You won't see me saying I hate a Piranha Bytes game ;-)

And no more coffee for you :P

Risen 1 was a good game and not as controversial as the second one, you might enjoy it ;-)

I got Risen 2 so I could get the expansion and be a pie-rat!
Arrrr

My flag

If I don't have coffee, things get dull in a hurry. And by dull, I mean I'll generally fall over like a comatose slug.
Kinda wraps the ability to converse in a carpet and throws it in the nearest ditch.

Too bad that the Risen 2 Collector's Edition flag was not like that. That would have been fun. But the real one is also kind of nice and people always give me strange looks since I put it on a wall in my office :D

So only reducing it a bit that you don't shout? :P

Ah just got this strange feeling... and after checking my library... I actually own Risen 1, but never tried it :)

And next you'll be saying you never played Gothic, right? *faints* :P

It's definitely a major step down from the Gothics and the first Risen. The character building has been overhauled a bit too, but I'm not far enough in to really talk about it one way or the other.

Climbing (outside of specially designated "you can climb here pal" areas) has been removed.That's a shame, Risen was filled with places you could only get to via climbing, and you could climb to safety if you had to.

Swimming was already near non-existent in Risen 1 (there was one island you could swim to, everywhere else would have you tossed back on the beach by a monster) is even worse here. Now if you go in too deep you just teleport back on the beach! No animation, the screen just blacks out for a split second and you're back on the beach.

Risen 2 is also no longer open world, instead you go from island to island, having to unlock each island via the story. Apparently you can at least go back to past islands, so that's something.

I'm gonna put a few hours into it to see if it gets better, but right now it feels more like Two Worlds 2 with a pirate veneer than Risen 1.

That might be doable. But on the bright side, at least I'm not shouting in public. That never ends well.
Sounds like the game's exploration elements got stripped down or ripped out. Bit of a mixed response to that since I feel that sometimes it's nice to not burn 10, 20, 60 hours slowly wandering through every single rocky outcropping in the game world. Going to blame Skyrim for partial burnout on that idea.

I think the combat is pretty terrible compared to the Gothics and Risen 1. It feels more like a bargain bin's hack n' slash combat system than the fine tuned combat system that Piranha Bytes is known for. I do not like the new system at all, but I'm intrigued at least about the firearms. Maybe it gets better overall anyway.

I want my companion to have all the "fun" because I don't find the combat system fun, at least not yet. The way I feel about it right now, if I had to do all the heavy lifting then I would be less than happy.

I actually really dislike pirates haha. To me pirates are generally beyond cheesy, and not in a good way either. Still I'm gonna give it a chance, as Piranha Bytes are excellent world builders and have great atmosphere. If anybody could make me look past my general dislike of the pirate theme then it would be Piranha Bytes.

Yeah, wasn't really calling the trope a bad thing, they've used it in every game so far.

And heh, I like Gothic 3 a whole lot, which a lot of "true" Gothic fans hate, so I think we're even here haha. I'm giving Risen 2 a chance (I'm pretty happy about one familiar face popping up already), I'm just mostly less than impressed at the moment.

You can still run around on the islands as you want and sometimes it is a bad idea to go explore every corner directly in the beginning. But you can always return to the islands and continue later on.

I had no problem with Gothic 3. Only thing I don't like is the Gothic 3 AddOn, but that was not done by Piranha Bytes, so it does not count :P

That sounds fine. It's useful to see you both discussing it, since it's all yet another series I need to run through.

Also, since people are discussing problems with games, I'm going to restate my opinion that Fahrenheit sucks entire continents of unwashed ass, just because it bears repeating.

I have to admit that Risen 2 was the weakest game in the Risen series, but like I said I still liked it :-)

And your comment reminds me that I still need to play Fahrenheit :D

Always happy to cause fainting :p
So, nope. :)

Forsaken Gods is indeed absolutely DIRE! Despite only featuring Myrtana and having access to the fixes made by the base game's Community Patch it somehow runs worse (way worse!) than Gothic 3. I'm not sure how that is even possible haha.

I tried the demo for Gothic 4/Arcania and the action-y bits seemed fun enough but nothing about it felt like a Gothic game, and Diego felt heavily retconned. Obviously it wasn't a Piranha Bytes developed game, so that's not too surprising.
I made it a tiny bit into that game but I have no desire to touch it again. I generally dislike Quick Time Events and that whole game is a stinkin' Quick Time Event. Shame too as everything else seemed intriguing, though I heard the story goes off the rails and right into the trashcan later on.

I'm willing to bet there are plenty of better games in your backlog to go through first. Course, given that it's Fahrenheit, that's an extremely safe bet.