"I actually got some hands-on time (about 45 minutes or so) with a beta build of the game and it's excellent. Deep Silver was in NYC yesterday with Risen, Cursed Mountain (a truly amazing and innvative horror game for the Wii), Mytran Wars (PSP), The Humans (DS) and a DS Chess game I forget the name of at the moment. I'm in the process of writing up a hands-on for my blog:
http://fanboydestroy.blogspot.com/
and I'll post a link once it's done.
Quick random impressions: they had the PC version on one side and the 360 on the other to show how good they look side by side. Other than the sharper resolution on the big monitor, both games look exactly the same. Obviously, the PC version has plenty of hotkeys and such, but in terms of control, both games were pretty fluid. As the build wasn't complete, there were a few hiccups in some tight spots and the English lip synching needed to be completed. The English voice acting is spot on from what I heard. We did see a bit of the German version's synch from that more completed build and it's nicely done, so no worries there.
Quick rundown of the demo (most of this will be enhanced for my hands-on):
Your guy wakes up on a beach - there's been a shipwreck and you seem to be the only survivor. First thing you see is how amazing the game looks. Piranha Bytes really knows their stuff, obviously and RIsen is striking right from the opening moments. You search around for items (they're shown as words onscreen thanks to the amazing amount of detail in the game world) and eventually find another survivor, a woman named Sarah. She sends you to look for some sort of weapon (there's a stick nearby) and when you find it, you'll be asked to find some sort of shelter.
Heading through a jungle-like area, you meet up with your first enemy, a tall white & black "vulture" that looks like an angry ostrich with a mohawk (well, a lot better-looking than that). Combat is combo-based and very direct. Click away 'til dead, dodge or backstep from enemies and try not to get surrounded. Your character's battle stance actually changes as he levels up, so in the beginning, he's looking fairly new to the sword, but as he grows, his weapon handling skills and poses become more confident - a REALLY nice touch
Anyway, once you kill Big Bird, you move on and cross paths with a big ol' porcupine thing. it's pretty nasty, as it rushes you and can knock your HP down in no time flat. dodge and swing, it's dead and you move on. A big wolf to kill and soon, you're seeing the game's first structure, a dilapidated cottage where a bunch of scattered goodies await.
There's a frying pan, where you can cook the meat you've taken from the dead animals on the handy fire outside (and that fish one of the bodies in the shipwreck had in his pockets, a bed to restore HP, a barrel of water outside (heals a tiny bit of HP) and other stuff to pick up. inventory is UNLIMITED, so you can grab that broom, a rock and anything else that's not nailed down. PB did this to let players have that kind of crazy freedom and not worry about stashes or how you're going to carry that big ol' bastard sword you're eyeballing in the Harbor Town shop. You can play as you wish, so if you like a small inventory, it's all you.
Anyway, once you find the house, you can go get the girl and she'll stay at the house while you explore some more. Behind the house, there's a pathway that leads uphill where a few more vultures await. enemy AI is fierce! if you run past a creature, it WILL follow you as long as possible (until you or someone/something else kills it). There's a ruined temple-like structure at the top of the hill (nice tilted angle, too)... could be the game's first dungeon - shall we go inside?
Down the stairs and yep, it's a dungeon. A small dungeon, at that. A step or two in and D'oh! it's a traaaaaaap! Pit trap.With a big, mean flying thing at the bottom. Crap. Kill it (quickly, as there's almost no room to move), open the chests (if you can - in the build they were easy, but other chests have a fun mini-game where you need to "turn" a lockpick using the arrow keys), grab the goodies and head up the stairs. make sure to JUMP when you get back to the top floor or else you'll fall back down the trap. In the builds no falling damage was in place, so I can't comment on how far you can drop. I jumped of a small cliff (about 10-15 feet) and suffered not a scratch, but I landed near a few of those big vultures, which did me in rather quickly!
Anyway, back outside and there are a few places to explore near the dungeon. We're told we can travel anywhere. There's a seamless world with no loading screens from what I saw, even when you go into buildings. Stronger enemies lurk off the beaten path to keep low-level characters from wandering too far, but you can do as you wish. I decided to go back to the cottage and past it to explore more of the game world. picking up a few plants on my travels (mint, mushrooms, healing herbs and such), there's another beat-up house to explore. As soon as I stepped inside, a cutscene took over introducing a new character and what looked like was going to be a showdown of sorts.
Nope - it's just a guy who eventually says this is a dangerous area and to look around and find another weapon in the house. Once that's done, he's sitting outside and after some dialog, he'll escort you to a farm area nearby. Here you can either take on quite a few quests for the different farmers (shades of Gothic II) from picking herbs to exterminating a pack of pig-eating wolves to a couple of fetch-quests and the like. Everyone has something interesting to say if you ask, or you can ignore them all and try to make it on your own. In this area, enemies are in packs (save for a stray boar or wolf near the farmlands), and that sword you just got really won't cut it for long, as I discovered while being killed a few times by giant moths and those vultures.
On the PC version, we got to see a few of the later areas, a lot of magic spells (you learn them as the game progresses), a monster menagerie area (which probably won't be in the final build - it was just a map where thy guy demoing showed off some monsters and spells) and even some cool transformations (gorilla, nautilus) your character can do. There will be some Gothic references in the game (you'll need to hunt them down, naturally) and a lot more, but I'll save that for the preview...
as for why you need to pre-order this if you're interested (cut 'n paste from the other topic here): that's actually bad for a game like this that's not being over-hyped and pre-sold to the FPS-fed masses. There's a nasty "consignment" system in play where if no one pre-orders a game, the game doesn't get purchased in any decent quantities (if at all in some cases). If a GameStop or EB or even an Amazon sees a big surge in interest and actual cash pre-orders, they're more willing to take the risk of giving the game shelf space. If people wait weeks for every single review to drop, that's bad for Deep Silver's bottom line as the game's "launch window" has closed and in some cases, retailers will drop the price on a game to move what they consider a non-selling or low selling title.
So, while it may be good for you to buy a discounted Risen, it's bad for both the developer and publisher, period. A good games journalist will do what he or she can to drive interest toward games such as Risen or Cursed Mountain, not say or think something like "well, this won't sell because Fallout 3 is still hot" or "Well, I already played (insert name of open world RPG here) and they're all the same..."
Risen is very much a Piranha Bytes RPG, so if you like their work and appreciate what they've done for the genre. go pre-order the game! Don't wait - you KNOW you're going to get a quality product that's going last you a good long time. I only played a short time and I walked away wanting to play a lot more."
:: KKK
:: otsing 
:: statistika
:: kasutajate nimekiri
:: kasutajate grupid
:: registreeri
teata moderaatorile
Spoiler 
Gothic tegijatelt võib midagi head tulla.
