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25.07.2009 22:28 [Sonstiges (englisch)] BBQ report by foobar (Seite: 2)
Part 2: The Game

Overview

Now I will give you my personal impressions on RISEN. It is, as any other "preview" you might encounter, based on my personal opinion. And I did not spend that much time with the game. There are some things I cannot tell you about because I just do not know about them.


Story

That's one of the unkowns to me. I think, the most important thing in a RPG is the story and its presentation. You might disagree but it's how I feel. All those things that were criticised in Gothic 3, for example, would have been acceptable to me if only it was given a more interesting story. But I cannot say much about the story of RISEN. I did not have enough time to progress very far in the game so I do not know how the story develops. Hence, I cannot promise you that we won't get a G3-like storyline. But the parts that I have seen are looking very promising.


Quests

You do not start like in Gothic 3, being thrown right into an unfounded combat with some orks. The game starts more like in Gothic 1 and 2. The first characters you meet will help you to understand a little of where you are, what's going on and what things are important to survive on the island. Just like the bridge guard from the Old Camp in Gothic 1 told you not to go into the forest alone (and that was a good advice for beginners), a bandit you meet will tell you not to let yourself get caught by the Inquisition unless you want to become recruited by force.

The very first quests are more of a tutorial kind. Collect some corn (in Gothic 2, it was turnips), get a weapon and so on. The first "real" quest is also similar to Gothic 2: Get into the city. And there are also several ways to achieve that. The more you talk to other characters in the game and explore the area around the city, the more (and better) options you can choose from. I selected a rather quick and costly way inside because I wanted to see as much as possible in the short time I had. I'm sure there are better possibilities if you take your time looking for them.

What I personally think is an unnecessary tribute to the casual gamer is that monsters which are attached to a quest have specific names. For example, normal gnomes are just labeled "gnome". If you stumble across some "devious gnomes", you already know that there is a specific quest somewhere which involves them. Probably someone wants you to kill them. That's not exactly an immersion enhancer for me but I guess you have to compromise nowadays if you want to make a living with RPGs. Those labels are also used to indicate different levels of the monsters in the game. A "hungry wolf" is easier than a "wolf" (just like the "young scavenger" in Gothic 1). Also, see the interface section below.


Graphics

The graphics are rather unimportant to me. Hell, I would be content with the old Gothic 2 engine and a new story and setting. But some people might be interested in this and there are some elements which I do care about nonetheless.

The engine does not support anti-aliasing because it uses a method called "deferred shading" to dynamically calculate correct real-time shadows. So you have to give up smooth edges and gain an admittedly impressive lighting if you go through a dark cave with only a torch in your hand. In motion, you don't miss the anti-aliasing that much compared to looking at a static screenshot. But I still would have liked some smoother edges. Perhaps there will be some external solutions for that in time. I guess the driver could always render the frames in a higher resolution and then sample them down to the actually selected resolution. Perhaps with a good graphics card or a "smaller" resolution like 1280x1024 (19" TFT), you can still get a decent framerate.

The engine also uses depth of field wich makes everything in the distance look blurry and in dialogues tries to direct your attention to the people you should watch. Personally, I don't like that. I'm a big fan of a large viewing distance and just love it when I can set the view range of Gothic 2 to 300% and look over the entire mine valley from the pass. But luckily, this depth of field can be disabled in the options.

Other than that, I do not have much to criticise. The graphics are not photorealistic and a bit rustic but it gives the game a unique style. However, keep in mind that I'm not much of a "graphics fetishist". The game looked fine to me but perhaps if you expect a second Crysis you might be disappointed.

A small marginal note: Some people feared that the collectable plants would stand out too much from the rest of the vegetation, blinking and flashing for your attention (like in G3). I think that's definitely not the case. The plants can be recognized as collectable but they do not stand out. For example, OnKeLDead screwed up one of the tutorial quests because he could not find all ten corn plants on a field of maybe 20 square metres. Collectable plants are drawn a little brighter when you focus them but this can also be disabled in the game options.


World Design

One thing are the technical features (like anti-aliasing) and graphical elements (trees, peoples, etc.), another thing is how they are composed. Owning a hammer does not make you an architect. Some games out there have shiny and photorealistic humans, trees and monsters - but the worlds the developers build with these elements are... unspectacular, to say the least. Much repetition, many areas looking similar or just identical and everything seems a bit sterile. Take Mass Effect as an example. I'm sure it's not a bad game but whenever you land on a side-quest planet on which you have never been before, there are only two or three possible interiors. You enter a building and already know the layout of the map.

