Risen 2: Dark Waters Preview
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The Unnamed Hero's first encounter is with a gnome called Jaffar in a fetching tricorne hat, who can speak rudimentary and obscenity-peppered English that he evidently learned from pirates. "It's pirate-themed, so we're going for a high number of f**ks per minute," grins Peter Brolly of Piranha Bytes. Risen 2's language is certainly colourful, and happily the variation of accents and dialects is just as broad as it ever was. I'm so sick of hearing totally out-of-place Californians in medieval RPGs that I could have sung when I encountered a boss later on in the demo who looked and sounded like a Yorkshire version of Johnny Depp.
After enlisting Jaffar's help in building a raft, we set off on a disappointingly predictable fetch quest to collect together all the materials, though our spirits are lifted by the personality on display in Piranha Bytes' world. The other gnomes on the island turn out to speak their own fairly rudimentary language, much to "Why can't these little bastards learn to speak properly," he says, with all the affability and openness to foreign cultures of the typical Englishman on holiday. Later, in a sizeable port town where, we see a little more quest variation: sabotaging cannons to blast away a prison wall and free a prisoner for your pirate crew, infiltrating watchtowers, even sending a fully-controllable trained money in through people's open windows to pick locks and loot chests.
Risen 2's world is hand-crafted, which should hopefully give it the same sense of place that Risen 1 was memorable for. There's no procedural generation, no randomly-spawning enemies, no fake doors. Every person in the port town has their own house and their own bed, and they'll get rather upset with you if you try to sleep in it. They have daily routines in which you, too, can take part, taking up a smithing, mining or harvesting job to earn a little extra cash or experience.
