Risen 2 Risen 2 impressions thread

after several hours of play, I think it's a solid rpg as is but I can not keep being disappointed, PB lack of ambition in its evolution or even regresses in certain matters, especially the roleplay part.
 
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Don't judge the game based on just a few hours of play. The "worst" part of the game are those few first hours, and then you start to discover the rich world out there. It's like a slow starting but great movie you turn off after 10 minutes without giving it a chance. I't easy to do that and say that the game sucks, but in fact you should only say that the beginning could be a way better and trust me, 99% of players will agree with you.
 
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for those running short on gold, voodoo is the way to go. specifically the feather earing only requires a tusk and feather to make but can be sold for 400 gold. if only i hadn't killed well over half the warthog and a bit less firebirds so early on...
 
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Then hint #2 related to it: With high cunning skills you can get the tool to take that stuff early from Sebastiano's daughter. And also those things respawn (only once), so make sure you revisit already cleared islands. ;)
But once you learn from already said stuff that you don't need to keep chunks of gold ore (hell I had 199 of those in inventory before going for Mara instead of selling them early), golden monkeys, crowns, masks and idols, you really won't have any money problems.
 
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Like I wrote yesterday, I've completed the game twice now. The first character chose Inquisition and muskets, the 2nd chose natives and voodoo + melee. All in all, I have to say that the choice is really significant. There are quite a few quests that can be solved in different ways, which gives the game fairly high replay value.

Ending stats:
- Blades: 10
- Firearms: 2
- Toughness: 4
- Cunning: 8
- Voodoo: 10

As far as muskets vs voodoo goes, I'd say they're about equal, but depend primarily on playing style. Voodoo has a lot more utility than muskets - easy ways of making money (as explained above), easy ways of solving certain quests using voodoo dolls, a summonable ghost that can help you during certain solo sections, a mind control spell that can solve certain tricky fights in a rather smooth way and a bunch of potions that can boost your skills whenever you need it. Muskets on the other hand has.. well, crazy damage output and an overpowered companion.

The biggest issue of using voodoo is that a lot of nifty stuff is only useful/available late in the game, while muskets are very useful right away. Also, you can get the best musket in the game about halfway through the it without too much trouble if you know how to get it.

In fact, voodoo is balanced similar to how magic is always balanced in PB games - starts out slow, but gains power towards the end of the game.

Anyway, I still find Risen 2 highly enjoyable, and will play through it a third time before putting it away for now. I'll max out endurance this time and focus on intimidation more than persuasion (silver tongue). Should be interesting, though it might be somewhat easy now that I know where to find all legendary items and so on.

Edit: Oh, I spent almost 34 hours on the voodoo character, which is significantly longer than the musket one, despite knowing most locations and quests. Muskets are just that much faster, especially early on.
 
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And I went to replay the game although I said I'll wait. This time with muskets…

The reason? PB joined EA train it seems:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2682851

I'm extremely disappointed with PB now.

3237335_700b_v1.jpg
 
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Have you tried what they say in that thread? I'm just curious if it's true and if it works for all versions.
 
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Ah apparently developers consider this hacking and piracy.
 
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You don't need voices - just turn subtitles on and that's it. I've checked the official Risen2 forum - all 3 DLC are fully functional inside every game version and you can enable all 3 by cheats, the only part missing are voices.

I never planned to buy the clothes DLC (nor ever will for any game), but I really wanted Temple of Air which isn't available on Steam yet, and now I find out that it's already in the game just without voices. What kind of crap decision was that?
Seriously I thought DLC fraud can't go lower than EA's, and I believe this wasn't PB's decision but Deep Silver's. But I still can't believe PB agreed to do this to fans. If there was no way to avoid the charade how DLC weren't a part of the game, then at least remove most of the files like EA did with ME3, then you can arrogantly tell customers to shove off because they have no real proof.

