Risen Review

Introduction (Gothic)

Risen is a game with an unusual history. Its developers, Piranha Bytes, split with their publisher JoWood Productions in 2007, and with it lost the license to their flagship IP, Gothic. A developing house like Piranha Bytes doesn’t really have the option to completely reset its design philosophy and start anew, even if it would like to. So everyone would expect their game to stay close to their former franchise.

Even so, I did not really expect them to stay quite as close as they ended up doing. Risen is as close to being Gothic 4 as it can be without risking a lawsuit. Gothic veterans can jump in and never miss a step when it comes to interface, character system and quest structure. To be fair, Piranha Bytes used the opportunity to advance or rework some concepts, as we’ll discuss later, but it fits the franchise like a glove. That makes this review fairly easy to write to people who played Gothic: if you liked it, you’ll like Risen. If you didn’t, you won’t.

Still, that doesn’t really hold true even to the most faithful of sequels. And there are some things Risen tweaks that might turn off old fans and bring in new ones. But, like Gothic, Risen is a third-person realtime combat-centric action RPG, with a heavy overtone on exploration and dialogue-heavy human locales, and an open-world made attractive by its by its beautiful vistas. How does it hold up as such?

Graphics & Tech

Graphically, Risen is slightly behind its RPG AAA contemporaries, but not by much. The environments are beautifully rendered, and the use of animations and lighting in the game’s world is subtle and superior to that of many other titles. In technical capability Risen may be a bit behind, but the graphical design makes up for its shortcomings.

It becomes a bit more of a mixed bag when you view the game’s animations and character models. The monsters are already somewhat weak, particularly in their circling animations, but the human models are really the game’s weakest point graphically. It doesn’t help that you’re staring at your PC all the time, which requires a good set of animations this game simply lacks, mostly notably in the somewhat hilarious jumping animation. A lack of details in faces and limited set of body language animations does little in keeping dialogue feeling lively. The camera is a boon here, preferring to put the point of view at some distance of the speakers and taking both of them in a single shot.

On the tech side, I personally had a completely trouble-free time with Risen, not running into a single bug, a few minor collision detection issues aside. As with any PC game that’s not really a promise you will have a bug-free experience, but from the reports it seems Risen is significantly more polished than pretty much any Gothic title was on release.

Sound & Localization

The music of Risen is atmospheric and rock-solid. Usually it stays appropriately in the background, helping to reinforce the game’s bleak atmosphere, though it also varies to slightly more intrusive combat-music and recognizable location-tied themes. The loading screen theme is delightfully bombastic, and again fits the game’s atmosphere to a T. Sound effects are all right but nothing really special. Spells can sound a bit odd, but the weapons swinging and impact sounds are convincing enough.The localization is of a quality I have rarely if ever seen in non-English RPG releases. Piranha Bytes and Deep Silver pulled no punches in ensuring the quality of this release to English audiences, both in hiring a set of established game writers to translate and rework the script in Andrew Walsh, James Leach and Rhianna Pratchett (whose work was also used as the basis of other localizations, like the Polish one), and in hiring a mostly British voice-cast that would not look bad on the average AAA release.The results speak for themselves; the writing lacks the stilted quality of many localized RPGs, instead offering solidly-written and entertaining dialogue especially the wry tone of the player character is often very amusing, as he is much more personable than PB’s previous nameless PC.

The quality of the cast shines throughout the game. I’m usually not a big fan of videogames hiring big names just for the purpose of having big names, and Risen sidesteps this trap by hiring established but not huge names with the requisite experience and/or skill in voice works. The two that most stand out are John Rhys-Davies (Lord of the Rings’ Gimli, Indiana Jones’ Sallah), whose nearly 20 years of experience in voice-acting enable him to give a convincing and delightfully subtle performance as Don Estaban, and Andy Serkis (Lord of the Rings’ Gollum), who gives an authoritative performance as the Inquisitor. Both actors do a lot with limited screen time and low word counts in which to get the message across, setting down exquisitely convincing, human characters. I’d also like to tip my hat at Lena Headey (300’s Queen Gorgo, Sarah Connor Chronicles’ Sarah Connor), whose solid performance allowed Piranha Bytes to finally set down a strong female character in Patty, a lack in their games that was becoming a bit noticeable after all these years.

