Risen Review
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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.
