Bilgefar
Savant
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2012
- Messages
- 184
I've been playing Risen 1 again lately. I really liked it when it first came out, but this playthrough I'm discovering a lot more problems. It's still a good game, but it's further from Gothic 1 and 2 than I had previously thought.
Biggest problem is probably that I'm going with an archery build, and holy crap is it OP. About halfway through the second chapter I got enough experience (not through grinding, just from doing all the quests and exploring a bit) to max out my bow, dexterity, and alchemy skills. Suddenly archery turns from a pretty solid means of killing things to the destroyer of worlds. I've heard people say that it's not overpowered because in tight spaces you won't get to shoot, but there are very few spaces tight enough to make that be true, and even when they are very tight, a person with max bow shoots so fast he can probably get a shot off between getting hit by the enemy. With the damage you can deal, that makes it not a very big drawback at all. So basically, there are a few design flaws that combine to make archery stupid good. First, it's simply too easy to level up. Having all those skills maxed should be closer to the end game than just chapter 2. Second, while archery doesn't really become great until you max all those skills out, it's still really useful even with no skill. This is partly because enemies are just too easy in general (you can pretty much get through all of chapter 1 and most of 2 without spending any skill points and just sword n boarding everything). Third, archery just never gets nerfed. You might think, well alright he's in chapter 2, maybe the enemies get tough later on, but I've made it to chapter 4 now and I'm still rofflestomping everything in my path.
There's a few other minor annoyances outside the fact that the game goes a bit downhill after the first 2 chapters. My biggest one is that there are all these cool spells to get past obstacles, except they almost never seem to be usable emergently. Usually it's like, well I need to get past this wall, oh look a very conveniently placed hole for me to shapeshift to get through. The biggest problem I had with this is when I was in a dungeon with a big river of lava in between two walking areas. I used the levitate spell which should have easily gotten me from one area to the next, but instead it inexplicably stopped working as soon as I got over the lava and I fell to my death, simply for trying to use the tools given to me in a way the developers hadn't intended. Instead I was supposed to find a way up from the place I currently was and jump down to the other place, because that's the puzzle they put in the game and no other way of solving it would be acceptable apparently.
Like I said, it's still a good game and I'm having fun, but it could have been a lot better.
Biggest problem is probably that I'm going with an archery build, and holy crap is it OP. About halfway through the second chapter I got enough experience (not through grinding, just from doing all the quests and exploring a bit) to max out my bow, dexterity, and alchemy skills. Suddenly archery turns from a pretty solid means of killing things to the destroyer of worlds. I've heard people say that it's not overpowered because in tight spaces you won't get to shoot, but there are very few spaces tight enough to make that be true, and even when they are very tight, a person with max bow shoots so fast he can probably get a shot off between getting hit by the enemy. With the damage you can deal, that makes it not a very big drawback at all. So basically, there are a few design flaws that combine to make archery stupid good. First, it's simply too easy to level up. Having all those skills maxed should be closer to the end game than just chapter 2. Second, while archery doesn't really become great until you max all those skills out, it's still really useful even with no skill. This is partly because enemies are just too easy in general (you can pretty much get through all of chapter 1 and most of 2 without spending any skill points and just sword n boarding everything). Third, archery just never gets nerfed. You might think, well alright he's in chapter 2, maybe the enemies get tough later on, but I've made it to chapter 4 now and I'm still rofflestomping everything in my path.
There's a few other minor annoyances outside the fact that the game goes a bit downhill after the first 2 chapters. My biggest one is that there are all these cool spells to get past obstacles, except they almost never seem to be usable emergently. Usually it's like, well I need to get past this wall, oh look a very conveniently placed hole for me to shapeshift to get through. The biggest problem I had with this is when I was in a dungeon with a big river of lava in between two walking areas. I used the levitate spell which should have easily gotten me from one area to the next, but instead it inexplicably stopped working as soon as I got over the lava and I fell to my death, simply for trying to use the tools given to me in a way the developers hadn't intended. Instead I was supposed to find a way up from the place I currently was and jump down to the other place, because that's the puzzle they put in the game and no other way of solving it would be acceptable apparently.
Like I said, it's still a good game and I'm having fun, but it could have been a lot better.
compared to The Dark Descent and fails on many levels (the monsters are not scary, it's very short, mental sanity was removed, unlimited lantern and it's very linear) but it's still a pleasant experience just for the great atmosphere (if you forget the monsters, that is) and the gorgeous visuals.
