Risen: A Guide
 

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I wrote/compiled a guide to Risen. It's 44 pages long (45 with the Table of Contents and title page) and includes everything about the game that's worth knowing. It's not just a copy/paste word dump either. I put a lot of effort into formatting the guide and arranging the information in a useful and accessible format, instead of just putting it out there. The appendix was made almost totally from scratch by me, keystroke by keystroke.

For the first time anywhere I've seen there's a clear, coherent and evaluated description of how to get yourself into the various factions. There are maps with descriptions of where to look for Ogre Roots and Hero's Crowns. There's an easy to use lockpicking cheatsheet so you don't have to savescum your way through Harbor Town each time you play. I've laid out all the plusses and minuses built in to choosing between axes, swords or staves (or Fireball, Ice Lance or Magic Bullet). There is also all of stuff you'd expect in a guide like this like a complete walkthrough, tables that list weapon stats and trainer locations, and the basics about armor.

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Condensed Table of Contents
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Introduction
Choosing a faction
Skills Information: Melee, magic, thieving, alchemy, ranged weapons, prospecting and smithing, skinning
Attribute Information: Strength, dexterity, wisdom, mana, hitpoints
Complete Walkthrough including highlighted points of importance and pictures or maps when needed
Console commands in almost all of their iterations
Tables on: Swords, axes, staves, bows, crossbows, armor, forgeable items, potions, skill boosting items, scrolls, magic runes, cooking, training
Maps of: Every Hero Crown, Ogre Root and Pixie Hat in the game, Teleport Rune locations, lock combinations for the town and swamp camp, NPC locations
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Download options:
[megaupload] [mediafire] (v1.3, English, 10 Apr 2010, 1.9mb PDF file)

If you like this guide please post a thank you of some sort in this thread or link to it from your site. This will keep the thread alive and hopefully it will show up on Google's radar.

The only thread related to this guide that I look at regularly is the one I posted at [Something Awful]. I will check in on the others (which includes this one), but don't expect quick replies from me anywhere other than the SA thread.

If you can translate the guide into another language that would be great! German, Russian and Spanish would be especially nice. Please be a native speaker in the target language if you're going to translate the guide. If you want to translate it send me an email and I can provide you with a .doc file to make things easier. When you're done I will include download links to your translation next to the English version above so that everyone can get it. My contact information is in the Introduction portion of the guide. If you're from World of Risen or Gamepressure I'd of course be honored to have my guide up on your site somewhere.

Please email me if you wish to host this guide on your site. I will generally be happy to allow you to do so unless you're going to somehow charge people to access it (in which case you're scum and won't ask me for permission anyway). Expect me to use your site as a download location in these posts if you put the file up, though I will point people to your download page, not directly to the file.

This guide/post is crossposted at:
English: [Deep Silver] [World of Risen] [Steam] [Rpgwatch]
Deutsch: [Deep Silver] [World of Risen]
русский: [World of Risen]
Française: [Deep Silver]
Italiano: [Deep Silver]

(I also wanted to post it on Gamespot and Gamepressure but their forums are garbage so I gave up.)

Thank You! I'll take a look at it.

Welcome!

All I ask from people that use the guide is that they post back in this thread with their opinions to keep it from falling off the forums.

Perhaps Gorath could make it a Sticky!!

Is there a PDF version?

I tried to convert it to PDF but the formatting got screwed up pretty badly so I left it as a .doc. Maybe someone else can try converting it for you, but I doubt it'll work.

Can you not open .doc or do you just prefer to avoid that format?

Checkout PDF Redirect. It's been nearly flawless for me and it's free!

http://www.exp-systems.com/

We could host it in our database.

Hey that worked!

I wanted to put it up in PDF anyway (plus there was a small mistake that I just caught).

v1.1 now up in OP. PDF version!



That'd be great. Put up the PDF please.

You could use multiupload if you want a bunch of mirrors.

Looks pretty complete,there's even Console commands(!!)

Great work :thumbsup:

VERY nice!

I'm saving multiupload for a later version where I'm sure I've ironed out all the kinks already. The filesize and name will become more and more similar as I do new versions and the primary way free file hosts check to see if the file is already hosted is by those two things. If a filehost thinks they already have that file they won't host it, so if I do multiupload now I might not be able to use it later.

BTW I registered to post my guide on this forum as an afterthought and so far it's been by far the most responsive one. Really surprised me!

Lots of Gothic fans here so Risen is quite popular

Now that you've got a PDF you could link the table of contents and create bookmarks.

My copy of Risen is on the way right now. Thanks for putting this together and posting it. I'm sure it'll be very helpful.

Haha maybe in a few days. I spent about a week on this guide so I'm a little tired of fixing it now — spent half of today translating parts of those posts into German and Russian and French and whatnot and crossposting to foreign language forums in the hopes that someone will pick it up and translate it. Need a break.

…think I'll go kill Gyger.

You do realise that this is probably the largest, most active Gothic/PB/Risen English Language site on the net!! :)

No longer. ;)

But back in the day we were the 2nd biggest Gothic forum in the world. Including WoG. A lot of PB fans are still around.


I bet Myrthos would agree we host the file on our servers when it's (nearly) finished. That's more personal than a bunch of anonymous file hosters.

