The ability to instantly heal yourself by spamming rum/grog ruined the boss battles anyways. They should have kept the drinking animation from previous PB titles.
Yeah. It unbalances combat and hurts immersion in the process.
On a slightly similar note, I don´t like the changes done to crafting presentation - I´d prefer these to be presented in-world and not on a separate screen and I miss the multistage smithing, immersion and all.
The hero also can´t sit anywhere, but … that´s not really an outrage material
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I´m also not very fond of items not having requirements anymore.
On a different note, one other thing that came to mind is that the game is a bit frontloaded in certain features - on the first island we can witness termites actually working and I haven´t noticed anything like that afterwards, also on the first island there´s use for certain cannons which I´ve found pretty cool, but I haven´t come upon a similar type of "puzzle" anywhere else (well, maybe except for certain artifact being useful in one of the temples, but that´s a bit different type of interaction with the environment) and, at last, I haven´t found any notable use for monkey after the first island, Sword Coast and Antigua (I may have missed some, of course), neither there were any minigames besides lockpicking after these three locations, but that´s not really a bad thing.
On the other hand, I´ve felt some companions became available a bit too late into the game, though that´s partially because I happened to leave the areas they´re in till last. I wouldn´t mind being able to spend more time playing the game with the full crew on board.
edit: Actually, I think the real problem (for me) may be the extremely brief endgame - if it was longer, more elaborate and involved the whole crew in some substantial capacity I probably wouldn´t mind getting some of the companions late.
Speaking of companions, I appreciated that the summonable ghost had comments during certain quests, area related comments and even dialogue with one major NPC. Don´t remember any direct convo with Patty though.
If you were to add all the islands together, it's most definitely bigger.
Indeed.
Though Risen has some fairly extensive dungeons which Risen 2 is unfortunately devoid of so that cuts into the difference a bit.