RISEN, in that regard, is quite the opposite. While the graphical elements are not photorealistic and some may even be a little rough around the edges, the level design sure shows one of the true strengths of Piranha Bytes. Everything looks organic and alive. It's not a generic tree beside a generic boulder beside a river. The entire world is carefully crafted by hand and so, the boulder will have a unique form, maybe a little arch, and overgrown with ivy that also climbs half-way up the tree. No two places in the world look the same, as far as I can tell.

Everywhere is something to discover. Climb a roof or a rock and you may find a small money bag, a weapon, a scroll or maybe just a great view across the valley you're in. The game certainly rewards you for straying from the paths - if you can handle what you find, that is.

I'm very content with the priorities that Piranha Bytes set. Shiny graphics and a liveless, repetitive, maybe even auto-generated world or a living, breathing world where every place is unique, shows great love for details and offers rewards for explorers. I'd trade the first one for the latter any time.


Combat System

One of the things I cannot say that much about. I did not have cheats activated on my system and certainly did not have the time skill my character in any way. So I can only tell what the combat is like on character level 0.

For those who feared that the combat will just like Gothic 3, I can assure you: Just clicking your opponents dead like in Gothic 3 or Diablo does NOT work. Believe me, I really tried. One of the first quests I took required me to kill five wolves. After spending a lot of my short time with RISEN and loading a quicksave about 4 times, I managed to kill three of them. After that, I gave up because I was out of healing plants and potions and the other two always attacked in a pair. Later, I switched the difficulty setting from "normal" to "easy" and still found many opponents to be quite tough. If the balancing stays the way it is, let me give you an advice for your first time with RISEN: When you're still at level 1 and you find yourself attacked by more than just one creature at a time - run away.

The ranged combat system (including magic) requires you to manually aim at your target. There is no auto-lock. If you want to hit a moving target, you have to aim to where it will be in a second. As you might already know, arrows from a bow will fly in a parabolic curve and bolts from a crossbow and magic projectiles will fly in a straight line.

There is a stun effect as in Gothic 1 and 3. Personally, I don't like these stuns because it just makes you loose control over your character. Gothic 2 managed to have a demanding and exciting combat system without a stun effect. Too bad we cannot have one like that in RISEN, too.

Daniel also showed us that any human you encounter can potentially have the same skills as you. You can see how experienced a fighter is by just looking at his stance when he draws the sword. More experienced fighters can break through your blocks or use more powerful attacks or combos. So be careful.


Music and Sound

Very good. The music is just like you could have expected from the samples we already know.

The sound is also quite good and informative. One time, I walked into a dark underground dungeon and could barely see a thing because I had no torches. Then I heard the flapping of a tomb moth somewhere in the dark. It scared me a bit but after looking around, I could not find the monster. But it had to be somewhere close because I could hear it. So I concluded that there must be a hidden trapdoor or movable wall, leading to another room with the tomb moth inside. Hence, I made my way to the other door extremely careful, always sticking close to wall. And it paid out. Right beside my feet, a trap door opened. If I had walked straight through the room, I would have fallen into it.


Interface

In one word: spartan. Which is good. The only mandantory GUI elements are the life and mana bars. Compass and quickbar can both be disabled and the quickbar shows only the slots that are really in use.

Magic requires you to aim for yourself and the game gives you a cursor to do so. Although this cursor looks a bit like you might know them from area spells in games such as Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 (and this may make some people scream: "Waaah! WoW!"), it is helpful in a way because the shape and colour of the cursor will tell you what spell you are using. If you disable the quickbar (and I think I'll do just that), you have a feedback there and will notice if you hit the wrong key before it's too late.

The character screen also includes the inventory which gives you all important info on one single page. It adjusts the size of its elements to the width of the screen. On the widescreen monitors that Deep Silver had, there was a lot of wasted space between the different elements. Yet the inventory on the character screen was as big as always. I think, a few more columns for lesser scrolling would have been a better use for the additional space. But that's only a small thing.

In dialogues, lines are selected with the left mouse button and skipped with the right mouse button. The only problem I have with the current dialogue controls is that you cannot select entries with the mouse wheel or the normal movement keys. You can select one of them via keyboard by using the arrow keys and pressing ENTER but if you use WASD, you have to move your hand for that which kind of defeats the purpose.