I will not cheat my game to unlock Temple of Air DLC and then play it. But also I will not buy that DLC nor any other that maybe comes for Risen 2.
I'm aware noone from PB and DS will read this and even if they did, they obviously don't care otherwise they wouldn't do this in the first place. But PB was one of my favorite game developers, I was numbering days till Risen 2 was out, couldn't wait for it. And now I can't even describe how disappointed I am.
 
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Finished the game.
Played on hard, voodoo path, found all artifacts, took me 42 hours.

A fun game overall and certainly still a Piranha Bytes experience, though not without shortcomings.

I´d say the strongest points of the game are world building, atmosphere (lively world, day/night changes), no level scaling, economy (both in terms of experience points and money) and, consequently, exploration.
The piratey setting turned out to be a fresh change over the rather nondescript setting of its predecessor.

Among the weakest stuff I´d count inclusion of QTEs, dungeon aspect and combat against monsters.

All the other stuff like character development, itemization, writing, combat against humanoids, voice acting, UI and quest design would be in the average to good range.

Don´t feel like writing point by point impressions, though I´d like to compare the game to previous PB titles in some aspects.

I would say that one improvement over pretty much all previous PB games is the progression in balance between major gameplay elements - the ratio between combat, exploration and questing remains quite in the same ballpark throughout the whole game. Some areas are more quest-heavy, some more combat-heavy, but there´s no sense of one element taking over during the last 1/4 of the game.
The reason for this is that due to the quest structure and area division the whole game is basically a huge "middle".
However, this does have one downside - due to effectively absent endgame, the finale feels abrupt and non-eventy.

The other clear improvement over other titles would be inclusion of dialogue skills - though they don´t affect quests dramatically, it´s nice to have dialogue options tied to character development.

Compared to its direct predecessor, the game comes with more chracterful setting, tolerable woman models and mostly better voice acting (for many people VA is likely the best in a PB game, but personally I have a soft spot for VA in the first two Gothics).

So much for clear improvements.

Now for some perhaps controversial stuff.
While I consider world design and exploration to be the game´s biggest strengths, I would say that compared to previous PB titles these mostly took a hit in one or more ways.

First, the world design. Besides the straight disappointing Caldera, the settlements are nice and feel lived in, but a bit too cramped/small, and the wilderness feels "real" and hand crafted, but I think the game underutilizes z-axis and is relatively lacking in variety, which results in a somewhat sparse amount of memorable, distinct places.
Some areas feel rather "corridor-y".

Second, the act of exploring. PB has been stripping down means of exploring since Gothic 3 and Risen 2 is their most stripped down iteration to date.
G1 and G2 had swimming, diving and climbing, G3 removed climbing and diving, Risen fortunately added climbing back with levitation on top of it, but removed swimming, Risen 2 removed levitation, assigned climbing to few clearly defined spots and on top of that gimped jumping - the result is traversing the environments feels very one dimensional.
No doubt, some of these limitations are mirrored in world design.

On a more positive note, the division into more areas maintains a sense of novelty, treasure huntery is fun and developers made sure that exploring places off the beaten path won´t go unrewarded.

All in all, exploring the Risen 2´s world is certainly fun and retains most of the signature PB craftmanship, but as a whole the exploration is probably weakest of all PB games. That it´s still strong compared to most of the other RPG-y titles on the market is a testament to how good for exploration PB games are.


At last, three disappointments.

First would be combat. After Risen, I think it´s a clean cut downgrade.
Shit, I´m late for the meeting! Sorry, the below probably won´t be very concise :).
Melee against single humanoid opponents is fun once one gains few abilities and understands how to use them, there´s good variety of weaponry, dirty tricks and voodoo are thematically fitting.
However, ranged combat is too straightforward, voodoo lacks in variety, dirty tricks aren´t useful against monsters and melee abilities are useless against monsters, besides kick and powerful swing.
To me, clearly the biggest issue is the lack of dodge, which really hurts combat against non humanoids and those constitute majority of opponents.
Companions shift balance significantly and are available for most of the time, firearms and a bit of running around can solve everything (even on voodoo path), once developed voodoo abilities turn into "I win" buttons, but are fairly dull to use…
Overall, the quality of combat felt quite similar to that of Gothic 3´s and that´s not really a good thing. They should´ve taken Risen as a basis and build upon that.

