Xenith on 5/10/2009 at 10:33

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What is up with all the reviewers? Geez, if you're going to be an idiot at least do it in your cellar where nobody can see your hands growing out of your ass.

Me and two other people put together cash and bought this game the moment it arrived in the stores around here. We each had our turns playing it (roughly about 3 hours so all three of us saw about 9 hours into the game) before we decided we need a schedule so we don't fight each other like little kids over who get's to play. :joke:

It is very enjoyable and couldn't have come at a better time.

Here's to hoping for a DLC/Expansion of sorts that will be something like Night Of The Raven for Gothic 2. :D Cheers!

Thirith on 5/10/2009 at 11:16

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It's weird that even reviewing sites that liked, say, ArmA 2 (a buggy, unwieldy, non-mainstream release if there ever was one) come down pretty hard on Risen (some of which may be due to a dodgy Xbox360 port).

On the other hand, German games mag Gamestar gave Risen a glowing review - but they tend to get all nationalist if there's a German game that doesn't embarrass itself completely, so I was a bit suspicious when they basically praised the game to high heaven.

However, in this case I've hardly read anything bad on message boards about the game, so I guess for once Gamestar got it right. Which still doesn't explain why so many other sites have crapped on the game from a great height...

Briareos H on 5/10/2009 at 12:12

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This might very well be the case, but any person who's reviewing a cRPG, part of the Gothic series on a console first doesn't deserve to be ever read again. "In my day", magazines used to employ reviewers that had genre preferences and knew what they were talking about.

Anyway, I like Risen so far. I'm a few hours in and it's a standard Gothic-type RPG with interesting quests, a nice world and even pretty visuals (yes !).

mothra on 5/10/2009 at 12:52

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well, the game he described does not sound like the game I am playing. And I do not mean the controls or visuals but the options and open world you have at your disposal. he makes it sound like an Bioware title where there is constant hand-holding on your guest to become ueber. Risen gives you this "anything could happen" feeling. Anytime the island could open up and swallow everybody or you could miserably fail at your tasks and have no impact on the history of island at all...while Bioware makes it completely clear from day one that you are the shit and everything revolves around you and all the girls do find you sexy and interesting even if your awesome collection of bad ass sidekick characters could die and they then constantly remind you to feel bad about it.

Malf on 5/10/2009 at 13:47

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I do have a savegame right before I opened the door, but that's not ideal, as I really did a lot after opening it, including finding another 3 Hero's Crown plants which I promptly turned in to permanent dexterity potions.
So in other words, a good 3-4 hours of play, if not more, something I'm not that excited about having to repeat.

As for my route through the game and time taken, I'm a pretty compulsive player of games like this, and played all weekend.

I went the "Bandit" route, and got fed up with being broke in the camp, so half way through doing quests there, I fucked off to Harbourtown to learn some decent skills, like pick-pocketing, sneaking and lock-picking. That made things a lot easier when I finally left town.

It's a lot tighter than Gothic 3 was, but it's nowhere near as ambitious as that game was. Note that I'm not saying it's a bad game in the slightest; on the contrary, it's the best RPG since The Witcher.
It does feel quite constrained however, and there are a lot of walls placed in the world that I'm sure were only put there to create the illusion of size by making the player go around them.

As for a gameplay-mechanic comparison with Gothic 3, it's identical, except they trimmed the fat that never got finished in Gothic 3 (such as dual-wielding and poisons), and added the dodge system, which makes wild animals nowhere near as irritating as they were in Gothic 3.
It's a shame we lost the scale and the town uprising stuff though. Even though it has been slammed continuously since it was released, I've NEVER seen another game do the rebellion thing as well as Gothic 3 did it.

Edit:
Oh, one more slight criticism of Risen and the Gothic games in general. I'm getting a little fed up of the 3 faction either/or system.
Why can't I be a bandit and a magic user? I was hoping I'd get some magic when I went to see the Druid, but nothing. I wouldn't criticise it if this were the first game Piranha Bytes had used this system with, but it's now the fourth.
The character system is pretty brutally balanced, so let me nerf my character by spreading learning points too thin if I want to.

Oh, and if I replay as a magic user, I don't think I'll invest that many points in Wisdom. Even as a bandit, having spent no points on Wisdom at all, I now have over 140 Wisdom thanks to the abundance of Stone Plates lying around.