Risen 3: Titan Lords

[Infinitron]

Press release: http://www.gamebanshee.com/news/113264-risen-3-titan-lords-officially-announced.html

Risen 3: Titan Lords – Piranha Bytes Return To Their Roots with Classic RPG

Larkspur, CA, February 25, 2014 - Piranha Bytes, the creators of acclaimed RPG titles Gothic and Risen, return to their origins with a new, classic RPG set to launch this year, Risen 3: Titan Lords. In the third installment of the Risen franchise, Risen 3: Titan Lords pulls players into a hand-crafted role-playing world full of rugged charm where every decision changes the course of the story and your fate, and the fate of the world, is up for the taking. Risen 3: Titan Lords is set for release in August 2014 for PC and consoles.

Once again, Piranha Bytes delivers enticingly lush and vivid worlds in Risen 3: Titan Lords, and true to their roots as leading European RPG developers gives fans the freedom to explore it. The world of Risen 3: Titan Lords promises to be diverse, authentic and full of life, providing the player with an authentic, classic RPG experience.

“Like a carpenter with a hand-crafted piece of furniture, we put together the story, the characters and the landscape – making it all fit together so that the player has the possibility to discover an entire universe,” says Bjoern Pankratz, Project Lead at Piranha Bytes. “Exploration is the key to our game.”

Official Website: http://risen3.deepsilver.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/risengame
Twitter: www.twitter.com/deepsilver

 

[toro]

August is good. But Sacred is also around that date therefore I don't know what DeepSilver is thinking.

 

[SoupNazi]

What's wrong with Gothic 3's world?

The fact that it's generic, boring, offers no actually interesting handcrafted locations like all the previous Gothics?

Just look at the Swamp camp in G1, the bandit's hideout there (at the beginning to the right), the Old Mine, that icy land in G2, hell the entirety of Khorinis, the Khorinis sewers, entire NotR island, ... those are all unique, interesting, well-crafted locations. Everything in G3 is boring and generic.

 

[DalekFlay]

Well they're saying the right things. That always turns out good, right?

 

[Murk]

G3 had handcrafted locations... that were then copy/pasted everywhere else =(

Some places were pretty awesome, and g3 gave me the feeling of exploration better than g1 or g2... but g2 had way better payoffs. It is clearly an inferior sequel to the first two games, but was still fun. I did like stumbling on the hidden chest chain on the island tho -- eventually finding fingers' chest with his rapier by accidentally falling into the ravine it's hidden in.

Nordmar was great and places like Faring and Silden were really fun (to me).

I really think the game would have been 50x better if they could have just spent a month on adding content, interactions, and side quests in the cities. Some things had promise but too many quests turned into mmorpg shit.

Still, I enjoyed it a lot -- despite it being heavily flawed.

 

[Dreaad]

Gothic 3 was plenty fun. Had a civil war that was actually interesting to get involved in. Awesome magic mechanics, especially at the end when you teleport from city to city summoning undead and demons to rape all the rebels. More to the point there was a mod that fixed a lot of the bugs and put in hand placed loot into the chests.... much like the morrowloot crap for skyrim. After adding those mods Gothic 3 is pretty awesome really, rebalanced combat system and all. Quests could be more interesting I guess, but honestly searching through that world for the 12 chalices and artifacts of adanos with no hand holding quest compasses was good enough for me.

 

[DalekFlay]

*Needs to finally play Gothic 3 with the fan patch*

My main memory of Gothic 3 is constant memory errors fucking up my boner.

 

[Cyberarmy]

*Needs to finally play Gothic 3 with the fan patch*

My main memory of Gothic 3 is constant memory errors fucking up my boner.

Unfortunately there are still some problems even with all patches. But light years better than release version.

 

[Revenant]

*Needs to finally play Gothic 3 with the fan patch*

My main memory of Gothic 3 is constant memory errors fucking up my boner.

This has nothing to do with the community patch, the latest official PB release (1.11 or something like that) hasn't crashed for me, like, ever, except that if you run a 64 bit OS you apparently need to edit the executable so it would use more RAM. The problem and the solution is described here:

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...no-cp-out-of-memory-error.75681/#post-2251146

 

[bloodlover]

What's wrong with Gothic 3's world?

The fact that it's generic, boring, offers no actually interesting handcrafted locations like all the previous Gothics?

Just look at the Swamp camp in G1, the bandit's hideout there (at the beginning to the right), the Old Mine, that icy land in G2, hell the entirety of Khorinis, the Khorinis sewers, entire NotR island, ... those are all unique, interesting, well-crafted locations. Everything in G3 is boring and generic.

You need to take intro consideration the size of the world. The amount of work it would take to craft it manually would me monumental. And even so, it's miles away from Oblivion, that came out the same year (if I am not mistaken). Yes the world is generic but saying this you are complaining about 99% of today's RPGs. And it did offer a different approach by not making the orcs evil by default and giving the player a minimal choice in the game.