It’s not all praise that makes the world go around: there are some slightly more tepid performances, including the PC’s which can be a bit uneven. There are also some very odd amateurish mistakes, including a voice actor actually reading the other character’s line, or a complete bit of dialogue being unvoiced. Blemishes aside, Risen easily stands amongst it’s bigger American cousins when it comes to voice-over work, and while it can’t duke it out with the likes of BioWare, it easily outpaces Bethesda’s efforts.

Combat & Interface

Risen’s combat feels fairly similar to that of Gothic 1 and 2, though with more intuitive controls. Like the combat system of its predecessors, it’s been getting some criticism, which I don’t really get. CRPGs as a genre are not really known for their strong combat systems, and while neither Gothic nor Risen will ever be a Mount & Blade, as real-time sword-swinging goes Risen is easily amongst the best, and leagues beyond the click-click-click mess of Gothic 3.

The combat modes available are split between close combat (one-handed weapons, two-handed weapons, staves), ranged combat (bows, crossbows) and attack magic (magic bolt, frost, fireball). Close combat is the mainstay of the game and probably preferable for a first playthrough. For each weapon type you are stuck with basic three-string combos until you gain more skill in the usage of the weapon, at which point you unlock faster, more fluent and longer combos.

The feel of combat depends heavily on what you’re fighting. As a rule, there are few tactics involved in fighting animals or monsters, as their attacks are often unblockable especially if you’re not using a shield and any skill in fighting them is simply in knowing the weaknesses and strengths of their AI and moveset. This unveils a disappointing weakness adopted from the Gothic franchise: the challenge level of monsters is not directly related to their stats but rather to your ability to adapt to them. As a mid-range two-handed axe-using character, I found ghouls with their lateral speed and deceptively quick attacks significantly more challenging than ashbeasts the presumptive ultimate beasts of the game, as I could simply push up to an ashbeast and the slowness of his attacks would mean he could not interrupt my combo string. This flaw becomes particularly marked as the game can not really adapt your XP to the challenge beasts pose, having only their stats to go by, so that you might get significantly less XP for a significantly more difficult fight.

Fighting against humanoids (such as humans and skeletons) is generally a lot more fun. They will typically have a range of moves similar to your own, and can surprise you with a combination of feints and powerstrikes, just as the PC had sidesteps, blocks and parries at his disposal. The AI is a bit limited here, and occasionally you can find a bit of stupidity to abuse, but usually fights will be challenging if the opponent is at or above your level. The big flaw in humanoid combat is revealed near the end of the game. Rather than opting for long high level fights consisting of the PC and his opponents exchanging open blows, Risen’s high level combat functions by pretty much everyone causing enough damage to kill anyone else including the PC in three blows. This brings an inordinate amount of luck into the game, as specific, almost chance-based timing can mean the difference between beating up three enemies without a scratch or getting killed in single combat.

Because of these differing flaws against non-human and human opponents, combat is a bit of a chore throughout much of the game. Creature combat can be needlessly frustrating at the beginning, while combat against humanoids can feel too luck-based near the end. These are weaknesses in design that drag down a system that is otherwise solid mechanics-wise.

The same does not hold true for ranged combat, whether it be spells or (cross)bow you’re using. Either you kill the enemy in one shot or you’ll have to go on kiting every enemy you meet. It’s an annoying shortcoming that’s the logical consequence of any game where almost no enemy uses ranged attacks. The limits of enemy AI become a bit of a problem here: if the enemy has no way of reaching the PC (and many can not jump) it will not go into cover to avoid your attacks, it will just stand there taking as many arrows as you need to put into it to put it down.