My optimal dialogue interface is like the one in G2. No mouse cursor, lines are selected with WASD or arrow keys or mouse wheel and the selection is then confirmed with the left mouse button. I hope that the beta polishing will also include an interface overhaul in that direction.

I was one of those who criticised the text popups in the videos of RISEN we've seen so far. Like: "New quest: Go and fetch 10 corn". One of the problems is that the game was really using the term "quest" although that does not exist in the german language. It's an anglicism only used as technical term for roleplaying and I feel that it does not belong on the screen. I liked the old messages from Gothic 1 and 2: "New diary entry" with a little scribble sound. A diary is an item that can really exist in the world and therefore, this enhances the immersion with very little effort. Real people can really have a new diary entry but I certainly would not think of it as a "quest" when I go shopping, for instance. Although, maybe some guys with girlfriends might feel different. And here's the good news: Now, we have this cool option in the INI file for RISEN. It's named "RetroQuestMessageSystem". If you set it to "true", you will get the old messages like in Gothic 2. Yeah!

By the way: Daniel showed me the INI and there are a lot of things in there which you can tweak. If you don't want the focus captions at all, you can disable them. Just don't complain about not finding anything anymore.

The rest is very good and the icons are designed with a great love for detail. Some might find them a bit to colourful but the colours help you to distinguish them.


Atmosphere

Complex. The game starts with a scripted weather. It's a dark and stormy day, the palms are waving in the wind and heavy rain is falling. Certainly not the kind of weather you want to have on your vacation.

When the sun comes out, the atmosphere changes and the island turns into a bright and sunny place. But of course, that does not stop the monsters that you run into everywhere. Even at its best, the island is a dangerous place.

The different areas also look and feel different. In the swamp, you rarely see the sun. It's all in a little greenish grey, with improvised huts that were built in a hurry when the bandits came here. The harbour city resembles your average mediterranean town. But you see a lot of poverty because the peasants were all forced into the city. You'll find them trying to sell fish or grow some vegetables on the few spots where there's some soil in the city. The vulcano fortress is full of training recruits and a warrior of the Inquisition who trains them. He's got the attitude of a drill sergeant.

In caves and underground ruins, you can barely see a thing if you do not have a light source. For me, there is sufficient darkness in RISEN. Regarding the atmosphere, RISEN seems to be more like Gothic 2 than Gothic 1. Some bright areas but also the darker regions to give you the contrast. I like it.


Bugs

Sometimes I'm annoyed by all that bug discussion because it seems as if this is the only thing that matters about a game. Everyone always asks "Will it be as buggy as Gothic 3?" or already seems to know that it will. As I wrote before, bugs are a nuisance for me but nothing more. Bugs can be worked around, you can use cheats to fix the problems and you can patch them away later on. But you cannot do anything against a lame story or flat characters in the game. These are much more important elements, yet they seem not to get the attention they deserve because everyone just cares about the bugs.

But, to calm you all: There are very little bugs in RISEN. I only witnessed one bug myself: During the earthquakes, you could not hear any rumbling when on the surface (it worked when you were underground). Daniel was surprised by that and said it worked before. I suppose it's a simple regression bug and will be fixed shortly.

The other testers also found two bugs: One of them discovered a wall with no collision check. You could walk through it and end up under the world mesh. Although this wall was at a place where a player has no reason to go to. And another tester got beaten down by a warrior of the Inquisition and did not wake up as new recruit in the vulcano fortress (as he should be) but stayed lying on the ground with an uncontrollable character and a full health bar. That will probably be fixed, too, because KaiRo was personally witnessing this bug and showed great interest in it.

Other than that, no problems. Absolutely no crashes or other problems. I really am surprised by the stability and quality the game already has, still being in its beta stage. There are RPGs on the market that even after the third patch are not as stable and bug-free as the RISEN beta I've seen.


Conclusion

I can tell you one thing for sure: I really liked what I saw and leaving that room with its RISEN demo PCs was not an easy thing. If you liked Gothic 1 and 2, you will probably also like RISEN and should give it a try. There are differences and also some disputable compromises for what are believed to be the requirements of the modern market. But the product as a whole is really convincing and looks very promising to me.

No bugs, no DRM and now I've played it myself and liked it. I guess I'm running out of excuses to delay my pre-order any longer...




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  geschrieben von foobar