Even though I never passed the second area, due to my limited time, I found the game to be quite good. Keep in mind that you do have to apply the CP and preferably use Alternative Balance.

 

[SoupNazi]

What's wrong with Gothic 3's world?

The fact that it's generic, boring, offers no actually interesting handcrafted locations like all the previous Gothics?

Just look at the Swamp camp in G1, the bandit's hideout there (at the beginning to the right), the Old Mine, that icy land in G2, hell the entirety of Khorinis, the Khorinis sewers, entire NotR island, ... those are all unique, interesting, well-crafted locations. Everything in G3 is boring and generic.

You need to take intro consideration the size of the world. The amount of work it would take to craft it manually would me monumental. And even so, it's miles away from Oblivion, that came out the same year (if I am not mistaken). Yes the world is generic but saying this you are complaining about 99% of today's RPGs. And it did offer a different approach by not making the orcs evil by default and giving the player a minimal choice in the game.

Even though I never passed the second area, due to my limited time, I found the game to be quite good. Keep in mind that you do have to apply the CP and preferably use Alternative Balance.

Oh, so bigger is always better? I would prefer the smaller but handcrafted world.

So because everything else is super shit as well, I should forgive Gothic 3 for being shit?

So the Orcs not being inherently evil is a quality that redeems the rest of the shitty game?

Are you retarded?

 

[Aeschylus]

You need to take intro consideration the size of the world. The amount of work it would take to craft it manually would me monumental.

And that was their greatest mistake. The biggest distinctive feature of the Gothic games that put them ahead of any other open world RPG was the great level of detail to be found in the world while exploring, and the density of content. Gothic 3 wasn't just big, it was too big to reach the same level of quality as the first two.

 

[bloodlover]

What's wrong with Gothic 3's world?

The fact that it's generic, boring, offers no actually interesting handcrafted locations like all the previous Gothics?

Just look at the Swamp camp in G1, the bandit's hideout there (at the beginning to the right), the Old Mine, that icy land in G2, hell the entirety of Khorinis, the Khorinis sewers, entire NotR island, ... those are all unique, interesting, well-crafted locations. Everything in G3 is boring and generic.

You need to take intro consideration the size of the world. The amount of work it would take to craft it manually would me monumental. And even so, it's miles away from Oblivion, that came out the same year (if I am not mistaken). Yes the world is generic but saying this you are complaining about 99% of today's RPGs. And it did offer a different approach by not making the orcs evil by default and giving the player a minimal choice in the game.

Even though I never passed the second area, due to my limited time, I found the game to be quite good. Keep in mind that you do have to apply the CP and preferably use Alternative Balance.

Oh, so bigger is always better? I would prefer the smaller but handcrafted world.

So because everything else is super shit as well, I should forgive Gothic 3 for being shit?

So the Orcs not being inherently evil is a quality that redeems the rest of the shitty game?

Are you retarded?

I never said that bigger is better. In fact, I never said that G3 is better than G2 so learn to read please. The fact that you consider it to be shit is just your personal taste and does not reflect the reality. I was just giving the orc example since the stereotype is to make them brainless fighters, while here they have leaders, they are organized, they trade etc.

 

[SoupNazi]

And how is that relevant? And why should I be more tolerant of the game because they made the retarded decision to make the world pointlessly bigger (and largely empty) knowing they can't then handcraft it, which was one of the signature aspects of the original Gothic games? What are you even talking about?

 

[Revenant]

Oh yes let's derail the thread about Risen 3 into a discussion about whether Gothic 3 is a good game, which was already debated, like, 20+ times on the Codex (read: I consider Vault Dweller's review the final word on the matter of Gothic 3).

Back to the topic, was it mentioned whether the traditional rune magic will be back in Risen 3 or will voodoo have to suffice as in Risen 2?

 

[Metro]

This August? Wow... sort of came out of nowhere (although it was pretty obvious that's what they were working on for a while). Didn't expect it so soon. I doubt Sacred 3 is much competition as that's more of a derpy Dia-blow clone (which will probably be terrible as it's being made by a developer who makes iOS games).

 

[toro]

This August? Wow... sort of came out of nowhere (although it was pretty obvious that's what they were working on for a while). Didn't expect it so soon. I doubt Sacred 3 is much competition as that's more of a derpy Dia-blow clone (which will probably be terrible as it's being made by a developer who makes iOS games).

Yep. Sacred 3 will probably be shit. But on the other hand, Risen 3 is using the same tech as Risen 2 therefore they had plenty of time to polish the content.

New stuff about DRM:

Contrary to current rumour which rose after the article in the PC Games print magazine, Deep Silver insists that the question of forced DRM (Steam etc.) is not yet finally decided.

Rudolf Inderst, Community Manager for the German speaking countries, just posted in our forum that at least in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, the PC retail version will be DRM free. There will obviously be a Steam version for those who want one but it will not be forced onto the customers - at least in these three countries.