Character System

Risen’s core character system is a duplicate of Gothic’s: as the player levels up he gains learning points, which can be spent with teachers to learn certain new skills or better the PC’s stats. Risen’s main stats are strength, dexterity and wisdom, tied naturally to close combat, ranged combat and magic. Mana also needs to have learning points invested in it, but hit points are raised automatically every level.

There are five combat skills (sword, axe, staff, bow, crossbow) each of which can be raised 10 levels, and with each level you gain new moves, as well as more damage and speed. A big change from Gothic is that combat magic is split from rune magic into crystal magic; the three crystal magic skills are magic bullet, fireball and frost, which similarly to combat skills can be raised 10 levels, and need an appropriate crystal to use.

Then there’s a bevy of non-combat skills, split between crafting (alchemy, smithing, prospect ore, gut animals), rune magic (seal, create scrolls) and thievery (open locks, pickpocket, acrobatics, sneak). Some of these have multiple levels of mastery (alchemy, smithing, seal, open locks and pickpocket), and with each level your ability increases, the others you simply know after investing 5 learning points in them. The only skill tied to a minigame is open locks, which is a simple left-right combination minigame. The levelled skills unlock harder challenges; certain locks can not be picked until you have the appropriate level, and you can not even try to pickpocket the more challenging NPCs.

The split in magic is an interesting one, with the marked disadvantage that having only three attacking spells (plus the inferno rune you find later in the game) is kind of, well, boring. The rune magic itself is pretty interesting, and used much more intensively than in PB’s previous titles. Spells like levitation, nautilus (which transforms you into a nautilus, allowing you to crawl through small spaces) and telekinesis are used as elements in puzzle-like dungeons. But don’t fear if you’re not a mage: anyone can use scrolls made from runes, though the crystal spells are only available to magic-users.

Overall Risen’s system feels like a slight simplification of Gothic, but that’s not where its biggest flaw lies. In Gothic, you would lack enough learning points to do as you wish, and would have to think hard on investing some extra points in pickpocket or skipping the skill entirely. Risen has no such question, as you’re virtually showered with learning points. There is no choice involved in learning the crafting or thievery skills, you can freely do it and easily have enough points left to max out your combat skill and related stat. Heck, by the end of my playthrough as an axe-wielding warrior, I had maxed out axe fighting, learned all crafting and thievery skills and still had a heap of skill points left which I simply did not know how to spend. I finally just opted to dump it all into dexterity, raising it by 60 points for no other reason than to unlock a bow I picked up, and ended up never using.

Setting & World

Risen’s backstory is that a mage cast a spell to banish the Gods and give humans their freedom, which was all well and good, only it freed the old enemies of the Gods, the Titans, from their prisons, and they are raging across the human world as the game starts. The player character is a stowaway on a ship, and witnesses the Inquisitor do battle to a sea Titan before teleporting away, leaving the ship to be destroyed. He and one other survivor Sara, who serves as your tutorial guide wash up on the shores of the island Faranga. Faranga, a volcanic island that harbours the Holy Flame, source of all magic, has oddly been left alone by the Titans (so far), and the Inquisitor is searching for the answer to the world’s woes there.

The basic structure of Risen’s world does not shine in originality. It is your standard medieval fantasy fare, axe and sword-swinging humans backed up by mages holding their strongholds against the wilderness, teeming with wolves, giant vultures, skeletons, ghouls and gnomes. But there’s two ways Risen rises above the standard fantasy tripe, both inherited from PB’s earlier titles.

First, the way concepts are worked out and designed is simply wonderful. The world is grandly atmospheric and gloomy, and while the dungeons get repetitive most of the world feels uniquely well-defined. The human locations bandit camp, monastery and harbour town each have a great, specific design, with a feel appropriate to the faction that inhabits them from the rather ramshackle huts of the bandit camp, to the quiet withdrawn feel of the monastery, to the suppressed liveliness of harbour town.

Similarly, the monsters are not original but often very well-designed both in visuals and in their context in the world. Ghouls and ashbeasts are good examples of being fitted very well to their functions, with ghouls having a clear skulking, but menacing nature, while ashbeasts are just looming, stupid masses of deadly muscle. Gnomes are probably my favourite in Risen’s world, both in that they serve a unique function as somewhat intelligent creatures scavenging and stealing from the humans, as in their visual design as rotund little goblins.