The second disappointment would be dungeon crawling aspect.
I thought they were on a good way in Risen, just made it too repetitive, but instead on improving upon it, Risen 2 cut puzzle elements and dungeon exploration almost entirely. Boo!!

Third, QTEs. They suck, period.

Oh, and DLCs. What a shame.

I´ve forgotten some other stuff, no doubt, but I have to go :).

Overall I consider Risen 2 to be a good, at times very good, game, but it´s no Gothic: NotR.
 
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I will not cheat my game to unlock Temple of Air DLC and then play it. But also I will not buy that DLC nor any other that maybe comes for Risen 2.
I'm aware noone from PB and DS will read this and even if they did, they obviously don't care otherwise they wouldn't do this in the first place. But PB was one of my favorite game developers, I was numbering days till Risen 2 was out, couldn't wait for it. And now I can't even describe how disappointed I am.

I will probably cheat, I'm a fan of PB myself and I bought all their games(pretty much the only games I buy) but this DLC bullshit is just plain annoying and disrespectful day 1 DLCs suck, they are basically parsing the game up so they could make more money. I'm not gonna spend another 10$ on the temple of air so cheating it is.
 
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Yeah, I was starting to wonder the last few weeks how could this be so long in development (on an already developed engine they just improved) and have the biggest budget of all PB games but still turn out to be shorter from what people were claiming… I had an inkling but hoped I was wrong…

Very sad if true (not going to test any time soon)…
 
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Jon, actually the claim that came from Deep Silver months ago was that I'll be shorter in landmass than Risen1 (true) but longer in gameplay time (absolutely untrue even with DLC).
cpt, I also have all PB games, hell I bought also digital versions of Gothics on GOG just to make sure I never lose them. So honestly I dunno what were they thinking. If they wanted a new fanbase of players who won't say a word about all this new DLC stuff, I can only say good luck. But an old fan, me, feels betrayed. And thus I won't use cheats nor will support that DLC.
 
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Jon, actually the claim that came from Deep Silver months ago was that I'll be shorter in landmass than Risen1 (true) but longer in gameplay time (absolutely untrue even with DLC).

Do you happen to have a link to any such statement from a Deep Silver person? Not saying you're wrong, just curious because in the German part of this planet where I'm coming from they always said that Risen 2 would be bigger, better, longer and even promised Gothic 3 proportions at one point.

As for myself, all I can say is that this is going to be a pretty long game for me thanks to an obsessively thorough approach to exploration. I'm at ~30 hours now and have only done Takarigua, the Sword Coast and I'm currently back in Caldera.
Since there is a respawn of monsters (and herbs?) when you visit an island a second time I'm going to have to do/clear Takarigua and the Sword Coast all over again when I return to those places later. Then open all the chests where I lacked the lockpicking level earlier on etc. etc. etc.
Well, hmmm... yup... *rolls Voodoo dice*.. I can see this get into the 60 or maybe even more hour range for me and thus at least double of what all the reviews are claiming.

I have absolutely no idea how someone can finish this game in 30 hours and claim with a straight face that they explored everywhere (and I mean everywhere), cleared every cave, killed every single monster (including the respawns), opened every chest, finished every quest, collected all the treasures, found every single legendary item and so on and so on...
I know I'm slow because I'm taking my sweet ass time as with every new PB game and I might be a little too obsessed with not missing anything but my guess would be that a seriously thorough first run through the game should take an average gamer somewhere between 40 and 50 hours at least.
30 hours may be possible on a first run if you do only nearly everything but it would have to be far from a completionist run.
 
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But why kill every single monster? Re-clearing an area won't provide any benefits whatsoever, especially not after you've got high enough skills and good enough weapons to kill everything in a few hits. Chests, treasures and so on don't respawn.

