Risen 2: Dark Waters Previews and Gameplay Footage

Overshadowed by the presence of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Piranha Bytes’ hardcore open-world action-RPG Risen 2: Dark Waters still has a presence at GamesCom, and we’ve rounded up two new brief previews based on some hands-on time with the title in Cologne.

First is IGN, that couples the preview with some shakycam gameplay footage:

Conversation and dialogue are a big part of Risen 2. Over 250,000 lines have been recorded, and players have a number of options when they’re interacting with the various characters they encounter. It’s a significant undertaking, but done so that they can have multiple ways players can tackle a quest. For instance you might be offered an easy way off the island in return for killing some escaped slaves, while the less evil route might take you three times as long. It all comes down to what type of person you want your character to embody.

Interacting with other characters is also a good way to learn additional skills. You don’t pick a class or put points into a giant skill tree, you simply work with characters and they teach you how to do new things. For instance a prisoner might need your help to get out of jail, so working with him will teach you how to do things like sneak and lock pick. Or, if you’re more of the witty type, you can interact a lot with prostitutes to learn how to get a “silver tongue.”

Then it’s GameSpot‘s turn, with some impressions from the Xbox 360 version:

As the game expands, you’re faced with more serious choices. Meeting with the governor, he offers you to join his employ and hunt down some escaped slaves (or as he slimily calls them, “involuntary servants”). It’s up to you whether you want to work for such a dirtbag or not, a choice between filling your pockets and suffering a guilty conscience or taking the high road and remaining a poor adventurer.

Said adventuring takes a lot of forms. Risen 2 is a game where you can freely run through lush island jungles, sail the seas between islands, and upgrade your combat skills to fit your preferred play style. There’s also a full conversation choice system with varying personalities to suit a given situation. One of the big goals for Risen 2, according to Deep Silver, is to take all of this openness and use it to reverse the “funnel effect” of the original game. Specifically, way the original Risen started out as an open experience and narrowed your level of choice as the story developed. Now the team working on Risen 2 want the opposite approach: start with linear experience (including purposely leaving out a character editor) and let the player control the experience more and more as the narrative unfolds.

We also had a chance to see the Xbox 360 version of Risen 2, which Deep Silver wanted to assure us was going to be far closer to its PC peer than the original version, which was criticized for having a thoroughly substandard console port. There’s definitely a noticeable difference, but aside from the predictably lower resolution on 360, there wasn’t a staggering gulf between the two platforms.