Second, Risen takes a well worked-out approach to low fantasy. There’s a lot of politicking going about, and even more human nature at work, and really, really little altruism to go around. So much so that the PC’s offers of help will often be met with suspicion, and if he is clearly not looking for a reward (that choice is sometimes up to you) he is met with open disbelief.

None of the factions are good, but nor are they really bad. The Inquisition is on the island for a clearly benevolent reason, to try and solve humanity’s crisis, it’s just that they let this goal take priority, and do not care about the little man, stifling the island’s trade by locking up most of its population in harbour city and arresting anyone they find outside as a bandit. Equally, Don Esteban’s bandit camp may seem like freedom fighters battling oppression on the surface, but when you get down to it their motives are rather superficial, fighting for money and control of Harbour Town while the fate of humanity is being decided in the background. The final faction, the Monestary’s mages, aren’t hurting anyone, but neither are they helping anyone, instead hiding behind the Inquisition.

The game is filled to the brim with miniature versions of this shades-of-grey struggle, especially in Harbour Town itself. Which faction to join is not an easy choice to make if you’re trying to base it purely on who is the good guy in the equation, as there are simply no good guys. Sadly, the game completely wrecks the meaning behind this choice, as the factions are tied directly to what class you wish to play: Don’s faction for warriors, mage faction for mages, Inquisition for paladin-esque warrior-mages. This completely strangles any significant attached to the choice, which is a shame.

Story & Gameplay First

Risen is split into four chapters, the first two having a distinctive different feel from the last two. For that reason we’re discussing them separately.

The opening sequence sees you washed up on the shore with Sara, a fellow survivor who will give you a bit of an overly long tutorial sequence. The game takes a delightful hard knocks approach to starting the player off, with tough fights and honest choices to make (when Sara has a bad feeling about the cave system you enter, do you press through or find an alternate path). It’s a bit overly instructive (explore house! Open chest! Cook meat!) but offers a more solid introduction into the gameplay than previous PB titles, though it’s less of a charming introduction into the world than washing up and getting your lights punched out in Gothic 1.

From then on, the world opens up and just lets you go wherever you want. You’re strongly advised by the first native you meet to go to the bandit camp, but after some exploring my personal instincts took me to the harbour town, which indeed seems to be the more natural pick from a gameplay progression viewpoint. This shows two strengths in Risen: not only do you not have to do as you’re told, often enough using your head and trying something other than what the characters in the game are trying to sell you works out better.

As a low-level character you tend to be too weak to really explore the island but, in typical PB-fashion, you’re still allowed to go where you want, and if you want to have the PC jump into the maws of a hungry pack of wolves that’s your business, good luck surviving it. There’s no real off-limits areas excepting a few locked behind magic barriers you can not open until a later chapter, but it still pays off to listen to people. When they tell you not to come close to any inquisition Warrior of the Light as they will not appreciate your presence, you should listen, the game will not have an (are you sure?) pop-up if you ignore warnings and press on anyway.

That freedom to screw up has always been one of the core strengths of Piranha Bytes and it remains in Risen. PB, unlike many cRPG designers, understands one of the core principles of RPG design lies in tangible progress. Level scaling and overly linear chapter progression both destroy tangible progress, as you are always matched up to your enemy. There is nothing quite as satisfying as returning to the ogres you had to run away from in desperation earlier to defeat them in a hard fight. The challenge is hard and unforgiving, but it’s only through the lack of handholding that Risen can offer a real feeling of accomplishment many of its cRPG contemporaries can not. Challenge rules heavily in this school of design, and it’s exactly on points where Piranha Bytes does this well that they get lambasted the slow, steady progression of available armour works because it makes the armour feel that much more valuable, yet cRPG players used to recent, loot-centric action RPGs will lament the lack of character customization and (phat loot) in general.

