GB Feature: Risen 2: Dark Waters Preview

Deep Silver and Piranha Bytes hooked us up with a preview build of Risen 2 last week, and Thomas spent the last several days taking it through its paces. To find out what he thought of it and how the mechanics are being fine-tuned in the sequel, you’ll just have to head on over to our full four-page preview:

Skills are upgraded by the usage of trainers. Unlike previous Piranha Bytes games, this does not take any experience points; instead, it takes only gold but has a minimum requirement in the related attribute, and for certain skills you must have the preceding skill upgrade. For example, the “Muskets I” skill takes 500 gold and requires a Firearms attribute of 3, “Shotguns I” takes 500 gold and a Firearms attribute of 2, and both of those increase their related talents by 5 points. If you want “Shotguns II” (+10 shotguns talent), you will need both “Shotguns I” and a Firearms attribute of 5.

Each talent has 3 of those upgrades, which makes up 9 skills per attribute, and each attribute has a further 6 skills related to them. These are the more unique skills. For example, there’s learning to parry and smithing for Blades, the ability to shoot someone mid-conversation and gunsmithing for Firearms, learning to kick, distill and even regenerate health for Toughness, pickpocketing, sneaking, lockpicking and monkey training for Cunning, and creating dolls, scepters, talismans and potions for Voodoo.

It is quite different from earlier Piranha Bytes character systems in how it simplifies the spread of updates down to spending Glory on Attributes and money on skills. The skills not tied to talents are one-upgrade only, so lockpicking and pickpocketing are simply learned and from then on depend on your Thievery talent level on whether or not you can attempt something. Failing a test in Pickpocketing, Silver Tongue (persuasion) or Intimidation isn’t really possible, the PC will simply refuse to do them if you lack the requisite talent level. Similarly, breaking lockpicks has been removed, you need only one lockpick and then the required thievery level to pick open doors and chests, which takes you into a fairly simple unlock minigame reminiscent of the one from Oblivion. This minigame as far as I had got into the demo is impossible to fail, all you need to do is figure out the order in which to push up the catches, which is usually really simple.

Oh, and don’t forget about the five new screenshots taking up room in our image gallery.