Risen 2: Dark Waters Q&A

The folks at RPGamer have put online a brief fan-powered Q&A with Deep Silver’s senior brand manager Daniel Oberlerchner, on Piranha Bytes’ upcoming sequel to Risen. Here’s a snip:

In an era of elaborate loot systems, talent trees, and morality systems, Risen had a pretty narrow focus on basic loot and skill progression (i.e. nearly all weapons improved in damage output alone with no bells and whistles even though there were items out there with additional traits such as bonuses to STR, DEX, etc.; most skills and spells got stronger with no real perks or unique differences in them. Quite a contrast compared to the weapons skills).
Also, the character’s personality, despite the use of dialogue choices, was pretty consistent with no real good/bad guy choices. All of this is somewhat counter to the usual amount of choice seen in open world games. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, I just want to know if this was a design decision, a result of a lack of resources, and whether or not that style will still be in place in Risen 2?

DO: The range of skills in Risen 2 has dramatically increased in their broadness. Although there are still straightforward skills to increase your damage, we also introduced a host of new skills e.g. the dirty tricks which offer you a varied toolbox of mischievous pirate themed attacks. You will also be able to distract foes with a trained parrot or control a small monkey to ransack the villages in the night. The choices in Risen 2 will have an impact on what skills you can learn and who will cooperate with you. The personality of the hero character however will be quite neutral in order for you, the player, to make judgments without bias. With Risen 2 we want to open up a window into another world and we didn’t want to have the glass rose-colored in any way.