But to continue on in the story, Harbour Town is really what the first chapter is about though I should note the experience of players in the first two chapters can be pretty different depending on what faction you choose to approach first. Harbour Town is a good showcase of what Risen’s strengths and weaknesses are: it is a well-designed, goodly sized location with interesting human conflict, convincing NPCs and a variation of quests with real choices to make on whose side you pick. Various skills, especially thievery, can come in handy to offer alternative solutions to different quests, and often a bit of quick thinking by the PC can help find an alternate path. Also, the story here really focuses on inter-personal and inter-factional relationships, the strength of which was explained in the setting & world segment of this review.

However and this is a big however Risen takes a definite step back from the likes of Gothic 2 when it comes to depth of quest design. Even if you dig around for alternatives, a shockingly large number of quests in Harbour Town come down to (beat him up and take his stuff or intimidate him), which is fairly ludicrous considering how often you are warned that this is a well-ordered town that you can not just mess around in (people are generally too forgiving of being beaten up through the game). A good example of this is a quest in which you need to retrieve 5 pieces of armour. If you have the pickpocket skill, you’re free to resolve the quest using it. Otherwise, you either have to pay the NPCs an exorbitant amount of money you likely won’t have and by paying that money also miss out on free XP and loot given by beating them up or, indeed, beat them up and take it, to no negative consequence. Why am I just allowed to do that and get away scot-free? Why can’t I trade the armour piece for a favour or a personal item of theirs I nicked earlier? Why can’t I get help in retrieving the armour pieces? Why can’t I side with the aggrieved holders of the armour pieces and gang up on their boss with their help?

The ridiculousness of combat being a primary solution in a town setting is exacerbated by the location’s stress on order and peace (this holds less true for, say, the Bandit Camp, where combat is also a primary solution to your problems), but its general shallowness is a bit of a letdown after PB’s previous games. Bribe, kill or steal seems to be the general rule of quest-resolution in the game, and that’s not very satisfying. It’s especially a letdown when an opportunity for more comes along: one of the better quests in the game involves uncovering clues to track down a murdered in the Monastery. But even this quest, a nice little detective-side track, is more shallow than it first seems, as the player is given almost no options in the path of his inquiries, and his hand is held in uncovering clues almost the entire way.

Still, despite the relative shallowness of quest design, the variation of activities throughout your first goes through the Harbour Town, Monastery and Bandit Camp are quite good. Choices will lock off certain quests, such as Bandit Camp quests not being open to people coming from the Monastery, or a number of Monastery quests not being open to people who joined the Bandit Camp, which to me is a sensible way of encouraging multiple playthroughs as you can never do everything with a single character, but not everyone will find delight in it.

The quests available to you vary quite a bit. There’s a healthy dose of fetch and other errand-quests, and I’ve already discussed the combat-centric quests, but others will require a bit of dialogue, though sadly rarely with any real input from the player, or shadowing an NPC to find out what shady business he’s up to, or finding a way into the attic of a warehouse without the guard spotting you. While a definite letdown after the Gothic series, there’s still a healthy dose of quests varied enough to please most RPG fans.

While the first chapter focuses on human interaction, mostly in Harbour Town, the second chapter will have signficantly less. You’ll probably be rounding up quests from chapter 1, and following the Inquisitor’s task of finding the five discs (and sadly, this (fetch five) theme comes back in the game, a lot), but if anything, Chapter 2 is about finally having the strength to explore the world without dying every other yard.

Piranha Bytes has always shone in designing interesting, open worlds to explore, and Risen is really no exception. It lacks some of the rewards of pure exploration of the earlier games, always locking up the loot behind some monsters to fight, rather than just atop a difficult climb as Gothic sometimes did. Still, the hard-earned items you scavenge, whether it be the surprisingly rare but ordinary helmets, fragments of legendary swords or ingredients for permanent boost potions, are well worth the often difficult battles.

