomena to throw in English accents to impart a type of class or is it just something we Americans do?????

Dajjer said:

Question. In the English version a number of supporting characters have British accents. For some reason whenever we Americans want to display a character with class we typically throw in an English accent. How does that work in the German version? How would you define the accents of the supporting characters in Risen 3?

Is it a world wide phenomena to throw in English accents to impart a type of class or is it just something we Americans do?????

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In German it is usually not done via an accent. If you want someone to sound distinguished or classy in German, then it's usually done in High German via their language using a stilted style with many foreign words or a nasal (kinda Frenchy sounding) tone.
Accents usually have the opposite effect. High German is considered "classy" and if you speak with a heavy accent like Saxonian, Bavarian, Swabian, Baden dialect, low German etc. you're sounding like a local yokel. Possibly the only somewhat classy sounding dialect is the "Wiener Schmäh" (Viennese charm).

A concrete Risen 3 example would be Doc Cunningham in that pirate camp on Kila. He is portrayed as a classy character in the German version. You can listen to a sample in this video starting at 08:30 (not exactly stellar voice acting though... it sounds too forced).

Moriendor said:

In German it is usually not done via an accent. If you want someone to sound distinguished or classy in German, then it's usually done in High German via their language using a stilted style with many foreign words or a nasal (kinda Frenchy sounding) tone.
Accents usually have the opposite effect. High German is considered "classy" and if you speak with a heavy accent like Saxonian, Bavarian, Swabian, Baden dialect, low German etc. you're sounding like a local yokel. Possibly the only somewhat classy sounding dialect is the "Wiener Schmäh" (Viennese charm).

A concrete Risen 3 example would be Doc Cunningham in that pirate camp on Kila. He is portrayed as a classy character in the German version. You can listen to a sample in this video starting at 08:30 (not exactly stellar voice acting though… it sounds too forced).

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Thanks M, that is some very cool information you imparted. I feel I gained some IQ points today.

Finished the game after 50+ hours as a Voodoo Pirate.

Solid game - 7/10 base rating

+ 1: if you are a fan of great gameworlds, exploring and secrets
- 1: if you are a fan of tactical interesting combat
+ 0.5: if you are a Gothic traditionalist
- 0.5: if you like deep interesting stories spanning over the whole game/series
+0.25: if you like crafting, alchemy, spells etc.
-0.25: if you are not into filler combat
+0.5: if you like whimsical and rough humor
-0.25: if you are not into action sequences
+0.25: if you like memorable characters

let's see - final score:

7+1-1+0.5-0.5+0.25-0.25+0.5-0.25+0.25 = 7.5 for me

HiddenX said:

Finished the game after 50+ hours as a Voodoo Pirate.

Solid game - 7/10 base rating

+ 1: if you are a fan of great gameworlds, exploring and secrets
- 1: if you are a fan of tactical interesting combat
+ 0.5: if you are a Gothic traditionalist
- 0.5: if you like deep interesting stories spanning over the whole game/series
+0.25: if you like crafting, alchemy, spells etc.
-0.25: if you are not into filler combat
+0.5: if you like whimsical and rough humor
-0.25: if you are not into action sequences
+0.25: if you like memorable characters

let's see - final score:

7+1-1+0.5-0.5+0.25-0.25+0.5-0.25+0.25 = 7.5 for me

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I haven't finished it yet, and probably never will, but let me go through your chart and see how I rate the game:

7+1,na, na, na. +.25, -.25, -.25, didn't apply in the English version. 7.75 would be my score on your chart and I'll say that's about accurate.

I'm generally not a big fan of using numbers as a verdict, as it's so hard to objectively compare games of different eras to each other. That said, Risen 3 is probably in the 7,5-8,5ish region for me. I guess "not quite at the top, but near it" is accurate enough.

It's a bid sad, it could be easily a great game in the 8.5 to 9 range if PB made the enemies harder, but a lot less of them. Improving the overall balance of combat, spells and gear would be good, too (*).
Heck, I was a Voodoo Pirate and except for Parrot Flying I never had to use any kind of spell. And you should be vulnerable while rolling.

(*) If I think about it, this re-balancing should be still possible - is someone from PB reading this site?

Yes, it should be possible to re-balance it, though it would be a bit of a challenge. It is currently expected for players to be able to "complete" the islands in any order. In order to balance it, the tougher enemies would have to be quite a bit tougher, and reserved for "high level zones" such as the area near skull caves. Such areas would then either be off limits or something the player would be expected to come back to later on, perhaps with some sort of notification from an NPC about how "that area is very dangerous, you'd best be prepared", similar to how the orc lands in Gothic 1 was handled (there are people posted at the entrances who tell the player it's very dangerous).

Edit: In fact, it sounds like something they could do in an expansion, similar to how NotR significantly changed Gothic 2.

Made a final push and finally finished Risen 3 tonight. Overall, it was a decent game and I'd still rate it somewhere between 7 and 8. Exploration is the major forte of the game and combat is its greatest weakness. The biggest downer is the lack of creature variety. Once you've been to your 2nd island, you won't find many new creatures for the rest of the game. Finding stuff stayed fun through several islands though I wasn't picking anything up at all for the last couple islands; I didn't see the point. With potions I was over 200 in Crystal Magic. Even the final boss didn't last long enough to teleport more than once and I didn't need to heal except once and I wasn't really trying to avoid damage. Way too many arcarde-y sequences that just don't fit in a pc crpg. Another big miss was the way men outnumbered women about 3000-1. Give me Skyrim anyday! Did like the dance the native women did though

Steam thinks I played 101 hours and since I restarted a couple of times and I walk away from my pc quite a bit, I'll guess the actual time of the playthrough to be about 70 hours. That's worth the price I paid, and I'm satisfied from that standpoint. Now I get to pick between finally playing past the beta areas in D:OS, the Pillars of Eternity beta, or the early access version of Heretic Kingdoms.

crpgnut said:

The biggest downer is the lack of creature variety.

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Really? I'm surprised to see that complaint coming from a big Elder Scrolls fan. I thought the creature variety was decent enough. Better than the last few TES games at least.