We from the World of Risen hope that this will also apply to our friends in other parts of the world. There is still a reason for that hope: On the topic of copy protection, not all decisions have been made, wrote Inderst.

New stuff about the plot:

A young warrior is attacked from the shadows and deprived of his soul. He sets off to reclaim what is lost amidst the darkness that is spreading throughout the world. The banned Mages could be powerful allies on his quest. To get their help, he needs to find the Mage sanctuary on Taranis, also known as the Island of Thunder.

And a new motherfucking screenshot (*probably doctored):

Amazon release date: 15. August 2014.

 

[toro]

And a list of features compiled by another WoR forum user:

- There is a prolog in which one can experiment with skills/perks from higher levels
- Monster attacks can be blocked with a sword, heavy monster attacks can be avoided by doing a roll or a teleport
- Armors can be obtained as a reward for joining guilds or reaching higher ranks
- Some spells have melee variants
- Guardians furnish their gloves with blue energy crystals (magic power supply)
- Dialogs similar to Risen 2 (camera, gestures)
- Mages reside on the thunder island 'Tamaris' trying to save humanity using the 'reactor' which shall protect the island from the titan lords. Plenty of magic energy is needed to power the reactor (power is gained from lightnings)
- Skull caves rise from the undeworld, undeads corrupt the landscape
- A shadow lord steals the new main character's soul in the prolog (skills/attributes are lost in the process so the hero is level 1 again)
- To end this curse, the hero needs to find a (particular?) mighty magician
- No character creation
- Risen 2 hero and the inquisition are important parts of the story
- Middle european woods, mine shafts, strongholds but also Mediterranean regions like in Risen 2
- Heavy armors, big swords (as opposed to Risen 2's coats and epees)
- Fireball, lightning beam spells
- More lore
- Fauna involves Scavengers (?!), non-humanoid lizards and gnomes and/or goblins (also shadows, shadow lords and other undead creatures)
- One one screenshot some kind of dragon can be seen
- NPCs have daily routines
- No level scaling
- Loot is hand-placed
- Exploring is rewarded (hidden NPCs, dungeons, side quests)
- Many quests can be solved in a couple of different ways
- Protagonist can swim
- More ambient animations like in Risen 1 (e.g. drinking from water barrels)
- Climbing only at prescribed places (which are a lot more common than in Risen 2)
- NPCs react to the player stealing their stuff/entering prohibited areas
- NPCs can be knocked down and looted but most NPCs are immortal
- Same engine as in Gothic 3, Risen, Risen 2 (Genome)
- No coherent landmass (but several parcels separated by loading screens)
- Risen 3 is Piranha Bytes biggest game so far
- It's up to the player in which order he visits the different parts of the world (not as linear as in Risen 2)
- There might be ships
- Minimap
- No modding tools
- Guild-specific skills (only known guild by now: the paladin-like guardians)
- Ocular that allows using the astral sight (enemies are shown in red, hidden chests can be seen if the ocular is upgraded)
- Other guild also have some light version of astral sight
- Trainers teach skills for gold and glory points (like in Risen 2)
- Smithing, brewing, scroll writing can be learned
- Vodoo magice as in Risen 2 is likely to occur again (this includes controlling enemys)
- Hero has a 'soul' attribute influenced by his decisions which determine if he gets back his humanity or turns into some demonic creature
- This 'soul' attribute influcences the story and its ending
- After being attacked by the shadow lord in the prolog, the protagonist is plagued by nightmares and his mind makes a journey to the land of the dead where he meets deceased companions and enemies (specifically the inquisitor from Risen 1)
- In the world of the living one can find items that belong to dead persons which makes their ghosts reval interesting information (e.g. buried treasures)
- In the land of the dead one can collect soul dust to regain humanity
- The hero builds up a crew/group of companions like in Risen 2 (but only one at a time can follow the player)
- There are also companions from the land of the dead
- The combat system involves four acions: blow, heavy blow, dodge roll, parade - there is also a rudimentary combo system (hit the mouse button three times in the right moment to get extra damage)
- Ranged weapons like bow or musket are optional
- Potions can be consumed instantly
- Opening chests, using a campfire etc. happens in the menu screen, not in the game
- There is a XP (?) penalty for being caught when stealing (pickpocketing?)

 

[toro]

Humble Bundle has a special offer for DeepSilver games this week - Risen 2 Gold is 4.99Euro.

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/promo/deepsilver_week

Edit: And still no trailer for Risen 3.

 

[Metro]

 

[Metro]

Potions can be consumed instantly

Oh wait... never mind. Shit like this just kills any sort of challenge in combat.

 

[Excidium]

Potions can be consumed instantly

Oh wait... never mind. Shit like this just kills any sort of challenge in combat.

inb4 cooldown

 

[Murk]

...so are souls just the new macguffin?

 

[Metro]

They sound like an entirely unnecessary mechanic considering 'glory' is still in the game.

 

[Murk]

Sure, but I meant in general. Quite a few games coming out with 'soul' as an actual mechanic.