The landscape is rich and varied, offering forests, swamp and mountains each with their own kinds of opponents. Battles range from easy to hard to too-hard-at-this-level, and the quests open to you at this point are sufficiently challenging and interesting, taking on a new, larger scope compared to the chapter 1 quests. Many of the subquests of gathering the five discs are goodly sized, but this is also the perfect point to tackle two other fetch-five quests: getting the five vassal rings for Leon and the five clues to the treasure for Patty. These three large fetch-quests send you all over the island, so even if you’re not drawn to exploration for its own sake, you’ll probably see all of the land during these three quests.

Story & Gameplay Second

And that completeness at the end of chapter 2 is a bit of a problem. You can keep these quests and exploring some areas for later, sure, but assuming you’ve done the exploration and minor sidequests by chapter 3 which seems like the natural point to have done it at the game suffers quite a collapse.

New areas open in the final chapters, and they fall out of tone with the rest of the game. Essentially, what opens up to the player are linear dungeons in the classic dungeon crawl style, which means lots of combat and some puzzles. Combat is the central part of gameplay in an already combat-heavy game here, as all dialogue and exploration take a backseat to long sequences of you swording your way through your enemy’s legions.

The only variation it offers are in (spell-based) puzzles, which become especially significant in the last chapter. Somewhat oddly, almost all gameplay you have been using so far is dropped at the end, and you’re put to the test in solving some typical dungeon puzzles of trapdoors and dropping ceilings, often using rune spells. The point most divorced from the rest of the game is the final boss, presented as a fight more reminiscent of 3D platform gaming, something right out of Zelda and completely unrelated to the rest of the game. To call this ending battle and the subsequent closing narration disappointing would be quite an understatement.

How much you’ll enjoy this last bit of the game depends much on your own tastes. They’re shorter than the rest of the game, and the combat in it consists mostly of challenging fights, so it’s not like you have to slog through an endless, boring dungeon, even if they are on the long side. The puzzling elements felt jarring to me, and I personally thought the game would be better served keeping them in sidequests, but they may appeal more to fans of dungeon crawlers.

Somewhat similarly to the previous PB titles, Risen turns from low fantasy to heroic fantasy at the end of the game. The politicking and shades-of-grey human relationships drop to the background as the PC battles an enemy that is clearly evil, or at least destructive. To my disappointment, you’re not even given a choice on which side to choose, and the (bad guy’s) plan which actually sounds somewhat sensible on the surface is revealed to be pointless as it simply can not succeed, taking away any possible grey morality in the ending sequence.

Conclusion

At its core, Risen still does well what Piranha Bytes always did well: it gives as a very atmospheric world, filled with low-fantasy NPCs, black-and-white situations and gameplay hinging heavily on exploration and the ability to use something other than combat to resolve situations. In some ways, it does a few things better than the Gothics did: its interface is more intuitive, the combat is superior (especially to the mess that was Gothic 3), the graphics are superior and the character system is more refined.

However, Risen feels not just like a polished Gothic, but like a Gothic in which certain parts are dropped to make it more accessible, much to its detriment. Illogically combat-centric quests, a character system loaded to make all skills easily accessible to you, a lack of meaningful choices in dialogue, faction-based decisions determined completely by what class of character you want to be. It all strikes me as needless simplification that adds very little to the game. What’s probably worse is that it’s so half-way between the two: the changes are obviously not aimed at hardcore cRPG players, yet they’re not nearly enough to please casual cRPG fans either. If you’re used to the amount of protection from mistakes given to you by a BioWare or Bethesda title, you might easily find Risen to be downright impossible.

But it’s the endgame collapse where Risen most exposes itself to flak. I’m not as harsh on it as some might be, as the final two chapters are rather short and thus are more unsatisfying than that they ruin the entire game, as opposed to say Lionheart. Still, especially with the confusing change of direction in chapter 4 and terrible design of the final sequence, it’s certainly a big mark against Risen.

Gothic 3, the precursor to this game, was overly ambitious and suffered from it. In response, it feels like Piranha Bytes has gone completely the other way and made a game that was under-ambitious. Risen is a remake of Gothic made slightly more accessible. Enjoyable, but hardly inspiring.