Also, you're probably not using quick travel considering how long you've spent so far. Risen 2 has quick travel right out of the box, no teleport stones needed, so you can just pop around incredibly fast once you've explored an area. Just like Skyrim, Oblivion and similar.

Quick travel is the main reason it seems shorter than Risen 1 to a lot of people. The actual content no doubt takes longer. There's simply less walking.
 
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I don't like quicktravel. Kills immersion for me and lessens the fun of exploration and the feel of traversing a real world that was always a huge part of the allure of a PB game. Also considering how modestly sized the islands are I do not really see myself even remotely tempted to use it (Skyrim after having seen all of he World was a different story)...

So 45-50 hours without quick travel is definitely acceptable to me...

But yeah, I too remember the claims Moriendor is noting among others . I am sure someone will say they meant the water too or whatever. In my neck of the woods we call that dissembling ;)
 
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I just finished a Voodoo/Toughness focused run in about 42 hours, and I'd say that the most disappointing thing about the game was the lack of development of Mara. It was sort of like Darth Maul in the new Star Wars, he was evil because someone said he was, not because we saw him repeatedly force choke people to death for minor infractions (ala Vader). The overall narrative was rather non existent as well, and instead focused on vignettes per island that moved in a more personal path rather than the grandiose.

Regardless, I enjoyed almost every minute of my playthrough, which was rather thorough. The exploration was very rewarding to me, and had the story been a little more involving, this game could have easily been PB best overall effort yet.
 
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I have absolutely no idea how someone can finish this game in 30 hours and claim with a straight face that they explored everywhere (and I mean everywhere), cleared every cave, killed every single monster (including the respawns), opened every chest, finished every quest, collected all the treasures, found every single legendary item and so on and so on.

That's because anyone claiming that is full of shit. The people who were finished in 2-3 days were trying to finish it that quickly. Some people just have that need to finish asap so they can hurry up and post about how they beat it.

I played pretty much the way you describe, except I didn't kill every single respawn. I'd have to check the time stamp on my final save game to be sure, but I think I got around 45 hours out of it.

I don't remember exactly how long Risen 1 took me to finish, but I don't think Risen 2 was shorter for me. Risen 2 is also significantly bigger than Risen in terms of land mass if you were to put all the islands together. I don't know how anyone could think otherwise.
 
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Regardless, I enjoyed almost every minute of my playthrough, which was rather thorough. The exploration was very rewarding to me, and had the story been a little more involving, this game could have easily been PB best overall effort yet.

There were a few things that detracted from game for me, but the story wasn't one of them. I thought the story was really good, but I agree that they could have fleshed out Mara a lot more.

The first thing that bothered me was the simplification of items. I really disliked how every food item you pick up is simply changed to "provisions". You also can't drop items anywhere you want like in previous PB games.

The second thing, which I've already mentioned in other threads, is the retarded QTE traps and mini-games. Thankfully they're not very frequent or it would really have brought the game down further.

I also felt the game started to become somewhat predictable towards the end. The sidequests and treasure maps stuck to the same formula throughout the entire game.

Finally, I ultimately found Voodoo pretty disappointing, especially in terms of variety. The Black Magic talent in particular was a huge letdown for me. I also thought Ritual was grossly overpowered towards the end.

Despite all the complaints, I still loved it for the most part. The voice acting in particular was phenomenal, and the game reeked of quality from start to finish. Give me the same thing again but with swimming and improved monster combat, and Risen 3 will be the best PB game ever.
 
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When I refer to the story I mainly speak of the pacing, and really, the way the ending panned out. I really enjoyed the 4 sub plots with the pirate captains and felt those were very well done. The Water Temple could have been an epic dungeon crawl including dialog with Mara interspersed to build towards a climax. As it was, I literally put a curse on her and 2 shot her with 6 skill points in Swords ;) The first hour and the last hour were a little disappointing I guess, but 95% of the game was PB through and through.
 
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