Risen 2: Dark Waters Preview
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Late in the third area, after you joined the Inquisition, you're sent out to find four members of the Inquisition to get them to accompany you. The first is somewhere in the camp and you'll know where if you paid attention to his earlier dialog with you, the second is near the butcher and you're told so, the third is out scouting but you're told who to talk to to find him. The fourth is easy to find, but his musket is missing, which sends you on a quest where you talk to all the people who have seen him as they went drinking the night before, and through several persuasion and other talent checks and correct dialog choices you discover what happened to his musket. There is no (click through dialog, follow quest marker, kill what is at the end of quest marker)-style design here. Tech
I don't have too much to say on the technical side of the game. Each of the three areas is loaded as one continuous zone on the engine, with no separate loading for caves or buildings, and the loading times for saves are surprisingly quick. This is one of those games that doesn't save over any of its quick and auto saves, so they stack up very fast, something I hope they fix before release, as the game auto saves very frequently.
The interface is intuitive, simple and well-done, with rebindable quick keys for easy access to the inventory, the map, the quest log etc. The only quick keys that can not be rebound are the hotbar keys (1 to 0), but that's not a huge deal. Graphic settings offer a good array of options to fine-tune to the best performance, though the game did seem pretty terribly optimized, and I can't say much about the graphics as I had to turn most options to low.
Conclusion
This demo kind of cut off at the wrong moment to get a good impression of the advanced voodoo and firearm mechanics, so most of it just felt very similar to the early Risen gameplay. But it does improve even on that, with better quest design and a more unique and equally well-executed setting.
The voodoo mechanics, especially the voodoo doll cursing, has a great potential to be creatively used later in the game. Guns are relatively less interesting, but they should add more variety to combat. Tantalizingly, in the first two areas you can use cannons, and enter a first-person turret mode. Though there was nothing to shoot at for those cannons, I'm curious to see what they'll do with this mechanic later.
Sequentially unlocking areas is a little different from and more linear compared to earlier Piranha Bytes titles, though we've seen similar things before (locking off the old island early in Gothic II, for example). It means you won't be as badly overmatched when stumbling onto the wrong monster as you were in older PB games, but don't think you can just run around freely on the unlocked areas either, you will still run into significant challenges you might want to put off until later. The advantage of this approach is that you regularly enter new towns and meet new NPCs, which in my opinion is always the best part of any Piranha Bytes game.
Based on the preview areas, the sequel appears to be a solid improvement on Risen, despite the disappointing simplification in character system. It is a challenging and addictive experience, and the number of hours I poured into it just leaves me wanting for more. As long as it avoids declining into a dungeon slog as its predecessor did, this should make for an excellent addition to the Piranha Bytes library.
