So, I fired up Risen 1 and played a couple of hours. I enjoyed Elex, but throughout thought it is distinctly inferior to R1, which I rate very highly.
Comparing R1 - Elex early game yields some interesting points:
(1) HP Bloat in Elex.
Even on Hard R1 v. Difficult Elex, enemies tend to have a
lot more HP relative to your attack power. In R1, the stick you pick up allows you to kill the first enemy (the bird) in ~5 hits; within minutes, you find a shoddy sword that reduces it to 3 (which is a single slash-slash-slash combo). In Elex, the first runt mass rats you fight with your starting weapon take longer in Difficult, and significantly longer in Ultra.
Combine this with the lack of Stamina in R1, and generally faster attack sequences and animations all round. Dodging feels instant in R1 compared to Elex. In both games, your vulnerability is similar; a couple solid hits from the enemy and you're fucked. But the difference is that in R1, you could even try and take on a non-'Weak' boar or wolf, and you win or lose within 20 seconds. In Elex it is going to be a more drawn out process - which naturally makes it harder to take on enemies above your power level, because you have to avoid making any mistakes for longer.
I think this is one of the key issues that contributes to people feeling like you are more weak and useless in Elex. In R1, within the first 10-15 minutes you might have fought 6-7 enemies, learnt a lot about how the combat works, and if you are good or are used to PB combat, even take on a Boar. In Elex, the chicken above the wall takes a long time to kill even if you are good, it is much harder to kill because you have to stay alive longer, and in general it
feels more grueling because you spent 30 mins playing and killed like 3 rats.
(2) World Design.
Playing R1 right after Elex it is striking how, although Elex distinctly maintains a PB/Gothic feel, how many changes have been made to the formula. First, everything is larger in Elex. Distances between enemies, distances between key areas. The world is far denser in R1; you might be at an intersection in the roads and spot 6 enemies steps away (who are much more blind in aggro LOS for obvious reason). Jan guiding you to bandit camp takes 2 mins, harbour town a bit longer, but it all feels faster than Duras to Goliet. World density is further diluted in Elex due to the jetpack, and how that changes the way you view the landscape: in R1 (and I would argue G1/2) you often see the world in terms of narrow paths, constrained tightly by a combination of strong enemies and natural environments. In Elex the world is more of a wide flat plain that you jump in and out as you please.
This world density difference has consequences for the PB Feel (TM). To me the key word for everything that makes Gothic great is
parsimony. You don't upgrade your armour 80 times. You don't see cities with 2000 pointless NPCs. Every enemy is dangerous and every kill counts, and even small pieces of loot make you happy too. Elex maintains the major pillars of this feel, e.g. dangerous combat and armour scarcity. But it also dilutes it by losing some of this 'density'. So it isn't simply a matter of the world being too 'big', though that factors into it as well.
(3) Too much stuff
Another important way this parsimony is lost is
what yuo find in this world. In R1, you get off a shipwreck, find a few corpses with nothing significant, no love letters or diaries. You fight a couple of wolves in a quiet and desolate nature; you find a small abandoned house, again no love stories or backstory, just a quiet hamlet. Even when you reach Bandit Camp or Harbour Town, the key themes from NPCs are so simple: we are bandits, those monks take people away. In Elex, Jax is talking about bros and Elex magicks and lost drones and interfaction politics the moment he wakes up. You find all sorts of old world machinery. Duras gives you a long rundown of how things are. As you wander, you keep finding all these old recordings and notes and stuff.
So there's a lot
more lore and story and subplots going on in Elex - and I actually think this is to the detriment of the PB Feel, and takes it a bit closer to nuFallout or Skyrim. I think PB games always worked best when dealing with a harsh and parsimonious setting: you're in a fucking prison camp, you don't fucking need to know what magic runs this universe or the long back history of what this prison used to be for social experiments or whatever. Dude you meet is a mob leader and his motivations are simple and direct. Your own situation is simple and unforgiving. Again, R1 recreated this perfectly with not only your shipwreck, but having basically a colonial island
without overloaded detail on what's going on in the mainland or whatever; details would come later. I think all these old recordings about Calaan and whatnot aren't bad in themselves, they are interesting, and I foudn the pirate stuff in R2/3 cool (the only redeeming feature), but to be sure it is a decision that dilutes this parsimony.
So I don't think all of these are purely negative. The HP bloat arguably makes individual enemies matter more in Elex and reinforces the vulnerability of the player, for example. But I"m just noticing some interesting differences, and I think on the whole they lead me to preferring R1 as a purer distillation of the PB formula. (Also
Darth Roxor )
