Risen 2: Dark Waters Interview

Spong is offering yet another interview with Deep Silver’s senior brand manager Daniel Oberlerchner on Piranha Bytes’ upcoming pirate-y sequel to Risen, touching on subjects such as why pirates were chosen as the focus of the new title, how the developers are handling the multiplatform development, how they’re going to handle the growing social network/iOS market and more. Here’s a sampling:

SPOnG: You guys are still making PC games, and as you said the PC version of Risen 2 is ahead of consoles at this stage of development. With a lot of large developers seemingly dropping the PC in favour of consoles, what do you think is the status of the industry there at the moment?

Daniel Oberlerchner: I think it’s very hard to say it’s dying, because it’s more like it suffers ups and downs. I think it’s definitely changing rapidly. What you’re seeing right now is people are focusing on micro-entertainment, I would say. And that’s definitely one influence that comes from the console generation – people playing on consoles tend to just come home from work, pop in a game and play for ten to fifteen minutes.

Risen 2 is really a hardcore game, which means that it’s not designed to be consumed in chunks. When you’re deciding to make a game in chunks, you have to make sure that the quests and dialogue are designed that way. That’s what we didn’t want to do, because when you do that it will just hamper and hurt the gameplay. You can’t do complex stories because people will be annoyed when they switch off the console for two weeks and then switch it on again, forgetting where they left off.

We made sure to have different features in the game so that players are always tracked in where they are and what they’re doing. We really didn’t want to adapt the micro-entertainment stuff. We really think there are enough people out there who are dedicated and want to explore a hardcore game.

SPOnG: You don’t think you guys are going to be left behind on PC, because you’re not interested in jumping on board with all the micro-entertainment games and Facebook stuff?

Daniel Oberlerchner: What we will be doing in the future is cater to that audience as well. Instead of making Risen 2 hook into Facebook, I think it would be more interesting to develop a dedicated Risen 2 Facebook app, for example. Or maybe a dedicated iOS app. You could come up with an app which revolves around the Gnome creatures specifically, perhaps. That could hook into the Risen universe, but make it a dedicated experience for the iPad.

But you don’t necessarily need to break up the 60 hours worth of gameplay of Risen 2 and share it on an iPad or any other mobile device, because then you’re going to fail. You really have to focus on what the device can do.