He may not be able to do so because, while I have reworked, rewritten and massively reorganized it, the maps and the text of the walk through are orginally from the gamepressure.com guide. Gamepressure can't really complain about some guy on the internet taking it and reworking it and offering it for free, but they might not like another site hosting it.

By the way, I did give credit to the gamepressure guide on the first page of mine. My guide, thanks to largely to better organization, much more thorough item and stat analysis, and a much better appendix, is at this point much better than the gamepressure guide — but a lot of the text in the middle portion of this is still theirs.

Good point. You are right, we can't host it of other people's work has been used extensively.

I've already got two tards at World of Risen trolling me about that, so just let me say that I don't expect any hosting or anything from anyone. I just wanted to make this available to the people playing the game. I wrote this for myself initially and other people on Something Awful heard about it and wanted it so I polished it and published it for them. The guide is all about assembling and making sense of the scattered and confusing information already out there on Risen — this makes it a better product than anything that's out there, but it's not an original product (nor, to some extent, are any of the guides out there).

In any case, I'm glad some people are enjoying it and hope they get a lot of use out of it.

Edit: Slightly new version of the guide up. I've adjusted my opinions of some skills somewhat after cross-testing. Biggest change is my opinion on the magic crystals.


Edit: Another update, last one for a while. I've added a map with teleport rune locations and tables on bows and crossbows, plus I've done a little cleaning up.

Original or not, I thank ye for all the effort you've put into this.

Yup, same here. I'm playing through the game, and I'm consulting your guide for little pointers. It's very helpful.

Wow, thanks for making an organized guide.

For those of you enjoying the guide, thank you for the thank yous.


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Risen is finally available on Steam again — they've got it set at 40 bucks though, which is about what it cost when it was a new release.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/40300/

I've finished this game once and since the ending was so disappointing, I won't stomach another playthrough…
Thanks to this guide, I'll see what other paths I could take

Downloaded it, not checked it yet, but thx anyways for the effort you put in to it

@risenguide.

Considering the the well presented work that *you* did with R1 - do you have any similar plans with R2…?
…would you approach it differently second time around? - eg: not using the work of others or perhaps with consentual agreement/permissions of integrated input from others? - etc'

…just interested (now is the time to plan ahead.) ;)

I sometimes make little guides for the games I play mostly as references for myself. However, these little guides almost never have walkthroughs, and instead are basically rough drafts of the kind of stuff present in the appendix section of the Risen guide. For example, when I was playing Morrowind I made a list of the most easily accessible sources for spells and for important alchemy ingredients using Balmora as a location, but I never actually wrote anything about "First you go here, open the third door in the hallway…"

Also I'll have to get a new computer before I'll be able to play Risen 2. My old beater can barely handle Risen on pretty minimal settings.

The short answer is "probably not."

I'd just like to add my thanks to your effort to making this guide, it really helped with my first play through, especially in Harbor town. I imagine writing a full walkthrough from scratch would be tough, but most players don't need a full walkthrough. I thought the most valuable part of your guide was the organized info and the tips. Maybe if you get around to playing R2 you could just make a handy reference and errors to avoid guide for us :D.

I've been making a list of my own tips and useful info, notably about the most of effective use of Learning Points, stat potions and stat herbs (min/maxing so sue me). Maybe you could add that to the appendix of a future version. I've also been making a note of unpatched bugs, some of which aren't immediately apparent but can be really annoying. You listed some like the archery bug, but there is also the fact that lvl 10 for all melee weapons skills do nothing so there is not point in training them(max attacks in a combo is 5 and thats if you start with a lateral blow). The the crystal skills also suffer from the archery bug in regards to their casting speed, IE no increase in speed until lvl 10 where speed doubles.
That doesn't effect point placement choice as much because damage obviously increases, it does make having lvl 10 more valuable though.

I'm sure about these I tested them quite a bit, but you should take a look at it. Just use the console to adjust stats and compare lvl 1 to 9 and than lvl 9 to 10.

anyway thanks again, let me know if you want my info for your guide.

How can someone use a walkthrough in an RPG. Don't you loose the entire game if you just read about everything before?

It depends on the walkthrough some well written ones can serve as a guide without spoiling too much. I use walkthroughs from time to time, usually as a reference after that fact to make sure I haven't missed anything in an area or if I get stuck on something. I imagine thats how they are used by most people. I also really like this guide for its appendix it collects all the information about weapons and items plants and such so I can make decisions on character builds and so on. Thats probably the most valuable part of the guide to me. Oh and Harbor town is a confusing network of quests and people ( and if you do some you can't do others) and he really straightens things out. So yes walkthroughs have spoilers but I doubt most people use them by reading the whole chapter and than playing that chapter.

Anyone managed to make the quest with the eastern temple ? I am there with the 3 brothers but when I talk to one of them he says I need to take them to the entrance … but they are at the entrance just that it;s blocked.

The 3 brothers quest is listed in the walkthrough - the guide is very handy for referrence.

thanks for the guide man, it's very nicely written. :)

Risen has had its first price drop on Steam recently -- you can get it for 30 bucks now!

RISEN is on sale at Steam this weekend, only $14.95 until Monday!

Wanted to thank you a ton for this guide. Very detailed and obvious you put a lot of time and effort into making it. Again, thank you very much!

A thank you from me for the guide. :)

cool will check this out
thanks man