Risen 2: Dark Waters Preview and Interview

After a period of relative silence some coverage for Risen 2: Dark Waters is starting to surface again, and after a preview from IGN and the release of some new screenshots, it’s time for a new preview and an interview, courtesy respectively of Videogamer and Strategy Informer.

A snip from Videogamer’s piece:

You’re helped by gnomes now, who now make a more prominent appearance. The beginning of Risen 2 shoves you into a lost-in-translation multicultural subplot where the Hero is invited into the homeland of a race he used to kill, many who have begun to learn swear-laden English from passing pirates.

Puzzle-styled quests leave you to decipher their pidgin language by interacting with NPCs, trading with them, and judging their responses. To build a sail, for example, The Hero trades with a reluctant gnome salesman for t-shirts. He will yammer in a complaining tone when you offer him the incorrect item to trade a currency, but by interacting with other indigenous NPCs the Hero will begin to learn the basic lingo himself.

You can have extended conversations with the game’s quest givers, choosing from a list of options that further the plot or offer extensive details about the characters or lore. The result is more Monkey Island than Oblivion, particularly when you’re tasked with collecting objects to build a raft by doing favours or trading with others in the town hub.

And a couple of excerpts from the interview with Deep Silver’s Daniel Oberlerchner:

Strategy Informer: As company, the developers haven’t really seemed to be interested in post-launch content. The original Gothic series only had one expansion, and that was for Gothic II, and there hasn’t really been any DLC or anything either – what’s your view on all this?

Daniel Oberlerchner: I can’t really reveal what we have in store for Risen 2 in terms of whether we will have DLC or not, but I can say that our view is… it’s ok to have like new items and stuff, but it’s important to also deliver content, and we don’t just mean one mission, two missions… for us it would need to be at least a new island, a new quest hubs, maybe multiple islands. We’re talking about more hours of gameplay, it’s not about having a different ending or something like that… I mean what can you charge for that? $.99? We don’t want to fall into the iTunes model. “Oh, you want a new skill? That’s $2” etc… and people are feeling betrayed because they have to shell out 50 – 70 Euros for a game and yet they still have to shell out more through micro-payments.

…

Strategy Informer: You’ve mentioned how the console versions have been made from the ground up, and how you’ve been greatly improving the graphics across all versions… but the 360 and PS3, they’re getting on a bit now. Are you worried that the console versions are going to too inferior due to the ageing hardware?

Daniel Oberlerchner: Well… you know… *laughs* I can tell you that we are going to have the optimum experience across all platforms, and they are going to be different experiences. There IS a technology gap. Some studios say they are going to have the same quality across all platforms, which is to say you take the weakest platform – the Xbox 360 – and you have the same crappy textures for the Playstation 3 and the PC.

It was just a couple of weeks ago there was a PC game that was… *laugh* well, I don’t really want to go into details, but our decision is that we want to have a really hi-res experience on the PC. There is no reason why we should create hi-res textures, then just make them blurry for a console version, then put everything back on the PC again – it doesn’t make any sense.

We want to make sure everything is maxed out on every platform – for example on the Playstation 3, it is a bit better in terms of Aliasing, but then extra memory is going to be better on the Xbox 360 because the PS3 doesn’t have direct memory – so it has to share everything. So it’s going to be different, but it’s going to be the same game, with the same features.